New analysis from Angelica Solutions says the next major cost pressure on UK motor insurers could come from a shift in who is being seriously hurt on the roads, not from claims volume overall.
The consultancy reviewed police STATS19 collision data and found that casualties among drivers and passengers have fallen by 46% since 2010, compared with a 16% fall for vulnerable road users, meaning pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. Vulnerable road users now make up around four in every 10 casualties on England's roads and account for 57% of all people killed or seriously injured.
The Department for Transport's 2024 annual casualty report showed a similar split.
Car occupants accounted for 55% of all reported casualties but only 43% of fatalities. Fatality rates for pedal cyclists have continued falling over the past decade, while rates for motorcyclists and car occupants have stayed largely flat.
The specific 46% and 16% figures are Angelica Solutions' own calculation, not DfT-published statistics, but the underlying trend, that vehicle occupants have benefited more from safety improvements than road users outside a car, is independently confirmed by DfT's own data.
The Government's third Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy, published in June 2026, commits more than £4.5 billion to active travel over five years, targeting 55% of short urban journeys being walked, wheeled or cycled by 2035. More people walking and cycling changes the base insurers are pricing against.
Angelica Solutions modelled a scenario in which walking and cycling activity rises by 60% while injury rates per journey stay flat. Under that scenario, pedestrian and cyclist deaths and serious injuries could rise by around 22%, third-party injury costs by an estimated 18%, and overall motor claims costs by roughly 6%. The firm said the impact would concentrate in the large claims layer, where catastrophic injuries involving lifelong care, rehabilitation and loss of earnings already account for a disproportionate share of total claims spend.
That flat injury-rate assumption is a deliberately cautious one. Established road safety research, known as the "safety in numbers" effect, generally finds injury risk per person falls as walking and cycling activity increases, partly because drivers adjust their behaviour around more vulnerable road users.
Angelica Solutions' scenario sets that effect aside to model what happens if rates simply hold steady. That makes the 22%, 18% and 6% figures an upper-bound estimate rather than a central forecast, one that would only play out if infrastructure and safety measures fail to keep pace with the volume increase the Government is trying to create.
Sarah Vaughan (pictured), director at Angelica Solutions, said the motor market had successfully adapted to major legal reforms over the past decade, including the Whiplash Reform Programme, changes to the small claims track and revisions to the Ogden discount rate, all of which reshaped claims particularly at the lower value end.
She said the next challenge looks different because roads are becoming safer at uneven speeds depending on how people travel. Vehicle safety technology has improved protection for drivers and passengers substantially, she said, but pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists have not benefited to the same extent, leaving them increasingly overrepresented in the most serious and expensive claims.
"As Government policies encourage more active travel, insurers have an opportunity to look beyond simply pricing this changing risk and instead help shape how it is managed," Vaughan said, pointing to better collision data, richer claims analytics and more targeted road safety interventions as ways to reduce serious injuries before they escalate into catastrophic claims.
Industry figures have already flagged that gains from the whiplash and small claims reforms face new pressure from shifting claimant behaviour and fraud tactics.
A rise concentrated in catastrophic injury claims would hit a different part of the book to the one those reforms addressed. Large claims involving long-term care and loss of earnings are priced, reserved and litigated very differently from the fixed-tariff, portal-processed claims the Whiplash Reform Programme was built around, meaning insurers cannot simply apply the same playbook that worked for low-value claims.
Angelica Solutions is describing a shift in where claims severity sits rather than a rise in overall claims volume. More people walking and cycling is a policy success, but under this scenario it could add cost to the hardest part of the book to manage: the small number of claims that are catastrophically expensive.
Whether that risk materialises at the scale modelled depends on whether infrastructure and safety measures for vulnerable road users keep pace with rising activity, and on whether the safety-in-numbers effect continues to hold as active travel scales up.
