Benchmarking of the North East Councils’ 2012 Road Casualties against Casualties in All Other English Local Authorities

This report sets out how each of the 12 North East local authorities has performed against several key measures of road user casualties. The overall total casualty figures have been combined with additional information to provide a more rounded picture of the situation in each authority by taking into account factors such as the amount of vehicle miles travelled and the size of the population. This is important because the characteristics of the authorities vary and have an impact on the number of casualties. Using these other factors helps us to understand the wider picture and explain apparent imbalances in the number of casualties. Effective benchmarking must take into account all of these factors.

The data used to produce this report is mainly the national Stats 19 dataset supplied by the Department for Transport (DfT) but has been supplemented with additional information taken from several different sources. Information on vehicle miles travelled in 2012 by vehicle type and local authority was obtained from the Road Traffic Statistics team in the DfT. Population estimates for 2012 have been supplied by the Population Estimates for England and Wales, Mid-2012 report by the Office for National Statistics. Finally, vehicle licensing and urban and rural road length information was taken from Vehicle licensing statistics 2012 and Road lengths statistics in Great Britain: 2012 reports by the DfT.

The report focuses on areas where there is notable good or poor performance that would benefit from further investigation and work by local authorities, rather than a complete documentation of all performance. This enables individual local authorities to assess where they would like their performance to sit for each of the measures, as it may not be possible for local authorities to achieve performance in the top quartile for all of the measures.

To further assist authorities in determining how they have performed in 2012, each figure includes a data table giving information on variations in performance compared to 2011. The measures used are relative rank compared to the other English authorities, quartile and actual casualty numbers and rates, with traffic lighting to show improved or worsening performance. Finally, the figures intentionally contain information for each of the 151 English local authorities included on the DfT’s reports so that local authority members can see how authorities similar to theirs perform against the measures, giving them the opportunity to share best practice.

It is intended that individual authorities use this report to help develop targets to plan and evaluate road safety delivery as well as a means of sharing good ideas for reducing road user casualties.