New Research Reveals Which Welsh Counties Have The Least Safe Vehicles

New research conducted by Intelligent Car Leasing shows a complete breakdown of driving licence penalty points applied for unsafe vehicles and unsafe vehicle usage across all counties in Wales in 2013.

Using a freedom of information request researchers asked the DVLA for details of all ‘Construction and Use’ offence penalty points (endorsements) applied to UK driving licences in 2013.

These results were broken down by DVLA recognised counties allowing the data to be filtered to show the counties with the best and worst overall vehicle conditions.

‘Construction and Use’ offences are those which put points on your licence for having a physically defective/unsafe car or driving in a way which reduces your control of the vehicle.

Examples include defective brakes, steering, tyres, unsafe loads and using a mobile phone whilst driving.

As each county has a different population size the raw data for number of penalties applied in 2013 was not directly comparable from county to county, Each county’s population was recorded and a ‘points per capita’ statistic was calculated. 

• Caerphilly had the overall worst record in Wales for ‘vehicle construction and use offences’, with 94.77 offences per 10,000 residents.
• Wrexham had the highest number of ‘construction and use’ offences in north Wales with 59.89 offences per 10,000 residents.
• Flintshire faired quite well versus other Wales counties, with 23.41 points handed out per 10,000 population.

Our interactive graph below, breaks down the offences per county, click on the individual sections as demonstrated.