Are Road Casualties Concentrated in Poorer Areas?
Quick answer: In England between 2021 and 2025, 23% of child killed or seriously injured (KSI) casualties lived in the most deprived tenth of areas, compared with 4% in the least deprived tenth, according to the Department for Transport (DfT). DfT describes the most-deprived figure as almost 6 times higher. The gap is wider for children than for adults, and it appears for pedestrians, cyclists and car occupants alike. These are shares of casualties grouped by where casualties live, not rates per child, and they do not by themselves prove a single cause.
The gap for children
The factsheet groups casualties by the deprivation decile of the casualty's home postcode in England. Areas are ranked and split into ten equal groups. A casualty is counted under where the child lives, not necessarily where the collision happened.
Between 2021 and 2025, children living in the most deprived areas of England accounted for around 23% of all child KSI casualties, compared with only 4% of child KSI casualties living in the least deprived areas. The factsheet states that this means child casualties from the most deprived communities were almost 6 times higher than the least deprived communities. For adults aged 19 and over, the same comparison is much narrower: 12% of KSI casualties lived in the most deprived decile, while 7% lived in the least deprived decile. The factsheet notes that the relationship between deprivation and KSI casualties is much stronger for children than for adults.
For scale, the factsheet records 2,432 children aged 0 to 15 killed or seriously injured in Great Britain in 2025, including 41 killed. Children were 3% of fatalities and 8% of KSI casualties in 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, 68% of child KSI casualties were male and pedestrians were 55%.
The gap holds for every way children travel
The deprivation gap is not driven by one road user group alone. Within England between 2021 and 2025, the share of KSI casualties living in the most deprived decile, against the least deprived decile, was:
- Child pedestrians: 23% in the most deprived decile, against 4% in the least deprived decile
- Child pedal cyclists: 24% in the most deprived decile, against 5% in the least deprived decile
- Child car occupants: 20% in the most deprived decile, against 5% in the least deprived decile
In each group, roughly a fifth to a quarter of seriously hurt children lived in the most deprived tenth of areas, while only about one in twenty lived in the least deprived tenth. The pattern is present whether the child was walking, cycling or travelling in a car, which rules out a simple reading in which the gap belongs to a single mode of travel.
Pedestrians were half of child KSI casualties in 2025, with car occupants at 20% and pedal cyclists at 17%.
Close to school, and closer still in poorer areas
Among children aged 6 to 11, 70% of KSI casualties occurred within 500 metres of an age-appropriate school in England in 2025, against 36% for ages 12 to 15, reflecting fewer secondary schools. Within 250 metres of a school, pedestrians were 71% of child KSI casualties; beyond 1,500 metres, pedestrians were 23% and car occupants 45%.
Deprivation sharpens the near-school pattern. Between 2021 and 2025, in the most deprived fifth of areas, 55% of child KSI casualties occurred within 500 metres of an age-appropriate school, compared with 41% in the least deprived fifth of areas. At the other end of the scale, 23% of child KSI casualties in the least deprived areas occurred more than 1,500 metres from a school, compared with 9% in the most deprived areas.
Distances are straight-line distances to the nearest open age-appropriate school in England. They include weekends and holidays, do not show whether the child attended that school, and indicate proximity rather than travel distance.
The wider 2025 picture
In the 2025 national results, the DfT headline release reports a higher proportion of KSI casualties lived in the most deprived 10% of areas than in the least deprived 10%, a difference of 6 percentage points. The release summary does not give the two shares, so they are not stated here.
The same release records 1,538 people killed on Britain's roads in 2025, down 4% on 2024, and 29,918 killed or seriously injured, up 4% on 2024. The full headline story is set out in How Many People Die on Britain's Roads Each Year?. The child toll in the factsheet uses ages 0 to 15, while an earlier article on this site, How Many Children Die on Britain's Roads Each Year?, reported 64 children aged 0 to 16 killed in 2024. The different age bands and years mean the two child totals must not be compared as a simple rise or fall.
Two cautions apply. First, shares are not rates: the 23% and 4% figures show how casualties are distributed, not how likely an individual child is to be hurt, and no per-child risk multiple is claimed beyond DfT's description of the share comparison. Second, the figures do not assign a cause, and this article does not claim that deprivation causes collisions.
How these numbers were counted
Child deprivation figures come from the DfT child casualty factsheet, based on STATS19 police-reported collisions. Deprivation uses the Index of Multiple Deprivation decile of the home postcode; the factsheet analysis covers England. The 6 percentage point gap comes from the DfT final results for Great Britain in 2025. A child means aged 0 to 15; KSI means killed or seriously injured.
Only police-reported collisions are included, and slight injuries are under-reported. Injured figures are severity-adjusted, and the latest year can be revised. Figures for every council area are on the UK road accidents page, and live reports are on today's accident reports.
In this story
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- Road accidents reported today
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