Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how will linked health and police data be used under the Road Safety Strategy to improve understanding of cyclist and e-bike injuries.
While police data records injury type as assessed by the attending officer, health data provides far richer clinical detail on injury patterns, severity, and longer-term outcomes. This includes standardised measures, allowing injuries to be classified consistently and compared across collisions, locations, road users and vehicle types. Linking health and police records will also identify collisions resulting in cyclist and e-bike injuries that never appear in police data, addressing known under-reporting.
For cyclists and e-bike users in particular, this enables new forms of analysis, including how injury severity varies by road type, collision circumstance, and vehicle involvement, as well as how outcomes differ between conventional cycles and e-bikes. This evidence will support more targeted and evidence-led interventions. Overall, the linked data underpins a shift toward evidence-led cycling policy based on real injury outcomes.