Failure to wear a seatbelt could result in penalty points as well as fines, under new plans to reduce the number of deaths on the UK’s roads.

Increasing penalties for those who do not strap themselves in is being considered as one of the 74 actions to improve road safety published by the Department for Transport today (19 July 2019). Currently, offenders are given a £100 on-the-spot fine.

In 2017, 27% of car deaths involved people that were not wearing a seatbelt – meaning 1 in 4 car deaths could have been prevented by belting up.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said:

The UK has some of the safest roads in the world, but we are not complacent and continue to look at how we can make them safer.

Today’s action plan is a key milestone in our road safety work and sets out the important steps we are taking to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads.

The Department for Transport is also considering the report from the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) on seatbelt use. This report analyses which drivers and passengers are least likely to wear seatbelts, what prompts their behaviour and which interventions would be best to reduce the number of casualties.

Road Safety Minister Michael Ellis said:

Far too many people are not wearing a seatbelt while traveling in a car, needlessly putting their lives at risk.

Increasing penalties for people who disregard the simplest of way of protecting themselves is just one of a long list of actions this government is taking to help keep people safe on our roads.

A Rural Road Users Advisory Panel will also be set up to explore how to boost road safety in rural areas, particularly improving roads and traffic signs, and issues around speed limits and enforcement.

The action plan is designed to improve road safety for people at every stage of life – from birth to old age. This includes:

For children:

• a £225,000 grant has been given to Good Egg Safety to deliver a nationally-accredited safety training programme for retailers to help parents correctly fit baby and child seats. It comes after 70% of parents said they didn’t know how to properly install seats
• a pledge to help improve children’s safety will see research commissioned into whether mobile phone use among young pedestrians leads to an increased risk of road collisions
• to help those with special educational needs and cognitive disabilities, the government will fund research into road safety support to help children aged 7 to 18 to understand the dangers near roads

For young adults:

• the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is developing a behavioural change campaign designed to encourage learner drivers to broaden their experience, by using more rural roads and driving at night before taking their test
• research will look further at the benefits of introducing Graduated Driving Licensing on road safety
• THINK! will continue reinforcing vital road safety messages through continuous campaigns focusing on drink driving, using mobile phones while driving, speeding, and dangers around passenger distraction

For adults:

• the government is also investigating whether alcolocks – devices which measure the alcohol in a driver’s breath and stop a vehicle from starting if that level is too high – can reduce drink-driving re-offending as part of rehabilitation programmes in the UK. PACTS has been given £50,000 to review drink driving trends and interventions, which will be completed early next year
• there will also be a greater focus on roads policing with a 2 year project with the Home Office and National Police Chiefs’ Council. This will identify best practice and gaps in services to see how policing can be improved

For older drivers:

• RoadSafe has been given £50,000 to deliver a digital platform to share best practice to reduce road safety risks for older road users

The action plan builds on a number of projects in the Road Safety Statement, published in 2015, which saw increased enforcement for drug driving, and doubling penalties for using a handheld mobile phone at the wheel.

In other road safety measures, the government is currently consulting on banning tyres aged 10 years and older from buses, coaches, minibuses and lorries. If proposals are supported, new laws could be introduced later this year, ready to come into force early 2020.

A Road Collision Investigation project, with the RAC Foundation, is also ongoing. This is examining the cause of crashes and if there is a business case for a Road Collision Investigation Branch, which would specialise in learning lessons from serious road accidents.

High-performing academy trusts are being encouraged to grow and support more schools across England, supported by £17 million announced today by the Education Secretary Damian Hinds (Friday 19 July).

The Trust Capacity Fund will be used by high performing academy trusts to build on the rising standards in many sponsored academy schools, by ensuring they can provide support to communities and schools that need it most.

Alongside this the Government is setting out more details on a new package of support, worth an estimated £16.5million, to support 2,400 underperforming schools to improve their leadership.

Figures published last week showed that there are 380,000 children now studying in good or outstanding sponsored academies that were previously underperforming council-run schools – and that 7 in 10 previously under-performing schools, have been rated good or outstanding by Ofsted since becoming an academy – compared to 1 in 10 under local authority control.

Education Secretary, Damian Hinds said:

Strong academy trusts across the country are already supporting schools in many of the communities that need it the most and this funding will help this to happen in even more areas.

