The UK’s local authority “A road” network needs an immediate injection of £200 million to tackle the high risk road sections, according to a report published by the Road Safety Foundation, in partnership with Ageas UK.

In a major innovation last year, the government allocated £175m Safer Roads Fund to tackle a portfolio of the 50 most dangerous local A roads in England – roads posing the highest risk of death and serious injury to users. These roads have been inspected, remedial proposals prepared and the first findings will be reported in 2018.

The report recommends that a further 6,111 kilometres on more than 550 sections of unacceptably high risk roads need to be addressed by the Safer Roads Fund in the drive to bring road deaths towards zero.

“Last year’s innovative allocation of funds to tackle a portfolio of the 50 most dangerous roads in England enabled the introduction of a new systematic and proactive approach to cutting the social and economic cost of road crashes, said Road Safety Foundation Chairman, Lord Whitty. “It has been warmly welcomed by councils and authorities and ushers in a new era of best practice. Known high risks are identified through research. Roads are inspected along their length so that risks can be systematically identified and then removed, often before people are killed or hurt.”

For the first time, the Road Safety Foundation/Ageas UK partnership has launched an interactive Road Crash Index, www.roadcrashindex.org, which shows the level of road safety improvement (or declining performance) in each county between 2010-12 and 2013-15. It shows a county ranking based on improvement, the cost of injury road crashes in each county and the cost per head of population, together with risk maps for each county and any improved or persistently higher risk roads. The interactive also includes an opportunity to tweet or email relevant MPs to ask them to support road safety investment.