Off-road Biking

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham. I congratulate the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on securing the debate, and all those who have contributed. The hon. Member was right to make a robust case in favour of the reforms he mentioned. This is a real and significant issue. All our constituencies are of a slightly different nature, as we have heard, but the issue is having an impact in all our communities in some way, and in many of our communities in a really serious way. The recklessness that the hon. Member talked about is having everyday consequences, which I will unpack in a little bit.

I was particularly struck by the point made by the hon. Member for Darlington about the merry-go-round of auctioned-off products then being re-entered and chased again. We have clearly not reached where we need to be in deciding what the final sanction ought to be for those who misuse this technology in the ways that they do. For me, the final destination is crushing: that is the ultimate sanction, which should provide some awareness of the consequences of misusing this technology.

This issue will be hugely important over the next few years. If, even as recently as the last general election, when we were returned to this place, we had said that by the end of the Parliament we would be talking about what are now seeing—millions of illegal journeys on our roads across the whole year, and that is before we get to what the hon. Gentleman says has happened off-road—I think we would have been surprised, but that is essentially what we have now. We have new technologies that mean that people are using roads and riding off-road in ways that we were not expecting, and in ways that they are not personally covered for and that those who fall victim to them might not be either.

In my community, I think in particular of a woman from just outside my constituency, Linda Davis, who was 71 years old when she was killed by a 14-year-old riding a privately owned e-scooter on the pavements. That is a shocking story, and it is obviously terrible for her family, but as the hon. Gentleman said, we are seeing those sorts of journeys on pavements throughout the country. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) said, “off road” is perhaps not the most useful distinction, because it literally means anything that is not the road itself, yet we are seeing this across all aspects of our community, whether on the pavements, as in that case, or on the headland, as she mentioned. This place needs to catch up with that, because behaviour change and technology change are currently outpacing us.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made some important points about the legitimate uses for these technologies. Indeed, they are essential in rural communities and for those operating rural businesses, and we should recognise that those people have a long, established record of using the technology properly. He gave the example from his own family of passing it down across generations, and of responsible ownership and usage, and said that actually it can be good sport as well—he talked about an example from outside Newtownards. It should not be beyond us to promote a regime in which that is possible.

As the hon. Gentleman said, this is not just an urban-versus-rural issue. He talked about the damage that can be done to fields, crops or livestock, which would also frustrate those rural business owners who are doing the right thing. As I say, these two things do not have to be in competition; however, he also talked about disrespect, which is what I think sits at the root of this issue. I will come to this when I make some points of my own, but that brings us to what we do about antisocial behaviour in this country—how we measure it and match up against it.

The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) talked about how we could turn this into something positive and use it as a diversionary activity. I have to say that speeding around on a motorbike is not for me, but for millions of people it is, as he says, and we know that it can be attractive for young people. We can make that work for us. I think of the wonderful Crisp Vocational Provision in my constituency, which offers alternative provision to young people for whom mainstream education is not working by using this sort of industry, and particularly motor cars, as a way to connect with them, develop their interests and channel that energy into a positive place. We can do that too, so there could already be some positives from this debate.

Just to make a few points of my own, people who are going about their business, whatever it may be, should not have to contend with people riding off-road bikes, often without helmets and with face coverings, as we have heard, or perhaps without tax and insurance, churning up public and private land and creating other sorts of damage. We know that dangerous riding can put road users and pedestrians at risk of injury if they lose control of their vehicles, which, when we think of how they are sometimes ridden—wheelies down the middle of the road—is not unforeseeable.

Again, I think of an example from my own community —which happily we have been able to resolve to a significant degree—where residents of a care home for older people said that they did not want to leave and go into town, which was just down the road. Because the road has humps, bikes would come down the pavement instead, so as not to be restricted by the humps, and in many cases they had physically knocked people over. That was having a real quality-of-life impact on those residents, and of course the same thing can play out in a countryside setting or when people are walking their dogs.

I think this myself when I am walking the dog: when he is off the lead running around and I hear that buzz, which can be hard to place, it is a moment of panic. I would like to say that I have full control of the dog and he always listens to me, but he is still a dog, and we know that the riders often do not have full control, or may not see the dog. That is a moment of real risk when I think the dog is going to get hit, so I instantly charge around, get the dog on the lead and leave, and I see various other people do that, with parents and children scattering as well. There are real consequences to this behaviour, and it is really sad.

I am not going to do too much political analysis, but I know the Minister will; we have to do a little bit each. The sense of powerlessness in communities—that these things just happen to them now and that is the reality in their towns—is a sad thing. This is an issue of antisocial behaviour, but we are still learning from the impact and experience of having 10,000 fewer police officers on the beat. They are being added back, but we have seen 20,000 overall losses, which means there are now 10,000 fewer police officers and police community support officers on the frontline.

