Under “tougher” plans to tackle road deaths and injuries in England and Wales, the government has announced measures to make over-70s take compulsory eye tests every three years or lose their driving licence.
But are they really needed? Motorists over the age of 70 already self-report their medical fitness to drive every three years, and British roads are safer now than they’ve ever been.
In 2023, the latest year for which the Department for Transport has published data, the casualty rate on British roads fell to 398 per billion vehicle miles.
It’s the first time that figure has been under 400, and has halved since just 2006. In 1960, the casualty rate was 10 times higher than it is now.
The total number of people killed on the UK’s roads also reached a record low in 2023, other than the COVID-affected years of 2020 and 2021. There were 1,624 people killed in total, just under half of which were in cars.
This figure has plateaued somewhat since 2010, however, after rapid improvements between 2006 and 2010. There was a similar plateau between 1994 and 2006 before the last significant piece of road safety legislation was introduced.
The 2006 Road Safety Act introduced higher fines and more points for the most severe speeding offences, as well as vastly expanding the use of speed awareness courses. It was also the first year that people could get points on their licence for using their phone.
In the four years that followed, there was a 40% decrease in deaths among road users. In the 13 years since then, it’s fallen just 12%.
There had been a slight rise in deaths among older drivers for a few years between 2014 and 2019, but that has started to fall again now.
There are now fewer deaths among over-70s compared with either the under-30s, people aged 30-49, or those between 50 and 69. In 2019, there were a similar number of deaths among people of each of these age cohorts.
Academic studies have previously found that older people are also more likely to develop symptoms of depression, be admitted to care facilities, and even have a higher mortality rate, once they stop driving.
The academics found that those links remained even after adjusting for other factors like baseline health and cognitive ability.
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: “It is certainly good for our eye health as we age to have a regular eye test – every two years the NHS advises – but this doesn’t automatically mean that a compulsory eye test at age 70 is appropriate. People can develop eye problems at any age so why confine such an approach only to those aged 70 and not to younger drivers too?
“From the data we have seen, there is no reason to suppose that eye problems lie behind a significant proportion of accidents. While there may be a case for introducing a regular mandatory eye test for drivers of all ages, it is not clear that this would have a big impact on the numbers of serious accidents involving older drivers.”
Are younger drivers a danger to themselves?
Edmund King, president of the Automobile Association, said that the government’s strategy is “much overdue”, while pointing to the figures showing that the number of road deaths have plateaued since 2010.
He said that making vision checks compulsory for older drivers was a “practical step that can make a real difference”, but added that failing to introduce a six-month limit on new drivers transporting passengers of a similar age is “a major oversight”.
A limit like this has been active in parts of Australia since 2007.
Research by road safety charity Brake says that, in the UK, around one in five drivers crash within a year of passing their test. The Department for Transport data also shows that younger people are also significantly more likely to die as passengers compared to people in other age groups.
There has also been a suggestion that younger drivers are more likely to die as a result of not wearing seatbelts.
More than a third of 17-29-year-olds who die on the roads didn’t have their seatbelts on. But the same is true of 30-59 year olds.
There is a significant difference between men and women however – 31% of men who died did so without wearing a seatbelt, compared with just 11% of women.
That also means that 89% of women who died on the roads did so despite wearing a seatbelt, perhaps adding to evidence that suggests that seatbelts offer better protection to adult men.
Drink-driving
Since 2014, Scotland has had a lower drink-drive limit than the rest of the UK.
The government’s new proposals would reduce the drink-drive limit in England and Wales to the same level as in Scotland – 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, instead of the current level of 80mg of alcohol.
For an average-sized man, that means they would be over the limit after one pint of beer, instead of after two.
In diverging from the other nations in the UK, the new standards in Scotland aligned with most of Europe.
It seems to have had some impact. The number of collisions involving drink drivers has fallen by more than 40% in Scotland since it was introduced, compared with 20% in England over the same time period, and 38% in Wales.
The improvement is less pronounced when it comes to the most serious drink-driving road accidents, though. They are down just 7% since 2014.
Where are the safest, and most dangerous, places to drive?
The Isle of Wight has the highest current fatality rate, after accounting for how much driving people do.
There were 18 deaths per billion vehicle miles on the island in 2023. Next was Blackpool, with 16. The central London boroughs of Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Lambeth were the only other local authorities with a rate higher than 10.
At the other end of the scale, Stockport (Greater Manchester), Thurrock (Essex) and Nottingham each had fewer than one death per billion vehicle miles.
When it comes to accidents that included not just deaths but also serious injuries, London has the worst record.
Drivers in Westminster were most likely to end up in a serious collision, but the nine most dangerous local authorities in Great Britain were all London boroughs. Bradford completed the bottom 10.
Bath and North East Somerset was the safest area, although three Welsh areas – Bridgend, Neath Port Talbot and Cardiff – joined South Gloucestershire in the top five.
Scottish drivers were among the most likely to avoid being in crashes altogether. Eight of the 10 local authorities with the lowest overall collision rate were north of the border, although Rutland in the East Midlands had the lowest overall rate.
The top 20 areas with the most collisions per mile driven were all in London.
How does driving in the UK compare with other countries?
The UK is one of the safest places to drive in Europe. Only Norway and Sweden had a lower rate of road deaths per head of population in 2023 than the UK’s 25 deaths per million people.
The figures in places like Italy, Greece and Portugal were more than twice as high.
There aren’t any directly comparable figures for 2023 for the US, but in 2022 their death rate from driving was five times as high as the UK, and 50% higher than the worst performing European country – Bulgaria.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
