ROAD safety experts from Nottinghamshire County Council will be out and about over the school summer holidays offering free child car seat checks at major supermarkets.

Dates and venues have yet to be confirmed but the events will be taking place between August 14 and August 29 across the county.

The announcement comes on the heels of a national report by Which? claiming that nine out of 10 retailers fail to fit child car seats correctly.

“If child car seats are not properly attached to the car in which they are being used then they can give little or none of the protection they are designed to provide,” said Zena Oliver, the County Council’s principal highways safety officer.

“When we’ve held safety checks before we’ve discovered that as many as 73% of seats were either fitted or adjusted incorrectly.

“In most cases they were either too loosely fixed to the car’s own seat itself or the seatbelt webbing was not threaded correctly through the child seat.

“This can sometimes be a result of the busy lives we all live nowadays, where child seats are moved from car to car, or simply that parents either haven’t been shown how to install the seats correctly, have ignored instructions or have bought second-hand and the original packaging and instructions are missing.

“Our sessions are an ideal opportunity for parents and carers to have their child seats checked and to get any advice or information they may need about general in-car safety.”

Dates and venues for the child seat safety checks will be announced shortly.