E-scooters: Deaths and Serious Injuries

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman)—I am not sure whether it is hon. or right hon., but after 45 years it probably should be right hon. I think in the next few minutes we will all know what will happen to that 45 years, although perhaps I will create some headlines rather than the Prime Minister. If that is to be the case, however, I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and thank him for his 45 years of service in the House and to the people of Huddersfield. This is an apt issue for him to go out on, given his work on similar issues for decades, as he outlined in his speech. He mentioned the serious car accident that he and his family were in, which led to his work. I thank him for his work on those issues.

The main point, and certainly the first point, that the hon. Gentleman made was that the sector is totally unregulated. That is the main point in the contributions made thus far. There are various numbers about, but I think we can probably come to a consensus on 750,000 to 1 million—perhaps just over 1 million—e-scooters in use in the UK. I thought he used a good device when he brought up the Toys “R” Us advert—obviously other retailers are available, and we can get these things from any number of them—to show how freely available e-scooters are, usually without any real warning about their potential illegality, any mention of training, and so on.

This is a real issue, and the Government have to take the blame, because ultimately they promised regulation. In fact, the hon. Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) quoted a Transport Minister when she said that safety was “at the heart of” their plans to regulate e-scooters. Since then, clearly nothing has happened. Another good point—I do not know how widespread this is, but I have certainly heard about it—was about those who tamper with their e-scooters to go faster. Some of them can already go pretty fast—too fast, one could say.

The hon. Member for Bradford South rightly referred to the amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill to ensure that the perpetrators of dangerous riding resulting in deaths and so on would be punished fully. She also read through some of the stats used by the hon. Member for Huddersfield, but said that it is possible that those stats under-report casualties and deaths. That is something we have to bear in mind as we look at the issue.

At the end of the day, the Government have failed to regulate e-scooters for a couple of years now. I am the SNP transport spokesperson and sit on the Transport Committee, and we have looked at the issue. We have been promised regulation, and it has never happened. It looks like it will certainly not happen this side of an election—certainly if an election is being called as I speak. In the Queen’s Speech in 2022, the Government said that they would create a new category of low-speed, zero emission vehicle in the transport Bill. The trouble is that we never got a transport Bill, which would have allowed for the regulation of e-scooters.

In July of the following year, the Government said that they intended to introduce legislation on micromobility vehicles, which would encompass e-scooters, when parliamentary time allowed. Those of us who have been around Parliament in the last few months—not even just the last few weeks—have seen that it has been rather a zombie Parliament, with a huge amount of time available for the Government to bring forward legislation. With the time available to us, we might even have been able to bring forward rail reform, but nothing was brought forward.

Clearly the Government have now left it too late. We do not know whether e-scooter regulation will be an immediate priority for an incoming Government of whatever hue—however likely the polls seem to be one way—but it has to come as quickly as possible. The point remains: there are just over 1 million e-scooters in use, so we need that regulation and we need it now.

This is not just about reflecting the reality of the numbers; it is about trying to ensure that the use of e-scooters is safe for riders, pedestrians and other road users. DFT numbers show that more than half of e-scooter collision casualties involve illegally ridden e-scooters—those outwith the pilot areas. A French study found that the fatality rate in collisions involving e-scooters was 9.2%, compared with 10% for bicycles, which is quite high—an amendment was tabled on that as well. The rate for motorcycles was 5.2%. The fact that e-scooters have a fatality rate nearly double that of motorcycles is telling.

A study by Queen Margaret University found that e-scooter riders were 13% more likely than cyclists to require admission to a critical care unit following an accident, which would stand to reason given the previous statistic, and that almost twice the number of e-scooter riders admitted had severe head injuries—probably because the vast majority do not wear helmets. Almost all deaths involving an e-scooter are those of the riders. Of the 12 killed in collisions involving e-scooters in 2022, 11 were the riders. Of the seven killed last year, all seven were the riders. According to UK Government figures, in the year ending June last year, there were 1,269 collisions, compared with 1,462 the year prior.

In terms of the Scottish situation, legalising e-scooters is clearly not a priority at this point. We need regulation before we can legalise—that seems obvious—but legislation is not an immediate priority. When the initial trial scheme was announced, Transport Scotland said that it had been given no prior notice, and Scottish legislation enabling such a trial in Scotland had not been factored in, so there are currently no trials in Scotland and all e-scooter use in public space in Scotland is illegal. There were no recorded e-scooter deaths in Scotland in the three years to May 2023, and there were nine serious casualties. E-scooters on trains have also been banned by ScotRail and other train operators, following several battery fires in London.

The Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Fiona Hyslop, who gave evidence on rail to the Transport Committee this morning, has said that “there’s an inevitability” that electric scooters will be legalised in Scotland, but that public opinion is “quite polarised” and that there are “genuine safety issues”, as I think everyone who has spoken today well knows. She continued:

“Electric scooters are a challenge for everybody. I’ve seen the statistics on injuries for electric scooter users and that's problematic…When you’re looking at a shared space”—

as we are in Scotland, with the massively increased spending on active travel areas north of the border compared with down here—

“we want to encourage people to do more walking and cycling, and where that’s compromised by an electric scooter—that’s a danger. It’s not a current priority for us; and anything we did would be in consideration to the timing of what we do with more bus lanes and active travel lanes. They would all have to be managed at the same time to have sensible use of electric scooters.”

That was the Cabinet Secretary for Transport in Scotland.

The bottom line, and consensus in this room today, is that the Government—whether this one or the incoming one, following the election being called as we speak—have to get on with this and make it a priority. Clearly, it has been nowhere near high enough on the Government’s priority list up to this point, given that they missed two deadlines that they set themselves. We need that regulation, and we need it now.