Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, for the way that she introduced her amendment in this group, to which I have added my name. The beginning of the letter circulated earlier says:

“The Government remains committed to protecting consumers from unsafe products. From toys to cosmetics, these products are essential to our daily lives and ensuring they are safe underpins both consumer confidence and competitive markets”.


Yet we are faced with a large amount of health and safety legislation simply falling, with no real understanding of why. That is why I added my name to the amendment. A lot of aspects of health and safety are complained about by some of the people who have to implement the regulations—they say they are excessive—yet, as has already been said, they save thousands of lives every year. It comes down to the fundamental question of how much value we put on the lives of our citizens.

We started off today discussing child seat belts. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, certainly dealt with that topic comprehensively, but I want to touch on seat belts in general. Before the 1980s legislation, when only 40% of people wore seat belts, there were about 500 deaths a year and about 10 times as many hospital admissions to treat serious injuries—so, about 5,000. In 2021, a quarter of the people who died on the roads were not wearing seat belts, despite our existing legislation. It seems that there are approximately 75 deaths every year in the UK from people not wearing seat belts. That is a dramatic decrease, and it is also a dramatic decrease in cost to the nation of managing serious injury.