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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

Failing a response, I propose to draw this one-sided correspondence to a close. I believe that I have established:

a. that the claim that seat belts have saved 60000 lives since the implementation of the seat belt law is nonsense, and

b. that it is your (PACTS’) view that a measure that could be demonstrated to save the lives of motorists would be OK so long as the number of vulnerable road users killed as a result is smaller. I pressed you on this point in open letters 2 and 3 and you have not, as yet, denied it.

When you sent me the paper by Richards et al that I discussed in my third open letter you said the paper “highlights the difference between the number of lives saved overall through the use of seatbelts and the number saved through the implementation of legislation in 1983.” I take it from this that you accept these “highlights” as validation of the claim still on your website that seat belts have saved 60000 lives since 1983.

In my third open letter I said that with such a sudden large increase in the wearing of seat belts (140%) one should see a sudden large downward step in the established downward trend. I asked “Where is it?” I have found it! I was looking in the wrong place.

In the graph below I have reconstructed the analysis of Richards et al that highlights the difference between the number of lives “saved” overall through the use of seatbelts and the number “saved” through the implementation of legislation in 1983.

To accept the claim in the paper by Richards et al that seat belts saved 2500 lives in 1983 you have to believe that 1869 extra lives were saved by seat belts compared to the year before. Since you cannot see such a dramatic effect in the graph of actual fatalities you are forced to believe that in 1983, coinciding with the implementation of the law, there was some dramatic increase in danger on the roads that, but for the seat belt law, would have killed 1869 more car occupants. Even people who can believe six impossible things before breakfast would find that a bit of a stretch.

Why am I doing this? Why am I trying to resolve this issue via open letters on my website? I have no personal desire to cause embarrassment, but earlier attempts to sort this out via personal emails have run into the sand.

In a parliamentary debate in 1979 William Rodgers, then Secretary of State for Transport, claimed “On the best available evidence of accidents in this country – evidence which has not been seriously contested – compulsion could save up to 1000 lives a year” (Hansard, March 22, 1979). This clearly did not happen, but the myth has grown and PACTS has been complicit in this growth.

Consider the following more recent parliamentary exchange in a debate about compulsory cycle helmets:

Mr. Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab): There are some who would accuse my hon. Friend of extending the nanny state. Does he agree that the same arguments were used in the 1960s and 70s against the wearing of seat belts, and that the legislation passed in that respect has reduced the number of deaths and the personal tragedy experienced by families whose members would otherwise have died on the roads?

Mr. Martlew: My hon. Friend is perfectly right. We have always seen a knee-jerk reaction against such measures, whether on the wearing of seat belts or preventing drink-driving, but, after a while, such things become common sense and we wonder why we did not do them before. (Hansard 23 Apr 2004 : Column 529)

Your website proclaims that PACTS was set up “as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation.” The “success” of the seat belt law might fairly be described as PACTS’ foundation myth. It is not a bit of harmless exaggeration.

You have accepted that the law caused an “appreciable” number of extra deaths among pedestrians and cyclists. Further, as we have seen above, the myth is now being invoked to promote another myth about the efficacy of cycle helmet legislation. So profoundly embedded in the parliamentary mind is the “success” of their seat belt law that no one saw reason to question the assertion of Mr Jones. A compulsory helmet law would significantly impair efforts to promote cycling and kill the London cycle hire scheme; no potential user of the scheme would want to put on a sweaty helmet that did not fit, and no scheme has been proposed to provide clean well-fitting helmets for spontaneous users. For a comprehensive over-view of the cycle helmet law debate please visit nohelmetlaw.org.uk.

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

I’m sorry but I must persist. The power and endurance of the myth that PACTS and RoSPA have built around the seat belt law takes a lot of deconstructing. So long as belief in the efficacy of the law persists it will continue to serve as one of the principal arguments of the campaigners for compulsory cycle helmets.

Seat belts and helmets are routinely linked. Injury lawyers argue helmetless injured cyclists risk having their compensation reduced for contributory negligence in the same way that unbelted motorists would. (see also here) Earlier this year the Mississippi Senate threw out a bill to repeal the State’s mandatory cycle helmet law on the grounds that “the helmet requirement was similar to the state’s seat belt law, designed to protect people from avoidable injuries.”

You say in response to my earlier letter “While I entirely accept that the piece on our website referring to the estimate of 50,000 lives [60000 actually] could have been more appropriately worded, I cannot share the view that seat belts have not been an effective contribution to casualty reduction.”

Short of a complete public retraction I cannot imagine an “appropriate” way to refer to the 60000 claim. The claim that the seat belt law has saved 60000 lives is ludicrous. I accept that the number was not your invention, but so long as it remains on your website, it strongly implies to the reader that PACTS considers the claim to be valid.

