Seat Belts (Children) (Hansard, 5 June 1981)

§ Mr. Fowler

Yes.

I am grateful to The Sunday Times for making the results of their tests available to me and for the concern they have shown to add to the factual evidence available to us on the very important issue of children's safety in cars. Having examined the test results very carefully, I have concluded that they do not in any way invalidate the advice of the Child Accident Prevention Committee that even small children are better protected in accidents if they are restrained, even by belts which are not specially designed for them. But the tests do underline the better protection afforded by properly designed child restraints.

The tests carried out for The Sunday Times used two child-size dummies, one representing a three-year-old child, the other a 10-year-old. In films of some of the tests, the dummies were shown to be thrown against or to slip under the adult seat belt in ways which would apparently have caused chest, stomach or neck injuries to a real child. If such results were repeated in real life, parents would naturally have serious reservatons about using adult belts for children of this age.

There are two reasons why such results may not be representative of real accidents. First, the dummies used in the tests were designed not to be entirely representative of the average child, but to exaggerate the roundness of the pelvis, which makes a child most likely to slip under a belt. This is done to ensure that specially designed child restraints are as proof against this tendency to slip as manufacturers can make them. In fact, in tests of adult seat 452W belts using adult dummies it is not uncommon for the dummy to slip under the seat belt, yet that seldom happens in real accidents. Similarly, the apparent neck injuries to the dummies would be significant—in the absence of accident data—only if the dummies had been specially designed to model the performance and physical structure of a real child's neck at the relevant age, which they were not.

Second, the accident evidence which relates to children under 11 wearing adult seat belts, although admittedly limited, does not support the suggestion that risk of injury from the belt itself outweighs any protection it may offer. In a Swedish study which looked specifically at this problem of a total number of 252 small stature adults none of those wearing seat belts suffered more than very minor injuries, such as a friction bum on the neck from the webbing. Out of 76 children over 6 wearing adult seat belts in the front passenger seat only 13 per cent. were injured. The rate of injury was the same for children between 6 and 11 as for those over 11. Australian work supports the view that a correctly adjusted three-point belt seems to offer a good protection even to very young children.

This was the accident evidence which convinced the Child Accident Prevention Committee that a child was less at risk when restrained by any approved form of restraint, including an adult seat belt, than when travelling unrestrained. I see no reason to dissent from that conclusion. However it is clear from both the accident evidence and the Sunday Times tests that the better a restraint is adapted to the size of the child, the better the protection offered.

My conclusion is that an adult seat belt gives a significant measure of protection to young children and that it would not be right to ban them from the front seats of cars so long as they are at least so protected. This is especially so as in many cars there is no form of restraint at all in the back.

The ideal is of course the use of a restraint appropriate to the characteristics of each particular child, that cannot be achieved by legislation, but I shall be issuing guidance to parents on the types of restraint which appear to offer the best protection to children of various ages and sizes.