Soundbites and images from the first session of day two of the 2024 National Road Safety Conference: deprivation and road safety.
- Deprivation and road safety (09:00 – 09:45)
- Click here to view the agenda
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09.00
Dan Campsall, Chairman, Agilysis
Having dedicated over a decade to road safety, Dan has been involved in leading a number of pioneering and critically acclaimed initiatives such as MAST online, CrashMap.co.uk and Safer Roads Berkshire all of which have gone on to win major awards.
Dan also does a good deal of training, public speaking and is often used as a commentator by various media networks.
Presentation: Road traffic and pedestrian injury risk in ethnic minority population
The link between deprivation and road safety is well established.
But what about ethnicity?
Stats 19 is great – but doesn’t record ethnicity.
Methodology:
- 10 years of STATS19 data to create large sample size
- 2011 census provided the relative populations of each ethnic group at postcode level
- The total number of matched pedestrians where a valid postcode was recorded 189,102.
- Of these, 137,270 (72.6%) were matched proportionately as ‘White’
- The remaining 51,832 (27.4%) as ‘Ethnic Minority (excluding White minorities)’
- Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD, England) is comprised of measures of income, employment, health and disability, education, skills and training, crime, barriers to housing and services, and living environment.
Results:
Being an ethnic minority puts you at greater risk of being a road casualty – a rate that increases if you are a pedestrian
Level of disparity is something we should be concerned about – and something we should address
“Deprivation doubles the risk of becoming a pedestrian casualty. People from an ethnic minority (excluding non-white minorities) are 25% more likely to be a casualty than white pedestrians. However, the research, which looked at ten years of collisions reported to the police across Britain, cannot tell us why some groups are more at risk.” – Mary Creagh
09.15
Fay Cannon, Coordinator, Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership & Frances De Paeztron, Business Intelligence Service Manager, Warwickshire County Council
Fay Cannon works collaboratively with partners to design and deliver initiatives, campaigns and interventions to help Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership achieve its ambitious target to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on Warwickshire’s roads by 50% by 2030.
Frances De Paeztron and the Business Intelligence team worked with the Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership to bring together a number of partnership data sources and conduct stakeholder engagement for the needs assessment.
Presentation: Supporting drink and drug drive offenders
Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership brings together representatives from Warwickshire Police, Warwickshire Fire & Rescue Service, and Warwickshire County Council Transport & Highways Teams, and other key organisations to coordinate the road safety strategy across the county. Our strategy to 2030 is reduce fatal and serious casualties by 50%, using a safe system approach, and working towards vision zero.
This presentation covers the work we have done as a partnership to understand the needs of drink and drug drivers in Warwickshire.
As part of Christmas operations and roadside stops many police officers have come across people behind these headlines who have been caught over the drink and drug drive limit and taken the through the justice process. But is this enough? Does this change their behaviour and result in them being safer drivers?
Promoting offences which are on the extreme levels of the drink and drug driving offences does grab the media attention and we all hope raises awareness of the issue and educate the public of the drink and drug limits, but is it really effective?
The partnership asks how do we reach the parts of the populations who need drink and drug to function every day but carry on driving because they are focused more about their addiction and not the dangers, they pose to themselves or others. How do we reach those families who are worried about a loved one habits but do not think about them driving around? When we do come into contact with these people in the population how can we give them the best support possible?
This is why the partnership commissioned a needs assessment into the support provision for drink and drug drivers.
What were the four outputs of this work?
- The documented and checked process maps
- A recorded and voiced 30-minute video walk through of the whole process.
- A completed stakeholder survey
- A 50 page report, covering areas such as key findings, policy, research, data analysis, current service provision and recommendations
Key findings from the data
- There were 6 deaths from drink driving incidents in 2023 in Warwickshire
- There were 2 deaths on average from drug driving related incidents per year that is between 2019 and 2023
- For same time we had on average 22 fatal collisions – so roughly 10% of all types of fatal collision were drug drive related.
- There were 64 arrests on average per month related to drink and drug driving between 2019 and 2023.
The top 5 recommendations that came from the process mapping, data analysis and stakeholder survey
- Knowledge and Prevention
– Issue of people driving over the limit from alcohol after drinking the night before.
– Male drivers aged 18 to 44 years should to be targeted for drink driving prevention work.
Action: Investigate prevention opportunities and communication programmes
- Targeting
- Younger drivers are more likely to drug drive.
- Drug driving is viewed by some as ‘socially acceptable’.
Action: prevention work targeted at 20 to 30 year-olds – focused on risks of driving after taking, or while on, drugs
- Translation Services
- Future drink and drug driving rehabilitation programmes to have capability to be offered to people where English is not their first language.
- To secure translators for future driving rehabilitation programmes so they are accessible to non-English speaking offenders.
Action: ensure translation services are a consideration for all future programmes and service offers
- Testing
There was concern over the length of time for lab test results (blood samples) to be returned – particularly for drug driving offences.
Action: recommend an Independent review
- Rehabilitation – Drug Driving
- There were no available local courses for drug driving rehabilitation.
- To investigate the commissioning of intensive wraparound courses tackling drink and drug driving, with #MORSE being a course recommended as ‘good practice’ in a neighbouring area.
Next steps
- Working with the local drug and alcohol services to complete joint engagement events at colleges in the area.
- Developing wrap around support service with local drug and alcohol service for offenders.
- Further promotion of drug and alcohol service to partnership organisations.
- Plan in 2025 to develop target communication and prevention campaigns.
09.30
Bruce Walton, Technical Director, Agilysis
Bruce Walton is a skilled and insightful data professional with substantial experience of developing and applying analytical techniques.
His expertise in road safety intelligence was instrumental in creating the multi award-winning data tool MAST Online, and he has also collaborated on many other projects and reports.
What we can learn about deprivation from STATS19?
Why does deprivation matter?
Well known relationship between risk and deprivation
How do we take on this topic?
Measuring data with IMD (Index of Multiple Deprivation)
- Official measure of relative deprivation for small areas
- Seven different domains
- Combining information produces overall relative measure
You can download full date for every local authority district (free)
Download IMD for a list of postcodes
What do you do with it?
- Each domain scored separately
- Deciles separate data into equal tenths
- Downloaded decile is relative to England
DfT published Stats 19 data:
- Free to access
- Can do a lot with the data
Deprivation is about people; not risk!
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