I ask you to re-read this passage on your website:

“On the 31st January 2008, the 25th anniversary of the law change which made front seatbelt wearing compulsory was celebrated. PACTS itself was set up by Barry Sheerman MP as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation. Eight years later it became compulsory for all backseat passengers to use seatbelts and it is estimated that since the introduction of the first law change in 1983, seatbelts have prevented 60,000 deaths and over 670,000 serious injuries.”

As most parliamentarians, and the rest of the world, will read it, PACTS is celebrating its role in saving 60000 lives. Indeed this piece of self congratulation identifies the seat belt law as the foundation stone of your organization.

In your article five months later in Significance (June 2008, sadly available free only to those with institutional access to electronic journals) you concluded that in the first year of the law it had saved not 2400 lives but 164 net. Here (for those without access to electronic journals) is Table 1 from your article.

In your article from which this table is taken you say: “The best estimates … are that extra deaths to vulnerable road users did accompany the introduction of mandatory wearing of seat belts.”

In your response to my article advocating repeal of the seat belt law you do not comment on my point that most of the decrease in car driver deaths in 1983 consisted of drivers who were over the alcohol limit (down 14%), and that this coincided with the introduction of evidential breath testing. Do you think that this change in the law with respect to drinking and driving had no effect?

In your Significance article you are clear that you believe the law has saved the lives of people in cars at the expense of vulnerable road users: “The picture shows a clear reduction in death and injury to car occupants, appreciably offset by extra deaths among pedestrians and cyclists.”

You then proceed to defend the law as follows: “It would … be a severe constraint on the use of safety measures if any measure were to be ruled out for which the larger number of deaths and injuries saved were differently distributed among road user groups from the smaller number resulting from the measure … The wearing of seat belts is therefore not exceptional among safety measures in that extra deaths and injuries that may arise from wearing occur in part (only in part because, if wearers drive more riskily, some of the extra deaths and injuries will occur to vehicle occupants) to different road user groups than those among which deaths and injuries are prevented—though the difference is perhaps sharper for belt wearing than for many other measures.”

I take this passage to mean that you think a measure that saves the lives of motorists is OK so long as the number of vulnerable road users killed as a result is smaller.

In the light of that argument I would welcome your comment on this analogy: an Organ Harvester Lottery in which healthy people will be selected at random to “donate” organs to people in need of them. One heart and one liver could save two lives at the cost of one – slightly better than the ratio that you argue justifies keeping the seat belt law. Throw in two kidneys and you get a four to one ratio of lives saved to lives lost. This is a gruesome but not wholly inappropriate analogy given the myth circulating at the time - (and still) that the success of the seat law was responsible for increasing the shortage of donor organs.

I do hope that you will take the trouble to comment on my website. Now that the campaigners for compulsory cycle helmets are on the march again that part of their “evidence” invoking the “success” of the seat belt law needs renewed scrutiny.

Best wishes

John

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

This claim made over a year ago is still on the PACTS website:

“On the 31st January 2008, the 25th anniversary of the law change which made front seatbelt wearing compulsory was celebrated. PACTS itself was set up by Barry Sheerman MP as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation. Eight years later it became compulsory for all backseat passengers to use seatbelts and it is estimated that since the introduction of the first law change in 1983, seatbelts have prevented 60,000 deaths and over 670,000 serious injuries.”

I have demonstrated the claim to be nonsense: click here and here. A while ago I invited you to post a comment on this demonstration of nonsense on my website. You have declined to do so, so I now issue a more public invitation.

Borrowing from Churchill – the lie has got all way round the world before truth has got its pants on. If you Google the claim you get thousands of hits. Legislators like to believe their laws make a difference. If the BBC, the DfT, PACTS, RoSPA and Google all tell them their seat belt law has saved 60000 lives they will be inclined to believe it.

Why does it matter? The Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine and the College of Emergency Medicine are now lobbying vigorously for a law that would make cycle helmets compulsory for children, and ultimately for all cyclists . Campaigners for cycle helmet laws routinely cite the “success” of the seat belt law. Their argument is seductively simple: seat belts and helmets reduce injuries in crashes; seat belt laws have saved lives and so would a helmet law.

The PACTS website is one of the ways in which your advisory council conveys advice to parliament. On this issue it has misled parliament. If parliamentarians are misled about the “success” of their seat belt law they are in danger of making the same mistake with a helmet law. I suggest that if you cannot refute my demonstration that the claim that the seat belt law saved 60000 lives is false, you should not just quietly remove it from your website, but retract it in a highly public manner.

The PACTS 2004 Parliamentary Briefing on cycle helmet use and effectiveness presents the case against compulsion in a clear, balanced and convincing way. It would be a great pity if it were to be undermined by pro-compulsion campaigners citing other PACTS “evidence” for the efficacy of the seat belt law.

I know it is difficult to admit to a clanger. But if you had devoted a moment’s thought to it you would have noticed that the DfT’s claim that the seat belt law had saved 60000 lives was preposterous. If you and RoSPA persist in endorsing the DfT’s claim you will assist in the promotion of a further nonsense that will inhibit efforts to increase cycling.

Best wishes

John