The Department for Transport (DfT) has published a feasibility study into linking STATS19 injury collision records with a national road network, in a move intended to improve the quality and usefulness of official road casualty statistics.
The report, Matching STATS19 collision data to a road network: feasibility, examines whether recorded collision locations can be matched to plausible road links in Ordnance Survey’s National Geographic Database (NGD) RoadLink network.
Proposed annual process
STATS19 records the location of every reported injury collision, alongside police-recorded road information including road class, road number and speed limit. The DfT says these attributes can be incomplete or inconsistent.
Matching the recorded collision point to a road link, without changing its coordinates, would allow existing road information to be checked and supplemented where appropriate. The proposed process could also support additional analysis of the roads where collisions occur, including improved classification of rural roads.
The DfT’s proposed way forward is to introduce annual network matching into the road safety statistics publication process from 2026. A suitable version of the road network would be selected, potentially based on its status at a fixed point such as the end of May in the relevant data year.
During data collection and validation, network-based checks would be used to identify potential issues and provide feedback to police force data suppliers. Final 2026 collision data could then be matched to an agreed road network for statistics due to be published in summer 2027, subject to licensing decisions.
Potential changes to STATS19 reporting
According to the report, routine network matching could provide a more consistent, network-defined basis for determining which collisions fall within the scope of STATS19 reporting.
The DfT describes the current publication as an initial assessment and says the work is expected to be developed further. Enhanced road-related analysis is intended to form part of the 2026 casualty statistics publication.