Off-Road Vehicles (Registration) Bill

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I extend my sympathy and that of the whole House to the family of David Gow. I have suffered personally as a result of the actions of quad bikes and motorbikes, although my experience pales into insignificance in comparison with the consequences that the Gow family have suffered.

Before I came into the House, I ran an outdoor leisure company that had 36 locations around the United Kingdom. We were building on a new site in an urban park in the north of England, but during the construction phase it was terrorised—that is the best way to describe it—by teenaged boys on quad bikes and motorbikes. They were 100% boys or young men, riding through the public park and, after the site was opened, frightening paying members of the public who were walking around. It led to concern, fear, including fear of injury, and increased cost. Security concerns at the site meant that 24-hour dog patrols had to be recruited to protect this perfectly legitimate leisure activity. In my newly formed constituency of Broadland and Fakenham, I visited quite recently the premises of Matt Pope Motorcycles—I was actually there to help with an issue related to flooding—which sells off-road motorcycles. During our conversation, the owner talked about the risk of break-ins, and of theft of off-road motorcycles. In part that is because they are not registered and do not tend to have VIN numbers as other vehicles do, making them much more susceptible to theft, even from very legitimate sellers, such as Matt Pope Motorcycles. There is a significant problem here. I am very sympathetic to any legislation that we can collectively bring forward, or any progress towards legislation, to make it easier to discourage this deeply antisocial behaviour.

When we consider legislation, as we all do in this House, there is a very obvious two-stage test that we should apply. First we should ask: is the problem that we seek to solve due to a lack of powers for the enforcement authorities, or a lack of enforcement of powers by the enforcing bodies? If it is the former and not the latter, we move on to the next test, which is whether the legislation will solve the problem without doing more harm than good. We should apply that two-stage, common-sense test to every piece of legislation.

Let me turn to the first question: is the problem here the lack of powers for the police, or lack of enforcement of existing powers? I found two relevant sections in the Road Traffic Act 1988. The first is section 3, under which it is an offence for a person’s driving, including on motorcycles and quad bikes, to cause alarm, distress or annoyance to other pedestrians and road users. That is very straightforward. Section 34 deals specifically with off-road driving.

As an aside, Mr Deputy Speaker, one of the great pleasures of these Friday sittings is that the research we have to do in order to make speeches gives us quite a lot of insight into legislation. I now know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you do not commit an offence if you drive off the road, but only if you do so within 15 yards of the carriageway and for the purpose of parking. It is also interesting that in 1988, the unit of measurement used in legislation was yards, not metres, yet we decimalised in 1971. That was a slight tangent, but it was something that just sprung to mind.

Turning back to my argument, we have the offences for the police to enforce. We see in section 59(3) of the Police Reform Act 2002 what the police can do once that offence has been committed. Section 59(3)(a) is the power to stop those miscreants, and section 59(3)(b) is the power to seize the vehicles, so the police already have the powers to stop and to seize. Section 59(3)(d) is the power to use reasonable force to do so. Section 59(3)(c) is the power to enter domestic premises to enforce those powers. If we take those in combination, it is pretty clear that this is a problem not of police powers, but of enforcement. The question is therefore whether the Bill would help to increase enforcement. There is a very substantial argument that it would, for the reason the hon. Lady gave, which is that many of us who are exposed to this antisocial behaviour would be willing witnesses to the offence, and could take down a registration number and supply it to the police. It is then an issue of the police acting effectively at beat manager level.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Some of what the hon. Gentleman is talking about would apply in England and Wales only; that is one point. My feeling is that there are so many instances of this behaviour that the police would be kept incredibly busy. However, an offence of not displaying a registration, or of not registering one of these vehicle, could be preventive, as he says. The police would have to catch someone not displaying a registration plate only once for the vehicle to be taken off them. That would save the police from having to chase people multiple times for using the vehicles in antisocial ways.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I substantially agree with the hon. Lady. It is worth noting in passing that under the Police Reform Act 2002—I cannot bring the section number to mind—the police are required to give a warning for the first offence. It is only when they are satisfied either that a warning has been given in similar circumstances in the past 12 months, or that a warning has been received and ignored, that they move towards using the powers that I have set out. I agree that a requirement to display registration plates may well act as a disincentive to commission that kind of offence.

That brings us all back to the role of the police and what constitutes effective community policing. Just last week, I spent a morning out on the beat with the police, by car, to look at some of the crime hotspots in Broadland, and I am very pleased to say that there aren’t any. Over the last decade, and particularly during the tenure of the excellent police and crime commissioner Giles Orpen-Smellie, crime has fallen significantly in Broadland. I was looking up the data, and in just the past year, crime overall has fallen by 9.6% in Norfolk, and residential burglary is down by 7.1%, robbery by 9.2%, violence against the person by 12.7%, and stalking and harassment by 27.5%. That just goes to show that an effective police and crime commissioner such as Giles Orpen-Smellie, and a police force that focuses on antisocial behaviour being a gateway crime to other, more serious crime, and that gets involved early on, really does make a difference.

[Anne McLaughlin]

As I should have said in my speech, I understand that a lot of antisocial behaviour comes from having nothing to look forward to and few job prospects. I will not stand here and say, “This is all your fault.” We must get things right for the—primarily—young people who are involved in such antisocial behaviour. There are loads of examples in my constituency of getting it right, such as St Paul’s Youth Forum, which in 10 years has reduced youth offending from 160 cases to zero cases a year. There are many more examples. We have a responsibility to ensure that young people have fulfilment, excitement and satisfaction in life, so that they do not have to use off-road vehicles to get that excitement and satisfaction.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful for that further intervention. Of course, the hon. Lady is right that parenting is a difficult task. I speak as the not-particularly-brilliant parent of three children, although they are getting older now, at 20, 18 and 14—I am very pleased that I got that right at the first time of asking. The challenge for every parent, no matter where they live in the country, is not just to engage their children but to teach them how to make their own entertainment.

[Guy Opperman]

On the points made by my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin), the way ahead is surely the example cited in the debate of my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) on 24 February by the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), who set out in very eloquent terms how in North Antrim there was a pilot project for kids who had the problems identified by the hon. Lady and a passion for off-road vehicles —a passion identified by all of us in various different examples. There were locations where those individuals could do that pastime in a safe way, and there was education on appropriate usage. That is surely the way ahead for tackling antisocial behaviour in tricky circumstances.

[Jerome Mayhew]

The Minister is absolutely right, of course. I want to move on, but I will make one other point. Yes, it can be very boring growing up where activities are not laid on, but the vast majority of teenage people do not commit offences. They do not choose to create antisocial behaviour. We can understand why that may happen, but those reasons are not an excuse for that kind of behaviour.

I will draw my remarks to a close. I am very supportive of the Bill. I hear what the Minister says—that perhaps a taskforce is the right way to develop these ideas further, and that the Bill may not be quite in the form that is most appropriate for legislation—but I am very supportive of the views behind it. I will just make a technical point. If the Bill proceeds further, it should be noted that there may be a drafting error in clause 1(3). It refers to section 21A(3)(e) of the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994. I think it may need to refer to section 21A(3)(a), but I could be wrong.