Road Safety Bill [HL]

Many noble Lords will not be surprised to learn that I oppose the amendment. I shall not challenge the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, on comparative statistics concerning seat belts at this time of the evening, although I would be delighted to do so at a later stage. I could argue about it for half an hour if I had time to marshal all the comparative tables that I have. I invite the noble Lord only to examine the interim fatality statistics for taxi drivers, who have never been   obliged to wear seat belts, although perhaps 0.5   per cent of them choose to do so voluntarily. I would guess that the improvement shown by statistics for fatalities and serious injuries among taxi drivers over the past 20 years is broadly in line with that of the motoring population as a whole. The noble Lord talked about people being thrown out of cars. He will not remember the late Lady Alma Birk, who was a Minister on these Benches 25 or so years ago. She was strongly in favour of the introduction of compulsory seat belt wearing yet she admitted that if she had been wearing one at the time of a very nasty accident she would not then have been standing at the Dispatch Box. She had been in a car that ran underneath a lorry, and she was thrown out on to a grass verge and survived. The car was reduced to a height of 18 inches. So it cuts both ways. Of course, on balance it is safer to wear seat belts rather than not, but it is not all one way. The obvious reason for the discrepancy between the law on the use of hand-held mobile phones while driving and the law on wearing a seat belt is that if you use a hand-held mobile telephone you are quite likely to run into somebody else and kill or severely injury them, whereas if you do not wear a seat belt the person you are most likely to kill or seriously injure is yourself. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, gave a guarantee that if the amendment were agreed to the accident rate would go down. That suggests that there would be fewer collisions. I think not. Surely he has heard of the risk-compensation hypothesis. Perhaps the injury rate would go down but not the accident rate. The hour is late so I shall take up cudgels on the matter at greater length another time.