>>So Nick - you think it's a low risk. I guess there are a lot of us here that think why risk it at all? Can you describe how you look at a situation and how you go about deciding that the risk of death or abduction is worth taking? When do you decide that it's just not worth it? And may I ask if you have kids of your own? Are you a parent?

I am a parent with two sons 18 and 22.

Let me be clear - I am not advocating that children should be left in cars and especially in temperatures that are considerably hotter than are normal in the UK. I am merely pointing out that - relatively - the risk of death is small compared with many other risks that a child will come across. Most of the reports that are on the web that I have read refer to children being left for times between 50 minutes and many hours and that is grossly irreponsible, perhaps even criminally so. The risk associated with leaving a child in a car in normal temperatures for a few minutes are low. It would be great if they were zero but they are still low compared with car accidents, pedestrian accidents, cot death, communicable diseases etc I would guess that the risk of taking the child out of the car and crossing a road to get to a shop is equally dangerous given the number of car accidents there are but I would not
imagine people would see that as an avoidable risk.

The risk of abduction is also remarkably low.

Perhaps my attitude towards relative risk is coloured by two incidents - my wife's niece was killed crossing a road outside school when she was 12 and I was attacked and assaulted by a stranger at gunpoint at a similar age. Both of these are things that happen rarely and probably both could have been avoided but you still need to get on and live a life. There are many more times that something could have happened in life but didn't.