Understanding Road Collision Data
Every road collision in Great Britain that is reported to the police and involves a personal injury is recorded in a national dataset known as STATS19, published openly by the Department for Transport. This tool shows the collisions recorded within one mile of any postcode over the three years from 2021 to 2023, broken down by how serious they were.
How Severity Is Classified
Each collision is graded by its most severe casualty: fatal, serious (an injury requiring hospital treatment, such as a fracture), or slight (a minor injury such as a sprain or bruising). The great majority of recorded collisions are slight. Bear in mind that the data counts reported, injury collisions only, so minor knocks with no injury and incidents not reported to the police do not appear.
Reading the Results Fairly
A higher number of collisions in an area does not always mean it is more dangerous. Busy town centres and major junctions naturally see more traffic and therefore more incidents than a quiet lane, without being more hazardous per journey. The figures are best used to understand the local picture rather than to rank one street against another.
To explore what else is around a postcode, try the postcode area report, or compare two areas with compare two postcodes.