Road Casualty Reduction Reports

Road casualty reduction report 2025

Casualty and collision data 2025

This report highlights road casualty and collision data for the calendar year 2025 along with details of forthcoming Road safety activities within Torbay.

The total number of collisions within Torbay for this year were 172 for all types. This is up from 150 for 2024.

Figure 1: Injury collisions per month in 2025

The total numbers of casualties within Torbay for this year generally are also slightly up from last year with 204 casualties compared to 190 from 2024.

Figure 2: casualty numbers per month in 2025

Regrettably 2025 still saw 4 recorded fatal casualties within Torbay compared to 5 in the previous year.

Serious injuries were down from 34 serious in 2024 to 29 in 2025 and slight injuries were 171 in 2025 compared to 168 in 2024.

The year shows that there was a slight downward trend in the level of casualties by month from January to December from an average of 18 casualties per month to 17 per month, with May being the worst month for casualties at 28.

Table 3: collisions by road user type in 2025

Collisions overall show that fatal collisions have decreased, as have the number of serious collisions from the 31 of last year to 28 in 2025.
However overall collisions have increased this year, mainly in 2 wheeled motor vehicles and Horses and others compared to 2024.

The notable changes are that slight collisions overall have risen by 13 from last year to 141, and there was a notable increase in Horses and other collisions.

Table 4: casualties by road user type 2025

The categories which have shown an increase are pedestrians up from 34 in 2024 to 43 in 2025 and cyclists up from 17 in 2024 to 18 in 2025. All other categories are either the same or in the case of vehicle passengers showing a reduction from 41 in 2024 to 28 in 2025.

Fatal and serious injuries have risen slightly from 2024 figures, and slight injuries are also up by 3 from last year.

Vehicle driver casualties have risen to 81 in 2025 compared to 74 in 2024.

Pedestrian injuries have risen however from 32 in 2024 to 43 in 2025 but with a reduction in the number of Fatal and serious injuries in this category.

The fact that casualty numbers have risen overall shows a negative trend within Torbay but and no longer remain in line with targets since 2010 and the more ambitious targets now set regionally by Vision Zero South West.

Planned expenditures for road safety initiatives

The cluster site review for the Torbay area has raised some locations for consideration, however some of these have either already been addressed or will be addressed as part of ongoing schemes already in the planning and implementation stages.

The progress and future recommendations for road safety interventions will be outlined in the Road Safety Initiatives Report 2026/27 to the Transport and Parking Working Party.

At a local level here in Torbay, we will also continue to report casualty figures each year as part of the Road Casualty Reduction Report and the figures for the following categories can be found displayed in section 3 of this report.

Casualty and collision data

A Casualty is a person killed or injured in a reported collision on a public road. Casualties are sub-divided into killed, seriously injured and slightly injured. The graphs below outline the road casualty and collision data for the years 2010 to 2025 compared against Torbay Council’s 2011-2021 targets and the newer regional targets set by Vision Zero South West (VZSW) (VZSW targets are to reduce all KSI’s by 50% by 2030 and to zero by 2040).

It has long been known that non-fatal (and particularly slight) casualties are underreported to the police and therefore this figure is likely to be an underestimate of the total.

The introduction of online self-reporting by the Metropolitan Police Service at the end of 2016 and a few other forces in 2018, is likely to have led to an increase in the number of non-fatal (and particularly slight) casualties reported in these forces and therefore impact the total for Great Britain.

Approximately half of English police forces adopted the CRASH (Collision Recording and Sharing) system for recording reported road traffic collisions at the end of 2015 or the first part of 2016, Devon and Cornwall Police switched in December 2015.

It is likely that the recording of injury severity is more accurate for forces using this new reporting system. Nationally this has had a large impact on the number of serious injuries recorded in 2016, compared with 2015. Some of these serious injuries may previously have been classified as slight injuries, which means that the 2016 and 2017 serious injury figures are not comparable to previous years.

CRASH is an injury-based severity reporting systems where the officer records the most severe injury for the casualty and the injuries are then automatically converted to a severity level from ‘slight’ to ‘serious’. Eliminating the uncertainty in determining severity that arises from the officer having to make their own judgement means that the new severity level data observed from these systems using injury-based methods are expected to be more accurate than the data from other systems.

Therefore, there has been a large increase in the number of serious injuries reported by the police after the introduction of CRASH in 2015/16 (+20%); as around half of police forces in England adopted this system, however the number of serious injuries recorded in 2017 has remained stable when compared to 2016.

Even though Torbay has such low base figures, it should be noted that this still showed an increase in our KSI figures of 15% between 2015 and 2016.

Fatalities

Figure 3: all fatalities 2021 to 2025

As reported, fatal casualties have fallen to 4 in this year. Any fatality on Torbay’s highway Network is one too many and we continue alongside VZSW to work towards an aspiration of having a 50% reduction of fatal by 2030 and zero fatalities by 2040.

