Is "research" bill a Trojan Horse for compulsory bike helmets?

Better off spending your money getting people to drive and ride better and generally be more pleasant to each other.

getting kids out on a bike or any other exercise is the key, helmet or not, rather than this production line of nimbie led tubbie lard arse fat kids.......99% of the time just look at the parents, its all about the mirror image fat arse parents feeding their kids wotsits and wispas for breakfast.

How many of you have kids and see parents dishing out sweets and chocolates when they pick up their wobbly kids from school. it sickens me, its the parents using sweet food to compensate for a lack of quality time or not being arsed......no time today timmy, got to go out, here have a muffin, we'll get you some bigger trousers at the weekend. diabetic hell.

'Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?'

The fact that non- constituents are objecting is irrelevant, since the law would not just apply to her constituency.

Very bizarre to think we have people who wish to interfere in others lives, who has the time or energy. If you are a parent focus on your own children i.e. decide on whether your children will wear a helmet . Let other parents make their own choices.

Hmm perhaps a law to control what children eat i.e no more crap, and mandatory exercise and if you don't then you are a failing parent, oh hang that would be about half the UK population. Your child may not die of a head injury but they will of cancer or heart disease.

Quite simple educate people to make informed choices, and as a state be there to support when people make bad choices. A bit like parenting in general really.

When I was a child I suffered concussion on quite a few occasions - once at the hands of the school bully, once when running backwards to avoid being recognised by the school bully and colliding with a lamp post, another time falling off the climbing bars in the school playground, several times representing my school at rugby; if only school were not mandatory these ugly, unpleasant experiences could have been entirely avoided.
Oddly enough despite many, many miles and years of on and offroad, unhelmeted cycling, concussion has not once made its' vomit inducing,vision-splintering, nuclear powered headache a feature of this most pleasant activity. No, not even on the daily ride to the place of compulsory childhood attendance.

What concerns me is that Annette Brooke implies that she has had no comments from her constituents opposing compulsory helmets. Surely there must be a couple of locals who could put the opposing case to her? It's obvious that there are a couple of do-gooders in her constituency who are trying to force this through and bombard her with drivel until she gives in and does this utterly pointless pr bill in parliament. She knows it's useless but she is seen as "doing something" and the do-gooders are happy to have raised the profile of helmet compulsion again.

As others have pointed out, we don't need more research, it's been done already.

sorry but if you try to be clever and quote figures to try and belittle another post then perhaps you should accept something back.

More crimes to investigate does actually take more time believe it or not and as such less time to spend chasing people about on bikes who are not wearing a helmet.

felixcat, that's all well and good until you look at the crime figures for each country and realise how much more time cops in Oz have compared to the UK.

In 2008 Oz had (approx) 950,000 crimes to investigate whereas the UK had 10 million.

More time to mess about with stupid legislation.

I don't get it... Why does she need waste time and money trying to pass a bill to make someone else review available research? Why can't she just review it herself? She may even learn something.

Regardless of what folk think about helmets it seems the vast majority just don't care what everyone else does, so why do we still get the occasional lunatic prattling on about it?

All the evidence and statistics show us that the biggest causes of head injuries in children are ;

1. Accidents in the home
2. Accidents in the playground
3. Accidents as a passenger in a motor vehicle

Cycling accidents are a long, long way down the list.

The incidence of injury to children could be greatly reduced if helmets were mandatory in the home, in the playground and in a motor vehicle.

So any politician with a genuine interest in reducing serious child head injuries would tackle the most common causes first. Surely??

But nope, instead it is the usual ill informed and misguided attitudes which mean they keep banging on about cycle helmets.

Well, I've emailed the MP anyway, it would be a shame if cycle helmets were made mandatory for any age.

blah blah blah, compulsory helmets. Even if it does come in do people honestly think the Police have time to enforce such ridiculous bits of legislation. I, for one, don't.

I'm all for helmet wearing but this is just stupidity.

This Bill is a Presentation Bill (see 'type of Bill' at the top of http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2014-15/protectiveheadgearforcyclist...). As such, it has negligible chance of even being debated, let alone taken seriously.

The fact that Annette Brooke has tabled it will doubtless earn her a headline in her local paper. Nothing more.

The bills sponser is brookea [at] parliament.uk - Annette Brook, Liberal Democrat

Can anyone find brain injury statistics? Causes of brain injury numbers do not want to show up on google.

I'm pro helmet, but anti 'compulsory law'.
people ride different bikes in different ways for different reasons in different environments.
What is right for one cyclist is not going to be right for all.

Frankly, could someone tell me why we need a NEW report into helmet safety? Have they (such reports) not been done already? The safety standards on helmets have not changed anytime recently, so the data from past reports should still be valid.

one can only conclude that a new report is required to look into a the case studies of countries who have implemented such a law....

It would seem that those pressing from a compulsory helmet law do so only because they have an anti cyclist agenda.

Good point on European politicians & an enlightened view towards cycling and its perceived as opposed to real dangers and the measures that actually work. Wonder if they'd like to enforce Dutch and Danish style infrastructure on us.

I wouldn't worry about the EU slipping this in, not while France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Denmark are in it.

Who takes responsibility for a child if they dont wear one and it becomes 'illegal'?
Will the child be fined? What if the kid goes out without the parents knowledge not wearing one?
Are we going to criminalise a whole generation of children (and their parents) ?

Round our way most kids dont wear one (its called 'playing out') so are vans of rozzers going to prowl the street picking up kids?
Maybe in safe middle class areas, over indulgent parents will ensure their little angels will wear one but on large council estates a helmet law will be virtually unenforcible.

It's not the UK government you have to worry about.

If the EU get hold of the research they could shovel the law through from Brussels via the safety directive. Then watch our lot whoever is in power roll over and pass it anyway.