Police recorded road collisions: April to June 2023 (provisional)

Data has been published on StatsWales. On 15 May 2023, Dyfed Powys police force adopted an injury based reporting system (IBRS) for reporting police recorded road collisions. Data are collected using the CRaSH (Collision Reporting and Sharing), where the attending police officer records all injuries for the casualty. The injuries are then automatically classified as a severity level of either ‘slight’ to ‘serious’ and the most serious severity is used to identify the casualty severity level. The other three police forces in Wales continue to use a non-injury based reporting system where police officers use their judgement and guidance to determine directly the severity of a casualty (fatal, serious or slight).

Most police forces in England, as well as Police Scotland use the CRaSH system, and some have done for several years. The introduction of IBRS has led to a change in the reported severity of some road casualties (it’s possible for some casualties that would be categorised as ‘slight’ on non injury based reporting systems to be recorded as ‘serious’ in injury based reporting systems). Analysis undertaken by the Department of Transport suggests that switching to IBRS adds between 5% and 15% to the Great Britain total for ‘serious’ injuries, and reduces the number of ‘slight’ injuries. The total number of collisions and casualties are unaffected.

We have not adjusted any figures to take these changes into account. The collision and casualty severities published are as reported by police forces. It is likely that from Q2 2023 onwards, more collisions in Dyfed Powys will be reported as serious than previously, and fewer as slight. This may also impact the total number of serious and slight collisions across Wales. The total number of collisions and casualties are unaffected. As we get more data from Dyfed Powys we will review the need to produce an adjustment, and will continue to keep users informed of this change.