§ Mr. SteinbergTo ask the Secretary of State for Transport what were the(a) projected and (b) recorded numbers of road fatalities and casualties in the United Kingdom for 1987; and what equivalent information he has about other EEC countries.
§ Mr. Peter BottomleyNo projections are made of casualties in road accidents. Final data for 1987 are expected to be available by July. The number of people killed in road accidents in the United Kingdom in 1987 is provisionally estimated to be 5,300, with total casualties at 318,000.
Road accident casualty data for other European Community countries for 1987 are not yet available. The relevant data for 1986 are shown in the table:
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European Community comparisons of road casualties: 1986 1Killed 2Injured Total United Kingdom 5,618 325,275 330,893 Belgium 1,951 79,861 81,812 Denmark3 771 13,809 14,580 Federal Republic of Germany 8,948 443,217 452,165 France 11,947 258,029 269,976 Greece 1,625 27,328 28,953 Irish Republic 389 8,327 8,716
1Killed 2Injured Total Italy3 7,629 217,603 225,232 Luxembourg 79 1,904 1,983 Netherlands 1,529 50,081 51,610 Portugal3 2,460 38,888 41,348 Spain 7,045 135,519 142,564 1 In accordance with the commonly agreed international definition, most countries define a fatality as being due to a road accident if death occurs within 30 days of the accident. The official road accident statistics of some countries, however, limit the fatalities to those occurring within shorter periods after the accident. Deaths in the above table have been adjusted according to the factors used by the Economic Commission for Europe and the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, to represent standardised 30-day deaths. Those countries with adjusted fatality data are: Spain, France, Greece, Italy and Portugal. 2 Because of differences in the definition and the quality of collection in different countries, injury statistics are not as reliable an indicator of road safety trends as death statistics. 3 1985 data.