Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) deaths and (b) serious injuries of cyclists that were attributable to poorly-maintained local roads in England in each year since 2007.

The numbers of reported cyclist fatalities and serious injuries that have been recorded on local roads in England for each year since 2007 where poorly maintained roads could be considered to be a contributory factor is provided in the table.

¹ Includes only casualties where a police officer attended the scene and in which a contributory factor was reported. In 2016, this related to 72% of reported accidents that took place on local roads in England.

By way of context, cycling in England has increased over the time period in question, rising from 3.7 billion kilometres in 2007 to 5.0 billion kilometres in 2016.

It should be noted that contributory factors assigned by police officers do not assign blame for the accident to any specific road user, however they do provide some insight into why and how road accidents occur. They give an indication of which factors the attending officer thought contributed to the accident. Officers do not need to carry out a full investigation of the incident before allocating contributory factors; they usually use professional judgement about what they can see at the scene.

Not all accidents are included in the contributory factor data; only accidents where the police attended the scene and reported at least one contributory factor are included. A total of 72% of accidents reported to the police in 2016 on local roads in England met these criteria although each accident can have multiple contributory factors attributed to them.