£500 fine from Monday if you don't use a child seat ...
Any parents of a child under 12 who has not picked this up - and my impression is that many people have not - should be aware that from Monday a new law comes into effect. If you transport a child under 12 in a car without a properly fitting car seat, or appropriate booster cushion, you may be risking a £30 fixed penalty notice. If a case gets to court you get be fined £500. There are certain exceptions, which are even less well known than the fact that the law has been brought in.
As with so much of the nanny state legislation introduced by this government, you can see the point but have to ask whether passing yet another law is the best way to deal with it. Passing a law and not publicising it properly strikes me as particularly stupid. If the police bother to enforce the new law (and I would have found that condition unthinkable nine years ago), it's a safe bet that those parents who first find out about the law when they get a £30 penalty notice for breaking it will be given a very jaundiced attitude to health and safety legislation.
I would add that my children, currently five, have always ridden in properly fitted child car seats since they were born. My first reaction when I heard about the law was to doubt very much that my son will still need one by the time he is 12 - by then he'll probably be taller than some of the MPs who were in parliament at the time the law was passed. I would have taken a £5 bet that my son would be taller than Sarah Teather MP before becoming old enough not to be required to sit in a child booster seat under this legislation.
In fact the law does allow for this - one of the exceptions is for children taller than 135 cm in height. (The law ceases to apply to a child on his or her 12th birthday or when he or she reaches 1 metre 35 cm in height, whichever comes first.)
There are a few other exceptions designed to deal with temporary emergencies.
There has been a torrent of legislation of this kind, from the ban on "beef on the bone" to this new rule. But it shows no sign of letting up - new ideas for extra laws which have been seriously suggested include controls on the temperature of bath water and a legal requirement for bicycles to have a working bell.
It is high time we stopped passing such new laws and started repealing some of the ones we have.
As with so much of the nanny state legislation introduced by this government, you can see the point but have to ask whether passing yet another law is the best way to deal with it. Passing a law and not publicising it properly strikes me as particularly stupid. If the police bother to enforce the new law (and I would have found that condition unthinkable nine years ago), it's a safe bet that those parents who first find out about the law when they get a £30 penalty notice for breaking it will be given a very jaundiced attitude to health and safety legislation.
I would add that my children, currently five, have always ridden in properly fitted child car seats since they were born. My first reaction when I heard about the law was to doubt very much that my son will still need one by the time he is 12 - by then he'll probably be taller than some of the MPs who were in parliament at the time the law was passed. I would have taken a £5 bet that my son would be taller than Sarah Teather MP before becoming old enough not to be required to sit in a child booster seat under this legislation.
In fact the law does allow for this - one of the exceptions is for children taller than 135 cm in height. (The law ceases to apply to a child on his or her 12th birthday or when he or she reaches 1 metre 35 cm in height, whichever comes first.)
There are a few other exceptions designed to deal with temporary emergencies.
There has been a torrent of legislation of this kind, from the ban on "beef on the bone" to this new rule. But it shows no sign of letting up - new ideas for extra laws which have been seriously suggested include controls on the temperature of bath water and a legal requirement for bicycles to have a working bell.
It is high time we stopped passing such new laws and started repealing some of the ones we have.
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