Creating a national accident prevention strategy

Approximate read time: 10 minutes

On 17 July 2025, the House of Lords is due to consider the following question for short debate:

Baroness Crawley (Labour) to ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to create a national accident prevention strategy, as set out in the report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, ‘Safer lives, stronger nation: Our call for a national accident prevention strategy’, published November 2024.

1.   RoSPA campaign for a national accident prevention strategy

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is a charity that campaigns to reduce accidents at home, on the road, at work and at leisure.^[1]

RoSPA published its report ‘Safer lives, stronger nation: Our call for a national accident prevention strategy’ in November 2024. Its research brought together data from across the four nations of the UK, using sources such as mortality and case of death data, hospital admissions data, police-reported transport data, and RoSPA’s water safety database.^[2] Some of RoSPA’s key findings were as follows:^[3]

• over the last decade, accidental death rates have risen sharply, by 42%
• 21,336 people died of accidents in 2022, enough to fill London’s O2 arena
• accidents are the leading cause of preventable death in the under 40s
• RoSPA estimated around 840,000 people were admitted to hospital across the UK due to accidents in 2022/23, using up 5.2 million bed days
• a further 7 million people attended A&E due to accidents
• this costs the NHS at least £6bn annually, and likely considerably more, as this excludes the cost of surgery and community services like GPs

RoSPA highlighted both the human and the economic costs of accidents. It said the tens of thousands of people who die in accidents leave behind families, friends and loved ones who are “devastated by their sudden loss”.^[4] People who survive injuries sustained in an accident may face “long roads to recovery; they can suffer from disfigurement, disability and mental health problems”. RoSPA estimated that accidents cost the UK 29 million lost working days per year and cost businesses £5.9bn due to lost output and indirect management costs relating to staff absences.^[5]

RoSPA argued that the government was not acting strategically to prevent accidents, “partly because they lack a joined-up plan to deal with it, partly because accident prevention is fragmented between many different departments and agencies, without a clear ‘owner’ to set overall direction”.^[6] RoSPA said there was a “robust regulatory environment” for workplace safety, enforced by the Health and Safety Executive and “cohesively owned” by the DWP.^[7] But it argued the same was not true outside the workplace, and this was problematic because its analysis of the data showed that most accidents happen in the home, when people are out in public, or travelling to and from work. RoPSA identified dozens of departments and agencies across central, devolved and local government with responsibilities for accident prevention in the fields of health, water and leisure safety, road safety, housing and home safety, product safety and safety at work; other departments also have responsibility for taking relevant funding decisions.^[8]

The central recommendation of RoSPA’s report was therefore that the government should create a national accident prevention strategy.^[9] It also recommended that an individual minister should have specific responsibility for the national accident prevention strategy, ideally as their sole portfolio. It proposed that the national accident prevention strategy must:^[10]

• take a joined-up approach which cuts across departments and provides strategic leadership to guide policy making at a national level
• empower individual departments or agencies to craft and implement more detailed policies
• propose ambitious but evidence-led and realistic policy interventions to reduce accident rates
• understand that accident prevention is a public health problem to be addressed using evidence-led interventions involving a combination of education (including public awareness and training), enforcement (including policy, regulation and policing) , and engineering (by designing in safety)
• cover the core sectors directly affecting the UK economy: home, work, product, leisure and transport
• be forward-facing to address emerging challenges, like the climate crisis, the rise of AI and autonomous technology, the gig economy, and the UK’s ageing population
• address inequalities like deprivation, gender, age, ethnicity and region/locality
• take a four-nations approach to data sharing and collaboration
• support local authorities to deliver interventions, and listen to communities about their local needs
• understand the global context, look for lessons from abroad where appropriate, and help to export expertise around the world
• strengthen government’s data collection and publishing processes relating to accidents, to help set targets and ensure the strategy uses evidence to guide decision-making

2.   Government policy

The government has not commented directly on RoSPA’s proposals.

The government has identified ‘prevention’ as a key element of its health policy. Launching the 10-year plan for the NHS in July 2025, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said moving the focus from sickness to prevention was one of three key shifts needed to make the NHS “fit for the future”.^[11] In the chapter on prevention, the plan sets out actions around smoking, obesity, harmful alcohol consumption, air pollution, the role of employment and “good work”, mental health support for children and young people, vaccinations, and genomic research and predictive analysis for identifying people at high risk of developing common diseases.^[12] However, the plan does not specifically mention accident prevention.

In response, RoSPA said the plan’s focus on prevention was “both commendable and understandable”, but it believed the plan overlooked accidents as “a critical dimension of public health”.^[13] It argued that “preventing accidents as well as sickness is essential for fixing the NHS”.

Although accident prevention is not specifically covered in the NHS 10-year plan, the government has highlighted elsewhere the work it is undertaking on accident prevention. For example, the government said this year it is reviewing potential future road safety interventions to prevent injuries and fatalities from road collisions and is committed to delivering the first new road safety strategy in over a decade.^[14] The government is due to set out more details about the road safety strategy “in due course”.^[15] As another example, the government published its response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry phase 2 report in February 2025.^[16] The government response set out actions the government is taking in safety-related areas such as remediating buildings still affected by unsafe cladding, and reforming the regulatory regimes for construction products, building safety and social housing. The government also published a progress report in May 2025.^[17]

3.   Read more

• House of Commons Library, ‘NHS key statistics: England’, 30 May 2025
• House of Commons Library, ‘Constituency data: Road traffic collisions and casualties’, 24 October 2024
• House of Commons Library, ‘Road safety for young drivers’, 24 January 2025
• House of Commons Library, ‘Water safety education’, 13 June 2025
• House of Commons Library, ‘Building regulations and safety’, 8 July 2024
• House of Commons Library, ‘Product safety’, 13 December 2022