Police officers have a huge impact on creating a deterrent but—I know the Government are moving on this, and I am sure the Minister will say something about this—our police are not crime counters. Our police should be problem solvers, and this is one of those local problems that needs to be solved. Some of the solutions may involve the physical environment and how we can configure it to make sure that people are not recklessly travelling around, but other solutions will be more positive. As the hon. Members for North Antrim and for Strangford said, those solutions should involve channelling that energy elsewhere—that is what we want to see from proper neighbourhood and community policing.

At the moment we have a situation in which 50% of the population say that they no longer see police on their streets, and we know that 90% of crimes currently go unsolved. Our police are making the best of what is available to them, but they are stretched too thinly. We need the restoration of problem solving and hotspot policing so that communities are not defenceless and powerless, and so that they can start to take that power back.

I wonder whether the Minister will make some interesting points, because we have had the conversation about registration. The case for registration is strong, but my anxiety with it is that I fear it might fall on those who do the right thing, and that those who choose not to follow law—as they are not doing in this case—will try to work round it. That loop could be closed with detection. The Minister and I had significant conversations about that during the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill—indeed, with you in the Chair, Mrs Latham.

On the use of technology, this problem is fundamentally a new and novel challenge driven by technology, and the solutions may well be there too. I know that the Minister has a short, medium and very long version of his facial recognition speech, and I am not trying to bait that longer version out of him again. Facial recognition software would not always be useful because of mask wearing, but it could be useful in many cases. Has he considered it with regard to off-road biking?

I want to take this opportunity to talk about what I think is a limiting factor in how we can tackle this problem: our data collection on antisocial behaviour. There is significant variety across the country in how antisocial behaviour is reported and dealt with, so it would be very difficult to compare even Derbyshire with Nottinghamshire—never mind the rest of our communities—when considering prioritisation. What are the Minister’s thoughts on better data collection in respect of off-road biking? We all clearly face the same problem, but I do not think we are able to understand it, in either an aggregate or comparative sense. Getting a grip of it and adequate resourcing are likely to be challenges as well, as will be building public confidence. I hope we will come back to that in due course.

I shall finish by saying that we are legislators, so there is a temptation to fall on legislation as a solution to all our problems, but I am not sure that that would work in this case. This is a behaviour problem and a respect problem. The issue is the fact that we have not competed on our streets on the side of the vast majority who do the right thing. Better and more active community policing that solves problems and is based around hotspots is a better model than the one we have had over the past 14 years. I suspect we might hear something similar from the Minister—I hope so—but there remains a resourcing issue, because we are short by 10,000 important pairs of boots. I hope we hear more from the Minister on the Government’s commitment in that respect.

This is an issue that is not going away. We will keep coming back to it because every day as we open social media or our emails, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool did, there will be more evidence of this happening, time and again. People are rightly looking to us for action, and we need to ensure that we meet that expectation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I am glad that my hon. Friend welcomes hotspot policing, which will provide an opportunity for officers patrolling on foot to report to their colleagues if they see off-road bikes being used.

Let me turn to the question of catching off-road bikers behaving antisocially, which has been raised by a number of Members. First, as I said, hotspot patrolling will help to identify those people so that help can be called in. Secondly, my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington made a point about 101 response times, which vary greatly by police force. Some are very good, and some are frankly terrible. From March this year—next month—we will be publishing tables of 101 response times, as we do already for 999 response times, to shine a light on which forces are doing well and which are not. I hope that that will include not just the answer time but the abandon rate—what percentage of incoming calls get abandoned. I hope that that will shine a light on the 101 issue and provide an opportunity for those forces that are doing badly to improve their performance dramatically.

We then come to the question of how we catch people after the incident has been reported or noticed. I know there are different policies in different police forces around pursuit and what is sometimes called tactical contact. That is an operational matter for police chiefs, but I would urge chief constables, within the law and the realms of a proper approach to safety, to pursue people on ATVs and off-road bikes. If we do not pursue them, the problem just escalates.

I am a London MP, and we do not really have this problem so much here, but we did have a slightly different version of it a few years ago. People were using mopeds to commit crimes such as stealing mobile phones and expensive handbags or stealing from a shop. They would flee on a moped because Metropolitan police policy at the time—this was about four or five years ago—was not to pursue if the person on the moped was not wearing a helmet. Word soon got around that this was the case, and so-called moped-enabled crime went through the roof because criminals knew that if they were on a moped with no helmet, they would not get chased—they would just get away.

