THE seatbelt legislation which came into effect on September 18 was never going to be easy to implement.

Are we now going to arm our police with tape measures so that they can pull suspects from a car, stand them up the side of the vehicle and then work out how tall they are? This sort of behaviour would be reminiscent of the Taliban, which had squads of beard police roaming the streets, pulling up the slightly shaven and measuring the length of hair protruding from the chin (women, apparently, did not have to comply with this rule). Anyone whose beard was shorter than a clenched fist held under the chin was beaten.

So, if the law is practically unenforceable - only two transgressors have been fined in the North-East - what is the point of it? It could be argued that passing unenforceable laws is a waste of everyone's time, from the politicians who frame them to the policemen who have to try to implement them.

In fact, it is said that an unenforceable law's existence belittles the whole judicial system - if everyone routinely gets away with breaking the law, the law is truly an ass.

We, though, would argue otherwise.

The law clearly needs re-wording, but, despite everything, it has been successful.

At the start of September, it was impossible to buy a child booster seat for love nor money. Parents, threatened by a fine if they didn't strap their children into one, snapped them up in their thousands.

Previously, therefore, there was a generation of children being driven around unsafely. Advice from safety campaigners and government was being ignored.

It needed the threat of a fine to concentrate minds, and now there are many more children being safely ferried about in mum's taxi than there were before the law was introduced.

By any measure, this must be a good thing.