FOI 899/25

Request

The total number of incidents attended by your service where sleep, fatigue or driving while tired was recorded as a factor for each of the past five calendar years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and partial data for 2025 if available)

Incidents could include, but are not limited to: Falling asleep while driving, road traffic collisions where driver fatigue was cited, etc

If there is no specific marker or code for "sleep" or "fatigue", I would be grateful if you could instead provide the number of incidents in which any relevant fatigue-related terms were noted in officer or incident logs-e.g., via keyword search for: "sleep", "fatigue", "tired", "exhaustion", "drowsy", etc.

Response

We consulted with our motoring unit who have provided the below response to your request.

A search was conducted on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) for RTC’s (Road Traffic Collisions) where ‘Fatigue’ was recorded as a contributory factor. Please see the results below:

2020 – 13

2021 – 18

2022 – 25

2023 – 24

2024 – 16

2025 – 13

Please note contributory factors for personal injury RTCs are set by the department for transport. Only ‘fatigue’ is a contributory factor, there are no contributory factors for ‘sleep’, ‘tired’, ‘exhaustion’ or ‘drowsy’. The results retrieved are dependent on how the information has been entered onto the system. As such, the information provided should not be considered statistically accurate and/or definitive and therefore, care should be taken when using this data for any further statistical, analytical or evaluative purposes.