I remember having meetings with the then commissioner of the Met and other London MPs about this, urging the then commissioner to change the policy and consider pursuing and on occasion even using tactical contact, which means physical contact to stop the person. Eventually, the problem got so bad that they did adopt a pursue policy and a carefully calibrated tactical contact policy, and the problem rapidly and dramatically reduced. I would ask all chief constables around the country to keep that example in mind. I understand that they do not want to cause an injury, but equally, if we do nothing and do not pursue, the problem snowballs and gets worse and worse.

There is more we can do on technology, which a number of Members, including the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North, mentioned. Using drones to pursue and track off-road bikes and ATVs is really important. We need to work with the Civil Aviation Authority to ensure that we can fly these drones beyond the line of sight. There are currently some restrictions, so I will meet the Civil Aviation Authority soon to try to get those relaxed for the purpose of law enforcement. I have met a company from America with a very interesting solution that is used by many American police departments, including the New York police department. They have autonomous drones that can fly to a specified location automatically, with a system that avoids crashing into buildings, electricity pylons, people and so on. I think they can even lock on to a target and pursue it automatically. They can provide video feedback to the control room. That technology solution will help us a lot.

[Alex Norris]

I knew the Minister would love that.

[Chris Philp]

It is excellent; the hon. Gentleman should definitely look at it. Once we have got the Civil Aviation Authority regulations modified, this autonomous drone technology has enormous potential.

I am delighted that the shadow Minister mentioned facial recognition. If we can get a picture of the miscreants mounted on the ATV or the off-road bike, we can run that through the retrospective facial recognition database and hopefully get a match. Even if they flee the scene, at least we will know who they are. As I have explained previously, the quality of the AI algorithm is now much better than it was, so the chances of getting a match are really quite high. [Interruption.] By the way, I apologise for my hoarse voice, Mrs Latham. I have a slight cough, as you can probably tell, so I am sorry if I am a little bit croaky.

Some Members have mentioned the problems with balaclavas. We are about to make an amendment on Report to the Criminal Justice Bill to change and expand the existing police power under section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which concerns face coverings, including balaclavas. At the moment, the police can only ask someone to take off a balaclava or a face covering. They can make the request, but they must do that proactively, and then the person can drive off and put it back on. We will amend that so that it will be possible to require face coverings to not be used at all in particular areas, unless for medical or religious purposes. If there was a particular physical area, whether it was the top of a Welsh mountain or anywhere else, where face coverings were a problem, the police could potentially use the updated section 60AA power to say to people that they could not wear balaclavas or face coverings in that area. If a police officer then saw someone driving along, even if they were initially driving lawfully and safely and were registered, licensed and insured, and they had a face covering, perhaps because they intended to behave antisocially later on, the officer would have a basis on which to stop them. I hope that that is a change that colleagues will welcome at Report stage of the Criminal Justice Bill on the Floor of the House in a few weeks’ time.

I think I have covered a number of the points that have arisen during the debate. However, I will add one point around preventing these bikes from being stolen and then misused. I pay great tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) for his private Member’s Bill, which became the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 after receiving Royal Assent last July. Once we fully commence that Act, which we will do shortly, it will require all-terrain vehicles, among other things, to be forensically marked upon sale, with the forensic marking to be recorded in a register. It will also require an immobiliser to be fitted to such vehicles, which will make it much harder—I would not say impossible, but a lot harder—for these ATVs to be stolen and then misused for the purposes of antisocial behaviour. That would address this carousel issue, whereby ATVs or off-road bikes get stolen and then used antisocially, which the hon. Members for Strangford and for North Antrim, and my hon. Friends the Members for Hartlepool and for Darlington, all referred to.

Reference was also made to vehicle recovery charges, which are applied when a vehicle is taken off the road and seized by the police. Following a review, the Government made changes last year to increase those vehicle recovery fees by 28%, which will hopefully assist police forces in recovering the cost of taking such vehicles off the streets.

We now have record police officer numbers across England and Wales—more than we have ever had at any time in history. The numbers of officers allocated to particular local areas are also at a record level. The subset of that, which the shadow Minister likes to quote, is not 10,000 any more; it is a much, much lower figure, so he should update his figures. The number of officers allocated to local policing duties is at a record level, and we expect those officers not to be behind desks, because we are investing in technology to do a lot of the administration; we expect them to be on the street, visibly patrolling and catching criminals.

We consider all forms of crime to be serious, whether it is antisocial behaviour, criminal damage, reckless driving, as we have been discussing, or theft from shops. All of that needs to be taken seriously. The police need to patrol and make arrests for all those criminal offences. We have now given them the resources, combined with the over £900 million a year extra in the next financial year that will go to police and crime commissioners. The police have the resources and the officer numbers, and we are making sure that the law keeps up with these issues, so we expect robust action by the police on behalf of constituents.

I would like to conclude by thanking Members again for participating in the debate. There are some points to look at a little further, and I am very happy to do that. However, I conclude by again commending my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington for bringing this important issue to the attention of the House.