National Water Safety Forum
The Water Incident Database (WAID)
The Water Incident Database (WAID) brings together water-related incident data from across the UK into a single comprehensive resource. It consolidates several existing sources of data, including search and rescue reports, coroners' reports and media reporting.
The key aims of WAID are:
- To provide a coordinated, national approach to the capture of water-related incident data
- To provide insight into levels of risk associated with water-related activities, enabling meaningful comparisons with activities outside the water sector, and the determination of risk acceptability
- To produce high quality, comprehensive data
WAID data is used to inform annual reports on water-related fatalities, the interactive report (which includes data from the preceding five years) and the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy.
In 2023, we introduced new taxonomies for WAID data, improving the range of activity and location data. The new taxonomies were used in the 2023 annual report and for ongoing reporting.
WAID Interactive Report
The interactive report below includes water-related fatality data from 2019 to 2024. For annual reports and the pre-2024 interactive report, please see our Annual Reports page.
WAID Data Enhancement
The WAID data enhancement project was undertaken by RoSPA, on behalf of the National Water Safety Forum, to improve the WAID dataset. This was done for two primary reasons:
- The need to overturn the high number of "not recorded" outcomes, giving a more robust data set (which could more accurately measure against the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy baseline)
- To match recent updates to the WAID taxonomy
Key objectives were;
- To provide the UK Drowning Prevention Strategy review with an up to date and robust data set
- To match the previous four-year data to the new 2023 WAID taxonomy and reconfigure ONS regional data.
Read the WAID Date Enhancement Project Report.
Future of WAID
We are currently reviewing what data we collect and how we can maximise report outputs, in order for or prevention and messaging to be improved and targeted. Keep up to date with this ongoing work by signing up to our mailing list.
Contact us about WAID
If you would like to share any data or information related to a one-off event, or if you are from a coroner’s office and wish to provide us with information, please contact us at waid@nationalwatersafety.org.uk.
If you have any general questions regarding WAID, please contact us at info@nationalwatersafety.org.uk.