Academies are at the heart of our reforms to education and just last week new data revealed that the last year has seen 80,000 more children studying in good or outstanding sponsored academies that were previously run by local authorities which is why we must continue to give these charitable institutions the opportunity to turn around more schools.

Launching in September and providing funding until the end of the financial year, the Trust Capacity fund will build on the success of previous rounds of funding awarded to successful academy trusts to help tackle underperformance and improve schools. It will:

• Support strong academy trusts across the country to provide assistance to communities and schools are most in need of school improvement

• Provide high-potential academy trusts, who have emerging capacity to improve other schools, with funding to meet challenges associated with taking on more schools in different contexts as they develop, deploy school improvement support quickly across a trust, and support collaboration between schools.

• Support smaller academy trusts that wish to merge into existing or new academy trusts, creating new clusters of schools

The Department for Education has also set out a package of bespoke support that will be available for schools with a ‘requires improvement’ judgement from Ofsted today, from expert education leaders who will provide them with tailored support and advice from National Leaders of Education to help them improve.

A more intensive offer of leadership guidance, plus up to £16,000 in support, will be available to schools with two consecutive ‘requires improvement’ judgements from Ofsted, to help them improve in a sustainable way, forming part of an estimated £16.5million worth of support from the Government to around 2,400 schools nationwide. The Department will be contacting schools throughout the 2019/20 academic year to offer this support package.

This follows the Secretary of State’s commitment at the National Association of Headteachers conference earlier this year, to use Ofsted’s ‘requires improvement’ judgement as the only trigger for offering tailored support to leadership teams, to help their schools to improve and relieve unnecessary pressures on head teachers and leaders.

This also comes as the Department for Education publishes new research on the type of school improvement practices used in high performing countries, offering the Department the chance review a variety of different practices that can be applied to schools in England.

Contributing to the Government’s work to raise education standards, the report highlights that the school improvement principles used by the Department are also in place in countries with successful education systems. There is, however, still more to learn about which approaches to school improvement work best in practice.

The public were asked to share their memories of the Moon landings and describe how Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins’s achievement had inspired them.

The Moon Landing Memories campaign was organised by the UK Space Agency and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.

Memories include:

• a woman in labour who delayed going to hospital so she could catch footage of the crew landing safely
• a man who proposed to his partner on the night of the Moon landing
• many whose experience of the Moon landing led to science and space industry careers.

Fifty of the submissions have been curated into a digital scrapbook and a selection of the best entries will also go on display at the National Space Centre in Leicester as part of its ‘One Giant Leap’ programme of events.

Science Minister Chris Skidmore said:

These memories of the first Moon landing bring to life the magic of that iconic moment. They clearly show why some of the children who watched live in 1969 were inspired to become the engineers and scientists that are now building our thriving space industry in the UK.

To retain our status as one of the world leaders in the new space age, we need the next generation to follow in their footsteps and our modern Industrial Strategy is backing the industry to create these highly skilled, well-paid space jobs for the future.

Tim Peake, astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA) said:

Thank you to all those who took part in the Moon Landing Memories campaign. The Apollo 11 lunar landing was humanity’s most audacious mission and our greatest achievement.

It is no surprise that for those who watched it live, and for those who were born into a world where humans had already walked on the Moon, it remains a source of inspiration and wonder.

As we reflect on past achievements and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, we must also look to the future as we embark on a new era of space exploration to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Further highlights from the entries include an account from Peter Cadogan from Cheltenham who said:

I had just graduated when Apollo 11 landed in 1969 and I stayed up all night waiting to see the first Moon walk. I was about to start my PhD at the Organic Geochemistry Unit at the University of Bristol with Geoffrey Eglinton, whose laboratory was one of just 12 in the UK to receive lunar samples from Apollo 11 and 12.

I soon joined Colin Pillinger (later of Beagle 2 fame) in trying to prove that the tiny amounts of carbon in the Apollo dust samples had come from the Sun. This I managed to do, received my PhD and then went on to determine the ages of Moon rocks with Grenville Turner at the University of Sheffield. 50 years on, I’m now developing computer software to count the very smallest lunar craters automatically.

In addition to those who were inspired to work in astronomy and science, the campaign also revealed accounts of how the Moon landing sparked artistic responses and creativity. Jackie Burns from Essex recalled:

I tried to watch the first moon walk at school – one tiny little black & white TV in the gym hall, with the rest of the school.

