Volume 2

Government policy on the management of risk / House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affaris.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
Date:
2006
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Government policy on the management of risk / House of Lords, Select Committee on Economic Affaris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    14 February 2006 Transport deaths are dominated by road accidents. The next largest group is railway trespassers. It is possible that some of the deaths to trespassers that are recorded in the official statistics as being accidental were in fact suicides, because deaths with open verdicts are classified in the official statistics as being accidental. Most of the aviation fatalities in 1993-2003 were in private flying. There were no major UK shipping accidents in the period. All accidents 16000 + Transport + home Transport +home+work Accidental deaths per year 6000 All transport incl road 4000 5 bt A 2000 All transport excl road 0 Gan tial eo ie ee eee ee eee 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Year Figure | shows the trends in the main classes of accidental fatalities since 1968. The number of accidental deaths per year has fallen by about 35% since 1970, with most of the main groups contributing to this fall. However, there has been little change in the numbers in the last decade. 3 VALUE OF PREVENTING A FATALITY (VPF) The Department for Transport and its predecessors has published a value of preventing a fatality (VPF) on the roads annually since 1969, and occasionally since 1952. There are also parallel values for the prevention of injuries, though these are not discussed in this note. The purpose was originally to provide a means of valuing the benefits of accident savings in cost benefit analyses of proposed highway schemes: one of the first was an appraisal of the original section of the M1 motorway by the then Road Research Laboratory published in 1960.! The values have also come to be used in the appraisal of road safety measures, and more recently also in the appraisal of rail safety measures. The government’s present formal position is that the same value should be applied to all modes of transport. Figure 2 plots the roads VPF since 1952 at constant 2004 prices; the original current prices are re-valued using the Retail Prices Index. The vertical axis has a logarithmic scale: this foreshortens the large real increases that have been made to the VPF, but it brings out the pattern of changes over time. It can be seen that the pattern is one of occasional sharp upward jumps at particular dates, together with gentle upward slopes between the jumps. The jumps represent the effects of changes in the principles and methods of estimating the VPF; the gentle slopes represent the effect of indexing the VPFs to GDP per head, which rises faster than prices. The most recent non-routine jump was in 1998, when the value was raised by 10% following new research.” The ! Coburn, T M, M E Beesley and D J Reynolds (1960). The London-Birmingham Motorway: traffic and economics. Road Research Technical Paper 46, HMSO, London. 2 Chilton, S, J Covey, L Hopkins, M Jones-Lee, G Loomes, N Pidgeon, and A Spencer (1998). New research on the valuation of preventing fatal road accident casualties. In DETR (ed): Road accidents Great Britain 1997, 28-33. The Stationery Office, London.