E-scooters: Deaths and Serious Injuries

Judith Cummins Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on securing today’s important debate, and I commend his lifelong campaigning in this place on road safety. If this is his last speech, it is a worthwhile one, and I place on the record my thanks to him for all his work.

Since being elected as an MP, I have been dedicated to making our roads safer in Bradford South and across the UK. That has led me to lead and support a number of campaigns that tackle dangerous driving and the use of illegal vehicles on our roads. I gave my name to the Road Safety (Cycle Helmets) Bill tabled by the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and put forward my Bill to regulate the use of off-road vehicles and quad bikes on public highways. My Quad Bikes Bill called for the registration of off-road vehicles, empowering police to remove nuisance off-road quads from our streets permanently.

I also supported amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill just last week that made important changes to the Road Traffic Act 1988. In particular, the amendments will create a specific offence of causing death or serious injury by dangerous, careful or inconsiderate cycling. The Act defines a cycle as including the pedal cycle, an electrically assisted pedal cycle and, importantly, an electric scooter. The amendments will be an important step forward in protecting people from e-scooter misuse and delivering justice, to a degree, for victims.

I would like to highlight your excellent work, Mr Dowd. You have worked tirelessly to make our roads safer and deliver justice for victims. The recent amendments to the Criminal Justice Bill in your name, to which I have given my wholehearted support, would ensure that perpetrators can be held properly accountable under the law following a road collision. Mr Dowd, your dedication and commitment to this issue is something that I and all Members across the House look upon with great support, respect and admiration.

E-scooters remain dangerously unregulated. As things stand, those available for public hire are available under the Electric Scooter Trials and Traffic Signs (Coronavirus) Regulations and General Directions 2020, which established e-scooter trials in major cities in 2020. We were told by the Transport Secretary in 2022 that the Government planned to introduce legislation to allow the regulation of e-scooters in the last parliamentary Session. That clearly has not happened. The Department for Transport—surprise, surprise—has now announced that it will extend city centre trials of e-scooters until May 2026. That dither and delay is simply not acceptable. The Government cannot stand by while our streets become more and more dangerous. In 2022, there were nearly 1,500 casualties in collisions involving e-scooters, including, tragically, 12 deaths. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield, I am sure that those deaths and casualties are under-reported.

Some private e-scooters are known to reach speeds of up to 48 mph, although I have just googled and found one available to buy on the internet that can reach a speed of, shockingly, 80 mph. That poses a great danger to other road users and to pedestrians. More than half of all casualties are outside the legal trial areas, so the legislation is clearly inadequate. Use of private e-scooters is illegal on public highways, but an estimated 750,000 privately owned e-scooters are in use in the UK and are often used on public highways and our paths. Private e-scooters are unregulated, so they do not pass tests, standards setting or type approval. The law must therefore urgently be updated to reflect the reality of our society. We need enforceable e-scooter regulations and not an indefinite trial period.

Previously, I have raised in this place the case of one of my constituents who was taken to the accident and emergency hospital in Bradford with a fractured knee after being mowed down at high speed on a path by a reckless e-scooter driver. That is but one example of a much wider problem. The Government must get to grips with the reality of the situation and act.

In 2022, a Transport Minister said:

“Safety is…at the heart of our plans to create a regulatory framework for…e-scooters.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 May 2022; Vol. 822, c. 30.]

Having all but abandoned those plans for a new regulatory framework, the Government are failing in their duty to protect all road users and pedestrians who remain at risk. Those vehicles are not harmless toys; they are capable of reaching high speeds and can be dangerous when not properly driven and not properly regulated. Now is the time for new measures to be introduced to protect road users from dangerous and antisocial use of e-scooters on our streets and paths.