Police Reports After a Road Accident in Scotland: When to Report, and How to Get the Report for Your Claim

The police report is one of those pieces of a road accident claim that everyone mentions and nobody explains. When do you actually have to involve the police? What goes in the report? And how do you get hold of it months later when the insurer is disputing what happened? Here is the whole picture for Scotland.

When You Must Report an Accident to the Police

Under section 170 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, every driver involved in an accident causing injury or damage must stop and give their name, address and vehicle details to anyone with reasonable grounds to ask. If details are not exchanged at the scene — because the other driver left, or there was nobody to exchange them with — the accident must be reported to the police as soon as reasonably practicable, and in any case within 24 hours. Where anyone is injured, insurance details must also be produced, and in practice injury accidents should always be reported.

Call 999 if anyone is injured, the road is blocked or there is danger; call 101 for anything else. Make a note of the incident reference number you are given — your solicitor and the insurers will use it to identify the report later.

The Special Case: the Other Driver Drove Off

After a hit and run, the police report stops being merely useful and becomes essential. Claims for accidents caused by untraced drivers are paid by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau, and reporting the incident to the police as soon as reasonably practicable is a condition of claiming. The report also anchors the investigation — partial registrations, CCTV enquiries and witness appeals all flow from it. If this is your situation, our hit and run claims and untraced driver claims pages cover the MIB route in full.

What the Police Report Contains

Where officers attend or an accident is reported, Police Scotland records the details in a collision report. For a claim, it is a goldmine of contemporaneous evidence: the parties and their vehicles, insurance details, witness names and addresses, the officer’s note of the scene — positions of vehicles, road and weather conditions, visible damage — and whether any driver was charged or reported for an offence. When liability is disputed, an independent officer’s record of what was said and seen on the day carries real weight.

How To Get the Report for Your Claim

You do not request it yourself — and you do not need to. Once you instruct a solicitor, they request the collision report from Police Scotland on your behalf, usually for a fee, quoting the incident reference number. Reports are typically released once any criminal proceedings arising from the accident have concluded or the police confirm none are being taken, so there can be a wait of some weeks — one of the reasons road accident claims run to the timescales they do. The claim does not stand still in the meantime: intimation, medical evidence and witness statements all proceed while the report is awaited.

Prosecution and Compensation Are Separate Tracks

A common worry after a reported accident: does the claim depend on the other driver being charged or convicted? No. The criminal question — whether the driver is prosecuted for careless driving or another offence — is decided by the police and the Procurator Fiscal on the criminal standard of proof, and it can take months to resolve. Your civil claim runs on the lower civil standard, the balance of probabilities, and does not wait for or depend on the criminal outcome. A conviction helps a disputed claim; the absence of one does not sink it.

What To Do Now

If your accident has not been reported and it involved injury or an unidentified driver, report it — late is better than never, and the sooner it is on the record the stronger your position. Then get your claim moving: the free assessment takes two minutes, and a specialist Scottish solicitor will handle the police report, the insurers and everything in between on a no win no fee basis.

Start Your Car Accident Claim