ROADS in a rural North Yorkshire constituency are the joint worst rate in England and Wales for serious or fatal crashes, a report has revealed.

A study by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety has found the Thirsk and Malton area had 73 per cent more people killed or seriously injured than the national average.

The report states higher casualty rates in rural areas could reflect high speed impacts as vehicles travel at faster speeds on roads with fewer engineering measures to reduce inherent risks in the road network.

The sprawling constituency, which features a large section of the North York Moors National Park, includes a number of roads, such as the A64 and the B1257 Helmsley to Chop Gate road, with poor accident records.

The index calculates the casualty rate for residents of each parliamentary constituency relative to the local population.

The research, based on Department of Transport data, also concluded work to reduce road casualties had fallen below the national average in the constituency, but progress there on the issue was better than in Hartlepool, the area in the North-East with the lowest serious road casualty rate.

It highlighted the City of Durham and Gateshead areas as examples of where work to cut road injuries had borne fruit and Darlington and North West Durham as constituencies where further measures were needed.

Launching a scheme to make it easier for North Yorkshire residents to report road safety concerns, the county's Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan said speeding and road safety continued to be the community safety issue raised with her most often.

She said work to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries would see the county's road safety partnership offer a “one-stop shop” to which a simple completed form raising concerns could be sent.

Investigations and decision-making will be carried out locally by a group of road safety, police, fire and community safety officers working together to assess the speed and traffic data they collect over a complete week and see whether anything can be done to improve matters.

Councillor Don Mackenzie, North Yorkshire County Council's executive member for road safety, said: “We know that traffic and speed are very real concerns for our residents and our working together in this way means that just one report to one email or postal address will set an investigation going.”