Serious injuries have a life changing impact and should be investigated in the same way as road deaths, argued Caroline Russell AM in Mayor’s Question Time today.
The Serious Collision Investigation Unit investigated 62% of fatal collisions and only 4% of serious collisions on London’s roads from 2018 to 2020. [1]
Caroline asked the Mayor today to extend investigations beyond fatal collisions to help meet his target for zero road deaths in London. [2]
When challenged, the Mayor responded: “Investigations is one that I want to look into because the stats you mentioned are clearly worrying”. Green London Assembly member
Caroline Russell says:
“If you cause someone serious injury by shoving them over you would be done for assault, but not if you were driving a car. That’s not right.
“Victims who suffer devastating injuries, like losing a leg, have told me they feel like their injury doesn’t matter to the police and are frustrated that an opportunity to learn and prevent future collisions through a thorough investigation has been lost.
“If the Mayor wants to meet his target for Vision Zero, he needs to focus on making sure collisions causing life changing injuries are treated with the utmost seriousness and investigated thoroughly by the Met, to learn from them and to prevent similar collisions damaging the lives of Londoners in future.
Notes to editors
Caroline Russell is available for interview.
You can watch the full exchange here https://youtu.be/aWH5jqzdwWw
[1] There were 331 fatal collisions and 10,510 serious collisions in London (excluding the City of London) from 2018-2020 according to data from Transport for London (TfL) https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/road-safety. An answer from the Mayor says that the Serious Collision Investigation Unit investigated 458 (4.36% of 10,510) serious collisions and 205 (61.93% of 331) fatal collisions from 2018-2020. https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2021/4431
[2] Vision Zero for London https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/transport/improving-londons-roads/…
According to TfL there were 23,131 reported collisions in London in 2021, resulting in 75 people being killed, 3,505 being seriously injured and 23,096 being slightly injured. Further data about deaths and serious injuries on London’s roads from TfL can be found here https://content.tfl.gov.uk/casualties-in-greater-london-2021.pdf
The main Metropolitan Police Service Twitter account (@MetPoliceUK) has only tweeted about Vision Zero twice and hasn’t tweeted about it at all from there in the past three years. https://twitter.com/search?q=vision%20zero%20(from%3AmetpoliceUK)&src=t…