National Accident Prevention Strategy

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Crawley]

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.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

I begin by thanking noble Lords for taking part this afternoon. It is really appreciated.

I was recently asked to be a vice-president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA. I am delighted to see my noble friend Lord Jordan here, as he is the lifetime president of that same organisation. There you are—forever young.

This is a body that has been at the forefront of accident prevention for more than 100 years, with landmark campaigns leading fairly directly to legislation, from its campaigns in 1917 for pedestrians to face oncoming traffic through to the Highway Code and the Green Cross Code, cycling proficiency and compulsory seatbelts in 1981—gosh, it seems so long ago now—as well as banning hand-held mobile phones while driving, up to the report in front of us today. Imagine the entire O2 arena, with all 2,000 seats filled; now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once but every single year. That is how many lives we estimate we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not rare events; they happen every day in our homes, on our roads, and in our workplaces and communities.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports accidental death rates surging by 42% over the past decade. It was that figure that led me to think that we need a wider parliamentary debate about this. This is not just a statistic, it is a crisis: a national failure of co-ordination, leadership and investment. I say to my noble friend the Minister, whom I respect greatly, that we really need government to champion a national co-ordinated approach to accident prevention, because the current system is just not working.

As the Minister will know, responsibility for accident prevention is currently fragmented across multiple departments: Health, Transport, Education, Housing and so on. This fragmentation leads to gaps, duplication and missed opportunities. There is a chart in RoSPA’s report, of which there are copies on the back table for anyone who wants to have a look, of the overview of government departments and agencies responsible for accident prevention, and it looks like the web of a crazed and demented spider. I would bet that no one in this Room could make head or tail of it.

I believe, too, that accident prevention aligns directly with this Government’s priorities. The NHS 10-year plan, Fit for the Future, for instance, rightly focuses on prevention and early intervention—but injury prevention must be part of that, and part of the vision of that policy, and I am not convinced that it is. Reducing unintentional injuries will lower emergency admissions, free up NHS capacity and improve population health outcomes.

We also know that accidents disproportionately affect people from more deprived backgrounds, making them a clear example of the health inequalities that the NHS 10-year plan sets out to tackle. RoSPA calculates that the cost to the NHS of treating accidents is nearly equivalent to the cost of treating obesity, and twice the cost of treating conditions related to smoking.

The Get Britain Working White Paper that the Minister will be very familiar with identified 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Many of these cases stem from preventable injuries. A more co-ordinated approach in government to health and employment accident prevention will keep more people healthy and in work. It will reduce benefit dependency and ensure that local authorities are more financially supported in designing safer communities.

Of course, we have the Employment Rights Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment. It offers a real opportunity to improve workplace safety. Day-one sick pay rights will reduce presenteeism and injury risk. The new fair work agency will enforce safe working conditions and whistleblower protections.

As well as the opportunities inherent in the Government’s agenda, there are also opportunities for getting better co-ordinated data into the area of accident prevention. At present, data is siloed, inconsistent and incomplete. Without robust data, we cannot target interventions, measure impact or hold systems to account. Australia’s national injury surveillance unit shows what is possible and it is a good example for us. It would make sense for the Government to encourage standardised reporting across the four nations. At the moment, we cannot compare data across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We should invest in real-time data infrastructure, as well as having an annual injury report published.

RoSPA’s headline call to government is for a national accident prevention strategy led by a named Minister, perhaps a departmental Minister who already has a portfolio, or a Cabinet Office Minister. I would like to put a few questions to my noble friend the Minister before I close. Does she agree with a named Minister heading up co-ordination? Does she think this is an area for co-ordination of data across the four nations of the UK? What provisions in the NHS 10-year plan actually address accident prevention? Can the Get Britain Working reforms be levered to reduce injury-related worklessness? Does she agree with empowerment through education, embedding accident prevention across the whole life course, from early years to old age, in schools, workplaces and communities?

I will leave noble Lords with RoSPA’s current costings for serious accidents. I found it slightly unbelievable when I first read it. Having had a deeper dive, with the help of the RoSPA team, who are sitting at the back, I understand that it is probably a conservative estimate. It estimates £12 billion as the annual cost of accidents, which is evenly split between the cost to the NHS and the cost to businesses.

Around £6 billion is attributed to NHS treatment costs, based on hospital bed days and A&E attendances, and the remaining £6 billion reflects lost productivity, calculated from working days lost due to injury, post-discharge recovery and time taken off by carers, adjusted to include the wider business impact of staff absence. For an economy in search of growth and a population in search of answers to needless and rising injury and death, this needs serious investigation.