We’ve been here before: what seatbelts tell us about duty of care in higher education

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Robert Abrahart, Lead Camapigner at ForThe100.

There was a time – as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s – when seatbelt laws were among the most contested public safety measures Parliament had considered. The opposition was not marginal or ill-informed; it was a principled, vocal defence of personal autonomy. Critics argued that compulsory seatbelts would infantilise adults, erode individual responsibility, and mark an unacceptable expansion of state power into private decision-making. They warned that safety would become a matter of compliance rather than judgment. Some even claimed seatbelts would actively increase the risk of death by trapping passengers in burning or submerged vehicles.

These were not trivial objections. They were arguments about life, death, and unintended harm, made sincerely and taken seriously at the time. Yet, what ultimately changed matters was not public persuasion but legal expectation. Parliament did more than express a preference for safety; it made safety the default condition rather than a matter of individual discretion. The law did not eliminate judgment; it clarified where responsibility lay and what reasonable behaviour required. Today, compulsory seatbelts are a normal condition of everyday life, barely noticed as a restriction.

The significance of this history lies in the pattern it reveals: where serious harm persists and safety depends on optional guidance rather than enforceable duty, law is the mechanism that resets expectations and enables culture to change in practice rather than aspiration. Higher education now occupies the same space seatbelts once did: persistent harm, diffuse responsibility, and reliance on voluntary frameworks that have failed to deliver structural change. This matters in 2026 as Parliament once again prepares to debate whether higher education providers should owe a statutory duty of care toward their students.

Law as the driver of culture change

In student safety debates, we are repeatedly told that universities need ‘culture change’, not law. A statutory duty, opponents argue, would be heavy-handed or liable to produce unintended consequences. But this misunderstands how culture change actually happens in complex institutions. Seatbelts did not become routine through voluntary pledges or best-practice frameworks. They became routine because the law reset the baseline of what responsible behaviour looked like.

The same dynamic applies to health and safety law, safeguarding duties, and duties of candour. These laws do not micromanage behaviour; they set a ‘floor’ of responsibility below which organisations should not fall. In higher education, the proliferation of policies and reporting requirements has equipped institutions to act, but it has not resolved the fundamental question of who is responsible when foreseeable harm occurs. A statutory duty of care would not replace existing regulation; it would give it legal clarity and purpose. It would not require universities to prevent all harm, but to act reasonably and proportionately where serious risk is foreseeable.

The persistent evidence of systemic failure

Student suicide is the clearest and most consistently documented indicator of what happens when responsibility for foreseeable risk remains unclear. According to the Office for National Statistics, approximately 160 students die by suicide each year in England and Wales – a figure that has remained broadly stable despite sustained policy attention, sector-led initiatives, and widespread recognition of a growing student mental health crisis. This sits alongside rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, intensified by academic pressure, social isolation, and post-pandemic stress, particularly among first-year and international students.

More detailed evidence paints a picture of persistent systemic failure. In a recent review – the largest of its kind to date – 73 higher education providers in England disclosed 107 suspected suicide deaths and 62 incidents of non-fatal self-harm during the 2023 / 2024 academic year.

Coroners’ reports and death reviews provide further insight into why these tragedies persist. Coroners have repeatedly highlighted:

• Delays or inadequacies in referrals: Academic and support staff failed to act on red flags, leading to delays in internal referrals to wellbeing teams. Where external clinical help was sought, students expressing suicidal ideation or serious distress were often not seen in time or were discharged back to the university without adequate follow-up or safety planning.
• Systemic shortcomings: Criticisms include poor communication when students disengage, fragmented responsibilities between academic and wellbeing services, and inconsistent data recording.
• Failed interventions: In multiple cases, coroners found that more proactive care might have prevented the death.

These data show that despite frameworks and sector-led initiatives, the same issues recur year after year because discretionary approaches have not yielded structural change.

Deconstructing the ‘unintended consequences’ argument

Concerns about unintended consequences – that institutions would act more defensively or that relationships of trust would be undermined – are often raised in good faith. Critics argue that a statutory duty would encourage universities to prioritise legal protection over student welfare, leading staff to become reluctant to engage beyond basic signposting for fear of legal repercussions.

The difficulty with this argument is that these are not speculative risks of reform; they are features of the current, voluntary system. In the absence of a clear statutory duty, universities already operate through dense layers of policy designed first to demonstrate legal compliance and only secondarily to secure student welfare.

Moreover, the current environment already produces the very outcomes critics fear:

• Defensive Reliance on Process: Decision-making is routinely mediated through risk assessments and documentation intended to manage liability rather than responsibility.
• Fragmentation of Responsibility: Currently, responsibility is siloed: the NHS manages clinical risk while the university manages administrative policy. Because no overarching authority exists to oversee how these organisations interact, their actions can sometimes become misaligned. One may be attempting to treat the student while the other inadvertently exacerbates the crisis through rigid academic processes. This creates a dangerous vacuum: the harm is foreseeable, but because it spans both systems, no one is legally responsible for the student’s total safety.
• Procedural Rigidity: For students, this can manifest as delay where urgency is required, or in the prioritisation of inflexible administrative processes where humane judgment would make the difference.
• Retrospective Responses: Institutional responses are often focused on post-hoc explanation and reputational management rather than timely intervention.

Likewise, many specific examples cited – such as the inappropriate use of fitness-to-study processes as risk-management tools or intrusive searches of student accommodation – are already visible in practice. These are not behaviours introduced by legal duty; they are the result of uncertainty about responsibility, managed through internal policy rather than external accountability. This is not the side-effect of law; it is the product of its absence.

The high cost of inaction

Doing nothing is not a neutral choice. It is an active choice to preserve existing structures and behaviours known to produce harm. The underlying assumption has been that institutions are best protected by minimising formal duties. In practice, this has not removed risk; it has merely displaced responsibility.

Inaction does not avoid unintended consequences; it locks them in. If the absence of a statutory duty has not prevented fragmentation of responsibility or reliance on policy and procedure in place of action, continuing without one will not resolve these systemic deficiencies. With 160 deaths a year and no sustained improvement, the system is not self-correcting.

When critics warn that a statutory duty might make problems worse, they rarely explain how clearer legal responsibility would increase harm. What they are really proposing is that we accept known, ongoing harm because change carries uncertainty. But in public policy, uncertainty must be weighed against the certainty of continued harm. A statutory duty of care would not eliminate tragedy, but it would drive systemic reform by delivering the legal clarity required for both anticipatory action and effective real-time responses.

Design, clarity, and the role of Parliament

A statutory duty of care is not an all-encompassing solution. Its purpose is more modest: to remove ambiguity and set a common baseline of expectation. Properly designed, it would define who owes what to whom, in what circumstances, and with what degree of proportionality. It would make explicit the balance between care and autonomy that is currently left to informal judgment and uneven practice. Clarifying responsibility does not remove autonomy; it protects it by ensuring intervention is justified, proportionate, and accountable.

Many ‘unintended consequences’ are, in reality, design questions. Concerns about over-intervention are not reasons to avoid legislation; they are reasons to draft it carefully. Parliament is exactly the forum where competing interests are weighed and safeguards are built in.

Before seatbelt legislation, road deaths were unacceptably high and resistant to voluntary change. Parliament did not act because things were worsening, but because they were not improving. The lesson is that law often creates the conditions in which culture can change at all. With serious harms in higher education remaining stubbornly persistent, the real risk lies in continuing to tolerate ambiguity, diffuse responsibility, and weakened accountability – and mislabelling that as caution.

On Tuesday, 13 January, MPs will hold a debate on the potential merits of a statutory duty of care for universities.