Findings by Stephen Glaister, professor of transport and infrastructure, worked with senior researchers Dan Graham and Richard Anderson of Civil Engineerings Centre for Transport Studies to reveal a clear link between area deprivation and casualty rates for child pedestrians, after studying the detailed STATS 19 police records from 1999 and 2000.

Their findings, Child pedestrian casualties in England; the effect of area deprivation, will be presented to the Institute for Public Policy Research later in the year.

Of  28,228 child pedestrian casualties reported - an average of 3.35 per census ward - 5,713 were killed or seriously injured, meaning each of the 8414 wards has a reported child pedestrian death or serious injury every three years on average. The worst accident rates were found in the regions around London, Brighton, Birmingham Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Newcastle.

You would expect to get high accident rates in dense urban areas with lots of traffic and deprivation, so we built a statistical model to unscramble the different causes, isolating  the separate effects of  different measures of deprivation relating to income, employment, health, education, housing  and access to public services, explained the professor.

Our figures show that each year, the most deprived ward in England is 4.4 times more likely to have a child pedestrian killed or seriously injured and 2.5 times more likely to have an adult killed or seriously injured than the least deprived ward.

The relationship seems to be particularly marked in London. After standardising for other factors, a ward with ten per cent higher deprivation index suffers a six and a half per cent higher child pedestrian casualty rate.

No one local authority can get an understanding of its own data without looking at the whole picture. This report is an analysis throughout England that can provide local authorities with a new tool to help them design their road safety policies to save more lives.

In contrast with a relatively good record on road safety overall, Britain has a poor record compared to the rest of Europe for child road casualties. Identifying the important failings of transport for deprived communities, the Cabinet Offices Social Exclusion Unit interim report, Making the Connections: Transport and Social Exclusion, published in May, refers to Imperials findings.

We didnt know whether a hypothesised relationship between child casualties and deprivation would survive after unscrambling other factors involved, Professor Glaister concluded. It has and it is very strong.

We can all think of reasons why children in better-off areas are less likely to be injured, such as better education, more private space available for children to play in and more lifts to school by car. When more work is done to identify the underlying causes, this must offer a significant contribution  towards developing policies which help the poor and reduce the relatively high incidence of accidents to children. From a road safety point of view, deprivation is a clear indicator of where the money should be spent.