However, it should be noted that these fatal collisions were all due to the poor judgement of individuals rather than the road conditions or design and as such engineering interventions are unlikely to have prevented these collisions, however collision cluster sites and locations of concern will continue to be considered for improvement, where this is likely to support continued collision reductions.

Our KSIs for all ages have fallen to 33 for 2025 from the 39 of 2024.
It remains the Councils priority to identify sites where clusters of such incidents have occurred, with a view to engineering out any Highway issues or road user actions that may contribute to these and either reduce the level of severity or remove its risk altogether.

However, some issues such as excessive speeding or actions by road users under the influence or drink or drugs cannot be engineered for but may be achieved by means of Police enforcement.

Figure 4: killed and seriously injured (K.S.I) (all ages)

KSIs for children 0-15 have risen from the 2 of 2024 to 3 in 2025, however none were fatal.

All of the injuries were due to the casualty entering the road without adequately looking or riding without due care and attention on a bicycle.

Ideally education on road safety would be appropriate, however with the loss of Torbay Council’s Road Safety Team as part of budget savings, the provision has reduced significantly. However, Torbay Council’s Communications Team have undertaken promotion of our Road Safety messages and improvements across the Bay as and when resources allow. Vision Zero South West also provide resources to deliver and promote Road Safety across the region.

Figure 5: yearly killed and seriously injured (K.S.I.) (0 to 15 years age group) from 2021 to 2025

Slight injuries (all ages)

Fig 6 shows the slight injuries for all ages and the 0 to 15’s within Torbay

Figure 6: slight injuries for all ages and for children (0 to 15 years) from 2021 to 2025

Slights overall are the second lowest on record at 171, ‘slight child 0-15’ remains the same at 19.

Of these ‘slight child 0-15’ casualties, 3 were passengers in a vehicle, 4 were pedestrians, and 5 were on cycles (one an e-scooter).

Of these 19 injuries inexperience or failure to look when entering the road may have been a contributory factor in 6 injuries, whilst 3 of the injuries were due to them being a passenger in a vehicle that was either hit or subject to mechanical failure of a vehicle, 4 were cycles and 1 occurred due use of an illegal e-scooter, and 2 due to motorist fault (tiredness and hit and run.)

It is likely that some of the child slight injuries were as a result of poor road judgement or inexperience, this may be the case with 6 of the injuries, 4 on cycles or e-scooters and 2 from failing to look when entering the road.

2 collisions were likely to be due to motorist error misjudging pedestrian or cycles that were fully visible.

The slight casualties broken down by age and sex are shown in Table 9.

Our greatest area of slight injuries remains within the 25 to 64 age group, with males being the higher number of injuries over females in all age categories although male slights have dropped by 5 from last year as opposed to female slights which have risen by 11 this year.

There has also been an increase in the number of slight casualties in the 65 to 99 age group from 21 in 2024 to 36 in 2025.

This shows the main causation factors in all our 171 slight collisions. Some collisions may have more than one causation factor (or no causation factor may have been ascribed), explaining why the total number of factors may be different to the number of collisions or slight injuries.

The main factor remain behaviour / inexperience, with speed behaviour still being the second highest factor and Driver/ Rider error coming third.

Vision Zero South West

Torbay Council continues to work closely with the Police to ensure enforcement is a key activity in road casualty reduction. The Council also works with the Vision Zero South West partnership to use camera enforcement and education to reduce speeds and red light violation. A link to their website is provided below.

Find out more about Vision Zero South West.

There will be no Council revenue funding for the operation of Safety Cameras in 2025/26, however the operation and enforcement of the fixed safety camera sites within Torbay will continue.

The partnership is responsible for the maintenance of the cameras, whilst the authority is responsible for the poles and housings and any works required would be funded from our maintenance budget. Any proposed new sites may require Torbay Council to fund the capital costs of providing and installing any new fixed camera housings.

The authority will continue to work closely with the partnership to ensure that mobile safety camera activity is targeted at those locations where speed related problems continue in an effort to increase the visibility of enforcement.

Some existing fixed camera sites, which are reaching the end of their operational life, are being upgraded by the Partnership during 2026 as part of the ongoing programme of improvements by Vision Zero South West it is likely that this programme will continue in future years, where funding from the Partnership allows.

Over the coming years Torbay, in line with our partners in Vision Zero South West (VZSW), will move towards the Safe Systems approach to road safety with a target of providing a safe transport system, free from death and serious injury.

Planned road safety campaigns 2025/26

Reductions in local government grants from Central Government and the increasing demands on our services meant that difficult decisions had to be made and, as there is no statutory duty to provide Road Safety officers, the Mayors Budget for 2017/2018 resulted in the loss of posts within Road Safety.

No specific funding has been allocated by Torbay Council for 2026/27 and therefore there are no planned Road Safety Education Campaigns programmed for the forthcoming year.

The Communications and Engagement Team along with Highways Officers will continue to engage and support Vision Zero South West in 2026/27 to promote Road Safety Campaigns and Education across Torbay and the Devon and Cornwall Region.

Vision Zero South West continue to support events across the region and continue to provide educational events such as Learn 2 Live.