Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many cyclists have (a) died and (b) suffered serious injuries as a result of poorly-maintained roads under the responsibility of (a) local authorities, (b) Highways England, (c) Transport Scotland and (d) the Welsh Government in 2017.

The numbers of cyclists killed or seriously injured in reported road accidents where the contributory factor ‘poor or defective road surface’ was allocated by a police officer attending the scene of the accident in 2017 are presented in the attached table.

"Contributory factors" provide some insight into why and how road accidents occur. They are designed to indicate actions and failures that led directly to the actual impact, in order to aid investigation of how accidents might be prevented. When police officers attend the scene of an accident, they are able to select up to six factors which they believe contributed to the accident, for each vehicle and casualty involved. This does not assign blame for the accident to any specific road user, but gives an indication of which factors the attending officer thought contributed to the accident.

Police officers do not need to carry out a full investigation of the incident before allocating contributory factors; they usually use their professional judgement given what they can see at the scene. Please note that not all accidents are included in the contributory factor data. Only accidents where the police attended the scene and reported at least one contributory factor are included. A total of 72% of accidents reported to the police in 2017 met these criteria.