From Silos to Synergy: Reaching the 2035 Road Safety Targets through Multi-Agency Collaboration

The Department for Transport’s (DfT) Road Safety Strategy 2026 represents a long-awaited and ambitious blueprint to address the stagnation in road safety progress seen over the last decade. With a firm commitment to a "Safe System" approach, the government aims to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on Great Britain's roads by 65% by 2035, with an even steeper target of 70% for children.

This strategy marks the first comprehensive national plan in over ten years. It moves beyond individual blame to acknowledge that while human error is inevitable, death and serious injury are not; the system itself, from road design to vehicle technology must be built to protect people when mistakes occur.

The Police: Robust Enforcement and Innovative Policing

Police forces are central to the strategy’s "Robust Enforcement" theme. Their role is being modernised to tackle the most dangerous behaviours on our roads more effectively.

• Tackling Impaired Driving: The government is consulting on lowering the drink-drive limit in England and Wales to match Scotland's standard, with an even stricter limit proposed for novice drivers.
• New Enforcement Powers: To deter high-risk offenders, the DfT is exploring new powers that would allow police to suspend driving licences immediately for those suspected of serious drink or drug driving offences until they appear in court.
• Addressing Information Challenges: A significant hurdle for roads policing is the sheer volume of data. The new Roads Policing Innovation Programme aims to solve this by improving national coordination and providing technological tools to better identify critical threats like uninsured vehicles and "ghost plates".
• Operational Coordination: Effective enforcement requires managing resources across vast areas. This strategy emphasises the need for tools that allow for rapid responses to emerging threats and the management of complex tactical operations like road closures.

Fire & Rescue: Specialist Integration and Scene Safety

Fire and Rescue Services are critical to the Post-Crash Response pillar, where their expertise in technical rescue is vital for life-saving interventions.

• Access to Critical Life-Saving Data: Fire teams increasingly require immediate, on-scene access to building schematics, vehicle risk assessments, and live site layouts to safely identify hazards and perform complex extractions.
• Coordinating Specialist Assets: Commanders must be able to synchronise various ranks and assets from technical rescue teams to aerial ladders in real-time to ensure a swift and safe resolution to major incidents.
• Reliability in Challenging Environments: A recurring problem for rescue crews is losing access to digital information when operating inside complex structures or in remote rural areas. The strategy recognises that infrastructure and digital tools must be resilient enough to function even when communication signals are disrupted.

Ambulance Services: Data Linkage and the ‘Golden Hour’

Ambulance services provide the medical response that is the difference between life and death during the ‘golden hour’ following a collision.

• Pioneering Data Linkage: In a new initiative, the strategy commits to linking police-recorded collision data with NHS healthcare data through the Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network (PRANA). This will allow researchers and clinicians to follow a patient's journey from the moment of impact to long-term recovery, providing a holistic view of collision consequences.
• Closing the Gap in Casualty Reporting: Early pilot studies have shown that police data can sometimes understate the true scale of road casualties. By matching ambulance and police records, the NHS can provide a much fuller picture of road harm and help prioritise safety interventions.

• Overcoming Organisational Silos: Major incidents often suffer from fragmented communication between agencies. The strategy promotes closer coordination between partner agencies to ensure paramedics arrive on-scene with the best possible situational awareness.

How Airbox Supports the National Strategy

The 2026 strategy identifies that a connected network is a "golden opportunity" to save lives. Airbox Systems provides the digital infrastructure to turn that vision into reality through the Airbox platform.

• Shared Responsibility through Interoperability: Airbox allows Police, Fire, and Ambulance services to securely share mission-critical data on a single, secure network. This effectively breaks down organisational silos, allowing partner agencies to be invited directly into live operations with a shared tactical picture.
• Evidential Accountability for Investigators: The platform automatically logs every decision and deployment with a timestamped audit trail. This is essential for the systemic learning envisioned for the new Road Safety Investigation Branch, which will focus on thematic causes rather than individual blame.
• Enhanced Operational Performance: With specialised tools for routing to moving targets, instant map annotations for hazard marking, and powerful offline reliability, Airbox ensures that emergency responders can act with speed and precision, even in the most complex and signal-poor environments.

A Future Built on Partnership

Road safety is an integrated ecosystem where technology empowers our first responders to act faster and smarter. By adopting tools that provide a "single version of the truth," our emergency services can ensure that every journey starts and ends safely.