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Motor Vehicles (Wearing of Seat Belts) (Amendment) Regulations 2006

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, I am concerned about how these regulations are to be enforced. There is a huge burden on the police and it is quite normal that they will enforce things that they can easily enforce; if the laws are difficult to enforce, the likelihood is that little attention will be given to them. I am rather concerned that we are adding legislation that has rather slim prospects of working. For example, how will a policeman be able to tell how an airbag is deactivated? I went out to my car yesterday and read the manual, but it did not tell me anything about how to deactivate the airbag. I do not know whether my car is peculiar, but I am not sure how it is done. That is only one question among many that I have. The Minister referred to the fact that legislation is being drafted for Northern Ireland. There is one important difference in the legislation in Northern Ireland compared with the legislation in the rest of the United Kingdom: it proposes to introduce penalty points for seat belt offences later this year, but people aged 14 to 16 and those without licences will have penalty points awarded and when they apply for a licence those penalty points will be activated. So there will be a real incentive for such people to wear their seat belts. That is extremely important. I have carried out some work over the past three years on road casualties in the Thames Valley. Of the 279 fatalities, 93 were not wearing seat belts, and, of those, professionally trained investigators estimated that 65 would have survived had they been wearing seat belts. That is a startling statistic. If the Government are serious about reducing the number of road casualties, they have to get people to wear seat belts. Most of these people are in the 17 to 25 age category. We have referred to young children but, although child casualties perhaps catch the headlines, being killed in a car crash is the biggest single cause of death in the 17 to 25 age group. I draw this seriously to the Minister’s attention. The Road Safety Bill has not yet finished its passage through the other place and I ask the Minister to consider whether further amendments to that Bill are necessary. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, referred to the fact that getting young people to wear seat belts is very difficult. In Thames Valley, we run what is called a seat belt diversion scheme. It is similar to the scheme that we run with regard to speed offences. If someone travels at 37 or 38 miles per hour and has no previous offences, the likelihood is that they will be offered, as an alternative to penalty points, the opportunity to attend a speed course. With speed offences, we get a 90 per cent take-up rate; most drivers accept the speed course as an alternative to penalty points. With seat belt offences, we get a 2 per cent take-up rate, because the alternative is a relatively small fine and is therefore not an effective deterrent. In fact, we have had to abandon the scheme as not being worth while. But seat belt wearing rates are not getting better. This year, Thames Valley Police have issued 18,000 fixed penalty notices for speed offences; I could add to those the large number that they have issued for using mobile phones. This is a similar offence in many ways. It is not dangerous driving, but the driver is doing something that is likely to lead inadvertently to an accident. These regulations are possibly a useful step, but they are fraught with enforcement difficulties. Something needs to be done—and that something could be done in the Road Safety Bill. We had a long discussion in the House about the matter when the Bill went through, but we did not succeed in persuading the Government to amend it. However, the Summer Recess will give Ministers another opportunity to consider seriously whether something more substantial needs to be done to make our seat belt legislation more effective.