A national accident prevention strategy could save lives – and billions

12 June 2025, 12:16

The UK is in the grip of a public health crisis caused by preventable accidents.

Accidental fatalities have risen by over 40% over the last decade and claim over 20,000 lives a year, as well as millions of injuries. There is also a stark economic cost, with accidents costing over £6 billion a year in lost growth and productivity, and an additional £6 billion in NHS treatment.

While the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is pleased to see investment in areas such as health, housing, and policing, we need reassurance that health and safety are being prioritised. For example, that police forces have the training and resources they need to help reduce deaths on our roads, or that new social housing is built to robust regulations to prevent fatal accidents at home.

The devil is in the details. Take transport. The government has made headline-grabbing promises of new rail networks and improvements to the UK’s road system. But, dig a little deeper, and notice that while a lot of money is going into spades in the ground in the form of capital infrastructure projects, the Department for Transport’s day-to-day budget has taken a significant cut.

This means that initiatives such as developing the UK-wide Strategic Framework for Road Safety, which was last updated in 2011, or funding prevention programmes, could be deprioritised in a search for ‘efficiency’ savings. In other words, the country might get some shiny new roads, but they won’t necessarily be safer than the ones on which nearly 30,000 people were killed or seriously injured in 2023.

We’re concerned that past cuts have contributed to rising accident rates over the last decade. Massive cutbacks at the Health and Safety Executive and in trading standards have limited their ability to protect the public today. Reductions in frontline policing and community healthcare have had impacts too, while a lack of funding for home and child safety is leaving some of the most vulnerable people at needlessly heightened risk.

In accident prevention, we often already know what works. But without proper investment to deliver on the ground, more lives will needlessly be lost, the NHS will face greater strain, and the economy will suffer.

Accident prevention is vulnerable to cuts and often deprioritised because it is spread across many departments and agencies. While individual departments might make relatively small cuts to their budgets, these can add up to a worryingly high loss of funding for accident prevention as a whole.

This is why RoSPA is not only calling for greater investment in accident prevention, but also for the government to adopt a National Accident Prevention Strategy (NAPS) under the oversight of a dedicated minister, who can take the urgent coordinated action necessary to save thousands of lives and billions of pounds each year.

Following the Chancellor's emphasis on wise investment in the Spending Review, a National Accident Prevention Strategy stands out as one of the best investments the government could make.

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Steve Cole is Policy Director at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

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