Sleeping teenagers

Mojisola

Bloodmoose said:

I am the carer for a pair of teenagers. On long journeys, one of them sleeps sideways on the back seat of the car. She is still wearing her seatbelt, but obviously is not wearing it correctly.
It's clearly not safe but teenagers aren't great at assessing risks or listening to advice. 

Have you tried "If you're in my car, you sit up so that your seatbelt will work as intended if we have an accident.  If you don't keep it that way, I stop the car/turn it round and go home."

Scrapit

Is there some misplaced priorities there OP? Bit worried about my teenager,I know its unsafe but about my insurance....

AdrianC

MinuteNoodles said:
If a driver continues to drive knowing that the passengers aren't correctly restrained then the driver can be prosecuted.

Not once the passengers hit their 14th birthday. Then the passengers are legally responsible for their own belts.

Aretnap

AdrianC said:

MinuteNoodles said:
If a driver continues to drive knowing that the passengers aren't correctly restrained then the driver can be prosecuted.

Not once the passengers hit their 14th birthday. Then the passengers are legally responsible for their own belts.

The specific offence of not wearing a seatbelt would be committed by the passanger, however the driver may still be guilty of an offence under RTA s40A
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/52/section/40A
"If person is guilty of an offence if he uses... a motor vehicle... on a road when.  the number of passengers carried by it, or the manner in which they are carried... is such that the use of the motor vehicle involves a danger of injury to any person."
I suspect it's unlikely in practice that you'd be charged because your teenagers had fallen asleep, however. 

Aretnap

Bloodmoose said:

My question is whether or not this would invalidate my insurance. I've tried looking through my policy documents and they go into great detail about child seats and the like,but don't seem to mention how a seatbelt should be used.

It's fairly simple really - if the policy has a clause that says that seatbelts must be used in a certain way it *might* be invalidated if you weren't using them in that way (there are still several caveats). If it has no such clause, it will be valid. I've never seen a policy with a clause like that.

There's a misconception that there's some secret list of things that invalidate your car insurance, known only to a select group of people (most of whom will tell you noisily about them in the pub or on the internet). In fact your policy has to set out clearly what it does and doesn't cover - and where there's any ambiguity it is interpreted in favour of the consumer. And unusual or important exclusions have to be highlighted particularly strongly to the consumer - not buried on page 94 of the small print. So if you can't find the exclusion, it's because it doesn't exist.