Benchmarking of the North East Councils’ 2011 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 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 2011, each figure includes a data table giving information on variations in performance compared to 2010. 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 Department for Transport’s reports so that local authority members can see how similar local authorities 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.