The Greater Manchester Casualty Reduction Partnership's  partners include Greater Manchester’s ten local authorities, Greater Manchester Police, Greater Manchester Primary Care Trust, the Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service, the Crown Prosecution Service, Her Majesty’s Courts Service and the Highways Agency.

Improving road safety must always be a priority, the Greater Manchester Casualty Reduction Partnership aims to provide a coherent, strategic approach to help local authorities, agencies and other stakeholders reduce the number of deaths and injuries on our roads by working together to ensure the partnership objectives are achieved.

The partnership objectives are:

• To improve road safety and contribute to the achievement of national and local targets to reduce the number of people and children killed or seriously injured in road collisions
• To reduce the level of road safety collisions and casualties in deprived areas
• To improve road and community safety, particularly for the most vulnerable users of the transport network
• To work closely with the local authorities, agencies and other stakeholders to develop a co-ordinated approach and solutions to problems through the delivery of joint road safety projects, and the exchange of information on best practice, development and best value for money
• To produce road safety educational resources and high profile campaigns to raise awareness to create safer road user behaviour

The Greater Manchester Casualty Reduction Partnership's work also links to the objectives of the ‘Greater Manchester Local Transport Plan 2' and relates to a co-ordinated approach to road safety initiatives adopted by the ten local authorities in Greater Manchester and the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority.

The work of the partnership is intended to support the principles contained in the following documents:

• The Government National Road Safety Strategy, Tomorrows Roads - Safer for Everyone' - 2004
• The Government White Paper, The Future of Transport - 2004
• The Greater Manchester ‘Integrated Transport Strategy' - 2005
• Communities & Local Government, ‘Strong & Prosperous Communities: The Local Government White Paper - 2006
• Audit Commission, ‘Changing Lanes - Evolving roles in road safety' - 2007

The Greater Manchester Transportation Unit analyse accident and casualty data in a number of ways to determine where accidents occur, the resultant casualties, why they happen and where high accidents sites exist. Trends over three year to five year or sometimes even longer periods are examined and particular groups of road user are considered in greater detail to help formulate action plans for future road safety projects.

There were 7146 reported injury accidents on the road network of Greater Manchester during 2008, resulting in 9881 casualties. The total number of casualties and accidents has fallen every year since 2000. The number of killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties only fell by over 9% between 2007 and 2008. In 2008 KSI casualties were 34% below the 1994-1998 base. A further 9% reduction is required to meet the national target for 2010. The number of child KSI casualties remained relatively between 2007 and 2008, but this is still 54% below the 1994-1998 base. The number of child KSI casualties has already met the 2010 child KSI target of 50%.

Full details of Greater Manchester 2008 Road Casualty Statistics can be found on GMTU website.

The challenge for the Greater Manchester Casualty Reduction Partnership is to ensure that all of the different contributors to road safety work well together, to create a safer road environment and safer road user behaviour, if we are to be successful in reducing the number of casualties on our roads and to meet the local and national targets.