Road Safety Bill [HL]

There will be an interesting debate about whether this amendment or the amendments of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, or both, achieve the objective that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, seeks. The noble Lord has shown me some of the pictures to which he referred, and they certainly concentrate the mind. I do not believe that we can argue about the statistics. We have to recognise that, whatever individual cases there may be of people surviving because they happened not to be wearing a seat belt—or people getting away with something or not being as badly hurt as they might have been—the statistics tell you that wearing a seat belt gives you a major advantage of being less hurt or staying alive. The objective, after all, is to keep people alive and reduce the severity of any injuries they might receive. I agree that the imposition of penalty points would concentrate the mind. Surely the driver should be responsible for ensuring that passengers wear seat belts. People say it is difficult but, if you are the driver, it is quite easy to turn around and ask your passengers, ““Have you all got your belts on?”” If someone says, ““I am not going to wear it””, you say, ““Well, I am not moving””. It is quite simple; you do not have to move. Reference has been made to black cabs and taxis. My understanding of why taxi-drivers do not have to wear belts is that they argued that they might be attacked from behind by one of their passengers and they could get out the cab quicker. I do not know what would happen to the cab if they were moving. Slow moving vehicles such as milk floats are another issue. It all comes back to the faster you go, the more protection you need. You must have a belt on. If one of your passengers has not got it on, you do not move. At Second Reading, reference was made to the horrific accident that took place on one of the Oxford by-passes about a month ago when a car went across the central reservation. I am not sure whether the driver was wearing a belt but there were six, seven or eight teenagers inside and in the back who had no belts on. Several were killed and some of them are still in hospital. Why they crossed the central reservation we do not know; it was an accident in which these people were either killed or seriously injured. But if the number of people in the car had been the number for which the car was designed, and if they had been wearing belts, there might have been a very different outcome. I hope that we can sort out a suitable amendment to achieve this very important aim.