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WHO IS THE GOVERNMENT ACCUSING OF LYING NOW THEN?
A study by Oxford University and the South East Regional Public Health Group in Guildford found when hospital statistics were used instead of police figures serious injuries caused by road crashes had not changed since 1996.
But the government uses police figures to measure its progress towards reducing road deaths and injuries by 40% by 2010.
These show a drop of nearly a third, leaving the government on course to hit its target.
Lead researcher Dr Mike Gill said: "The discrepancies are likely to be down to under-reporting of accidents to police.
"But it raises questions about the police figures and I think it is important the government looks at the hospital figures."
Road Safety Minister Stephen Ladyman said the study was "misleading".
Mark McArthur-Christie, the ABD's director of Policy, commented "The real figures tell the truth - and tell it clearly. Despite millions spent on humps, calming, cameras and campaigns our roads are not getting safer. Simplicity, soundbites and political expediency have been allowed to dictate a road safety policy that is more concerned with legality than safety."
Road safety policy in the UK has focused since the early 1990s on "speed kills - so kill your speed". Cameras have proliferated, as have lower limits, humps, bumps and calming. The ABD believes these have not delivered results because they focus on the wrong things.
McArthur-Christie continues, "These figures show we need finally to acknowledge that safe driving is about so much more than speed. What about observation? What about anticipation? What about hazard management? We need thinking, trained and educated drivers and road users, not simply ones who believe that speed limit compliance is the pinnacle of driving-skill achievement."
The ABD believes that, rather than imposing more and more external controls on drivers, the only way to safer roads is to ensure that control are internal. In other words, to train, educate and inform road users.
CHANGES IN SAFETY ON ENGLAND'S ROADS: ANALYSIS OF HOSPITAL STATISTICS From BMJ,
Mike Gill 1, Michael J Goldacre 2*, David G R Yeates 2
1 South East Public Health Group, Government Office for the South East, Guildford, Surrey GU1 4GA
2 Unit of Health-Care Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, Oxford University, Oxford OX3 7LF
Correspondence to: michael.goldacre@dphpc.ox.ac.uk .
Objective To compare trends in the numbers of people with serious traffic injuries according to police statistics and hospital episode statistics (HES).
Design Descriptive study based on two independent population based data sources.
Setting Police statistics and hospital episode statistics in England.
Main outcome measures Rates of injury and death and their change over time reported in each data source, for 1996 to 2004.
Results According to police statistics, rates of people killed or seriously injured on the roads fell consistently from 85.9 per 100 000 in 1996 to 59.4 per 100 000 in 2004.
Over the same time, however, hospital admission rates for traffic injuries were almost unchanged at 90.0 in 1996 and 91.1 in 2004.
Both datasets showed a significant reduction in rates of injury in children aged 15, but the reduction in hospital admission rates was substantially less than the reduction shown in the police statistics.
The definition of serious injury in police statistics includes every hospital admission; in each year, none the less, the number of admissions exceeded the number of injuries reported in the police system.
Conclusions The overall fall seen in police statistics for non-fatal road traffic injuries probably represents a fall in completeness of reporting of these injuries.
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