This is the 2005 edition of "Road Casualties Great Britain: 2005: Annual Report, renamed from Road Accidents Great Britain - The Casualty Report". It presents statistics, collected to an agreed national standard, about personal injury road accidents and their consequent casualties. These statistics are used to inform public debate on matters of road safety and to provide both a local and national perspective for road safety problems and their remedies. The first edition of this report covered road casualty numbers in 1951. At that time, there were 4.7 million vehicles in use and the police recorded 178,000 personal injury road accidents. In 2005, the vehicle population stood at 33 million and there were 199,000 injury accidents. Thus whilst the vehicle stock has increased seven fold the number of injury accidents has increased by about a fifth. Between 1951 and 2005, 305,972 people were killed and 17 million persons were injured in accidents on British roads. Most of the casualties were slightly injured and the numbers of people killed and seriously injured each year have been reducing; however this is still a serious problem. Against this background, in 2000 the government announced a new road safety strategy and casualty reduction targets for 2010 with particular emphasis on child casualties. This volume gives the baseline averages to be used in monitoring these new targets and the first article in this edition reports progress to date. (Author/publisher)
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