Vehicle Headlight Glare Standards

Richard Foord Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Harris.

As the clocks go back and evenings grow darker, drivers in Devon are finding that dazzling headlights are no longer just a nuisance, but a real danger on our roads. This week, for the first time since summer, many of the people I represent are trying to get around in the dark along the dark lanes and long roads that surround Sidmouth, Honiton and Seaton. A burst of a full beam before it is dipped can leave drivers disoriented. Add in a wet road, a scattering of potholes and maybe a cyclist, and it is a recipe for a near miss. Those do not always make it into the statistics, but anybody who drives knows them, because they have been there.

Many people in Devon are saying the same thing to me: headlights feel brighter than they used to. They are right. I remember when halogen bulbs were first introduced. They cast a much longer beam than we had known before, but now those have been surpassed by LED. The RAC’s recent polling backs this up: almost every driver thinks that some headlights are too bright, and more than half have been temporarily blinded. A quarter now do not drive for fear of such temporary blinding.

[Dr Arthur]

That is an interesting point. If most drivers think there is an issue, that means their cars are probably part of the problem. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that they should look at their own vehicles first before they start criticising other drivers?

[Richard Foord]

I honestly do not think that we can make this the responsibility of every individual driver; it is our job to come here and legislate on collective problems such as this one.

The problem is especially serious in rural areas such as the one I represent, where the population tends to be older than across the country as a whole. Age changes how the eye copes with bright light at night. A report by road safety consultants released yesterday highlighted that an older person’s eye can take around nine seconds to recover from glare, compared with about one second for a 16-year-old. That could mean not being able to see anything properly—potholes, pedestrians or cyclists—for the length of an entire football pitch.

In 2024, more than 600 people were injured on Devon and Cornwall’s roads, and sadly 56 lost their lives in road traffic collisions. Plainly, the sort of glare we are talking about will not have been responsible for all of those incidents, but I know from a constituent who came to see me in a surgery that at least one of those fatalities related to glare from sunlight. If adapting headlights to reduce glare helps to prevent even one of those tragedies, it is worth looking into it.

LED headlights give the driver a clearer, crisper view but, when they are not properly fitted or aligned, their tight, blueish beam can cause real discomfort for others on the road. Penalties for sellers peddling unsafe kits would make a difference. When the Government’s report is released in the coming weeks, it is vital that its recommendations are acted on quickly. Following the evidence could help us to save lives on the roads.

People in Seaton, Sidmouth and Honiton want to get home without feeling that they are gambling every time with a bright set of lights coming around the bend. Let us make sure that our vehicles light the way home safely, rather than blinding those who share our roads. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) for bringing this issue to the fore.