Why is the government ignoring 20,000 deaths a year?

Imagine the entire O2 Arena, every seat filled with 20,000 people. Now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once, but every single year. That’s how many lives we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not freak occurrences. They are daily, preventable tragedies happening in our homes, on our roads, in our workplaces, and in our communities. Over the past decade, accidental death rates have surged by 42%. This is not just a public health crisis; it’s a national failure of coordination, leadership, and investment.

At RoSPA, we believe the UK urgently needs a National Accident Prevention Strategy. Responsibility for accident prevention is fragmented across various government departments such as health, transport, education, and housing. This has led to duplication, gaps, and missed opportunities.

We need a coordinated, cross-government approach that puts accident prevention at the heart of public policy. This isn’t about bureaucracy. It’s about saving lives, easing pressure on the NHS, and supporting economic growth. In 2023 alone, accidents cost the NHS over £6 billion and consumed 5.2 million bed days. Businesses lost another £6 billion through absences and lost productivity, ten times more working days than were lost to strikes.

The government’s recently announced NHS 10-Year Plan rightly emphasises prevention. Yet it makes only a fleeting reference to accidents—a glaring omission given their scale and cost. Accidents are a leading cause of emergency admissions and long-term disability. They cost the NHS nearly as much as obesity and over twice as much as smoking, yet they are barely mentioned in a document that purports to be a roadmap for a healthier future.

We also need better data. Accident data is siloed, inconsistent, and incomplete. A modern, joined-up injury surveillance system would allow us to target interventions, evaluate impact, and hold systems accountable.

Our call has now reached the House of Lords, where, in a debate led by Baroness Crawley, peers from across parties have demanded that the government take urgent action in response to the sheer scale of the accident crisis laid bare in RoSPA’s Safer Lives, Stronger Nation report.

This debate could not be more timely, given the challenges the country faces in both keeping people safe and growing the economy, as well as addressing emerging issues such as AI and climate change. Peers made it clear that accident prevention work influences every one of the government’s priorities, from the Get Britain Working white paper and the need to ensure people entering or returning to work are in a safe environment to the links between accidents and health inequalities, demonstrated by the disproportionate impact of accidents on people from deprived backgrounds. 

RoSPA is now demanding that the government step up to invest in better data, better education, and embed accident prevention across every government department.

We have the evidence. We have the tools. What we need now is leadership. Because while anyone can suffer the consequences of an accident, no one should.

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Adrian Simpson is Head of Policy at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).

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