More than half of child car seats are incorrectly fitted

23 June 2014

Good Egg Safety has launched a new national initiative which is supported by the biggest public/private sector partnership ever - to raise awareness of common fitting errors and how to rectify them to improve in-car child safety.

The campaign demonstrates ‘common faults’ found from almost 11,000 child car seat checking events and a video has been recorded to demonstrate how easy it is to rectify these. These can be found on the campaign site.

Common mistakes include loose or twisted harnesses, padded clothing, buckle crunch (where the adult belt rests on the child seat and can shatter on impact) and incorrect seat belt routing.

The Good Egg Team have been filming with Good Morning Britain where as many as 80% of seats were found to be incorrectly fitted. While the Good Egg average is 54% failure rate (from almost 11,000 checks between 2010 and 2013) it shows the wide swings in poor fitting prevalent across the country

To help address the problem, branches of Mothercare and Halfords are offering free safety checks on child seats, including seats not purchased from them, between Monday 23rd June to Sunday 30th June. Along with Mamas & Papas, they will also be giving free copies of Good Egg’s In-Car Safety Guides to their customers. Free additional Good Egg car safety seat check events will be taking place nationwide throughout the summer.

The campaign, run in partnership with Good Morning Britain, is also backed by Road Safety Scotland, Arnold Clark Group, Maxi-Cosi, Mamas & Papas, Which?, the Department for Transport, NCT, Road Safety GB, TRL, Brake, RoSPA, London Road Safety Council and RoadSafe. The campaign will run until November with Good Egg free child seat clinics run nationwide. Full details of the events are available on the campaign web site.