I remember crying in frustration because most of the other children were not interested in watching and I was reduced to seeing snatches of the TV screen amongst the moving bodies obscuring my view.

I am now a Fellow of the International Association for Astronomical Artists and the only professional female space artist in the UK.

Seafood Innovation Fund will reward cutting-edge innovation.

A Government call for evidence, launched today (19 July 2019), is part of a three-month project overseen by a panel of experts, aimed at throwing a spotlight on how the family courts manage the safety and well-being of children when there is a risk of domestic abuse.

Responding directly to concerns raised recently including in the Government’s Domestic Abuse Consultation, the review will also consider the use of ‘barring orders’- court orders which can prevent abusive parents from making further court applications that often serve to simply re-traumatise their victims.

Crucially, it will also examine what the risk is to children and parents in continuing to have a relationship with a parent with a history of abusive behaviour, including where continuing contact between the parents is required by court orders.

Justice Minister Paul Maynard said:

Domestic abuse destroys lives, which is why survivors and their children must have every confidence that they will be protected in the family courts.

Just this week we introduced legislation that will ban abusers from cross-examining their victims in the family courts, and throughout our review we will be engaging with victims across the country to make sure we are doing all we can to protect them further.

The review – ordered by ministers in May – will also consider the level of encouragement victims are given to raise concerns, the standard of domestic abuse information shared with courts, as well as looking to better understand the different types of coercive control.

It will also look at how these courts handle a range of offences including rape, child abuse, assault, sexual assault, murder and other violent crimes.

The focus on family courts follows a number of government changes to tackle domestic abuse, including widening the evidence requirements to allow victims access to legal aid.

In addition, £900k has been allocated to fund organisations who provide emotional and practical support to domestic abuse victims before, during and after hearings in the family court. Earlier this week the Government introduced its Domestic Abuse Bill, which outlined a raft of measures to further protect victims, including:

• introducing the first ever statutory government definition of domestic abuse, which will include economic abuse
• establishing a Domestic Abuse Commissioner to champion victims and survivors
• introducing new Domestic Abuse Protection Notices and Domestic Abuse Protection Orders to further protect victims and place restrictions on the actions of offenders
• providing automatic eligibility for special measures to support more victims to give evidence in the criminal courts

The call for evidence will close on 26 August.

Notes to editors

• The call for evidence includes an option to submit via email or post. It will be open for 6 weeks before closing on 26 August.

• Specifically, the call for evidence will focus on private family law proceedings and will ask:

• how Practice Direction 12J is being applied – this relates to child arrangement cases where domestic abuse is a factor. This includes its interaction with the presumption of parental involvement in the Children Act 1989
• how ‘barring orders’ are being used – these prevent further applications being made without leave of the court which could be used to re-traumatise those who’ve faced abuse
• how FPR Part 3A and Practice Direction 3AA are being applied – this relates to special measures

• what is the impact on the child and parent victim where child contact is sought by someone alleged to have, or who has, committed domestic abuse or other relevant offences

• The panel members represent key organisations from across family justice including the Judiciary, academia, social care, policy officials and third sector organisations which represent and advocate for victims of domestic abuse.
• The Children Act 1989 states that the welfare of the child must be the court’s paramount consideration when making any decision about their upbringing, including with whom the child is to live or spend time, and there is no automatic right to parental involvement.
• In circumstances where there is evidence of domestic abuse, the courts are bound by law to consider potential harm to the child and parent.
• The court also has a duty to consider a range of factors, such as the wishes and feelings of the child (including instances where a child wishes to see a parent) and any evidence of risk of harm to the child and to the other parent, and has a wide discretion to conclude what is in the best interests of the child.
• Practice Direction 12J sets out what the court is required to do in any case where domestic abuse is alleged or admitted, and applies to any application relating to children where there are allegations that a party or child has experienced domestic abuse.
• Practice Direction 12J was revised in October 2017 to place greater emphasis on both the indirect harm that domestic abuse can cause to a child and parent, and the impact of non-physical forms of abusive behaviour. The Children Act also makes clear that the presumption of parental involvement will not apply where there is evidence that the involvement of that parent in the child’s life would put the child at risk of suffering harm.
• Section 91 (14) of the Children Act 1989 empowers the court, when disposing of an application under the Act, to make an order that prevents future applications without leave of the court. This review will explore how the court handles multiple and repeat applications and whether this is used to coerce and frustrate victims.