Keepmedriving - Keeping Parents Up-To-Date On Child-Seat Use

LONDON – June 23, 2009: In this, Child Safety Week 2009, the motoring solicitors at Keepmedriving, the motoring law division of Richard Nelson Solicitors, are urging parents to make sure that children are safe when on the road. Research has shown that many people simply are not aware of the safety and legal risks of using inappropriate and poorly fitted child seats when carrying children in vehicles.

Jonathan Wright, a partner at Keepmedriving said: “The law on the use of child seats can be confusing and not all parents realise that they may be committing an offence if they do not carry their child in an appropriate seat. It is a simple fact that many parents are quite unaware of how dangerous using the wrong type of seat can be, and the lives of children are being unnecessarily placed at risk as a result.”

The law is not prescriptive as to the nature of the seat which must be used, although it does contain guidance on when a reward facing seat must not be used. It states that the driver is responsible for ensuring that all children travelling in cars use the correct child form of child restraint until they have either reached a height of 135 cm the age of 12 - whichever comes first. Children over that age or height must use an adult seat belt. It is the driver's responsibility to ensure that children under the age of 14 years are restrained correctly in accordance with the law.

The law does state that it is illegal to carry a child in a rear-facing child seat in the front of a car where there is an active frontal airbag. In other words, unless there is no passenger airbag or it can be switched off, then a rear-facing child seat may not be used in the front.

What is less clear is what constitutes the correct form of child restraint. Appropriate child restraints include baby carriers, child seats, harnesses and booster seats. Clearly, however, not all forms of restraint are equally suitable for all children. All approved child restraints must carry the BS "Kitemark" or United Nations "E" mark and should be labelled by manufacturers to indicate the weight for which the seat or device has been designed. This in itself may deter some parents from continuing to use rear-facing seats.

Recent research carried out by Dr. Elizabeth Watson, a Surrey GP, and Dr. Michael Monteiro, a specialist registrar at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, which looked at existing data on car seats and was published in the British Medical Journal, criticised the current weight-range labelling of European seats, as it might imply that forward-facing seats are as safe as rear-facing seats for children over 9kg.

The confusing nature of the advice given to parents has been borne out in a Which? survey carried out to coincide with Child Safety Week which began this week, which showed that only 41% of parents questioned about the use of child seats and seat belts got the information correct with 18 per cent believing that the right age for a child to travel without a car seat was, incorrectly, eight.

The research performed by Dr. Watson and Dr. Monteiro suggests that seats which face away from oncoming traffic could be up to 75 per cent safer for children carried in cars. The report suggests that too many parents in the UK are too quick to move children into front-facing seats and that ideally children should remain facing away from the traffic until they are at least 4 years old.

Whilst this advice is borne out by statistics, the problem in the UK is that many of the rear facing seats cease to be usable by children over 9Kg (20lbs). Thus children over about 8 months are forced to be carried in normal front facing child seats.

A study undertaken in Sweden suggested that over a seven year period half of the children who died in accidents where front facing “booster” seats were used could have been saved had they been using rear-facing seats. This is backed up by a study in the US which looked at information on 870 car crashes involving children between 1998 and 2003 and which found that rear facing seats were 75 per cent more effective.

Rear-facing seats tend to be more effective because they protect children from lower neck and chest injuries, which can prove fatal and keep the head, neck and spine fully aligned so that any force, such as from a crash, are distributed across the body.

Dr Watson has called upon healthcare professionals to advise parents that rear-facing seats are safer than forward-facing seats for children younger than four and has asked manufacturers and retailers to make rear-facing seats for older children more available.