Pedal Cycles

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord in his description of all the things that are wrong with cycling and cyclists. He made some good points. But one has to look at it from a view that the number of people killed in accidents, for example, by cyclists is very small compared with the some 2,000 people killed in road accidents. The noble Lord did not mention road accidents between vehicles—be they cars, lorries or whatever—and people. There are not many pedestrians that seem to suffer that.

Most of the issues that need to be looked at come under the category of either safety or enforcement. Many noble Lords have been speaking in this House for a long time about the lack of regulation and enforcement of electric scooters. I hope my noble friend will give us some answers about what has happened to that because, actually, you can have fun on a scooter. You should be on a road, in my view, and not on a pavement. You should also not be cycling on a pavement. There has to be much better education of cyclists and pedestrians, as well as car drivers, before we can get to a situation where everybody can live with other road users without getting completely fed up with people who disobey whatever the law is.

The noble Lord mentioned a load of statistics and I can quote a load more from a report by Sustrans, which is very useful. It gives the view that a lot of younger people are very keen to cycle and would be very keen probably to use scooters, if they were allowed to. It helps with your quality of life. One statistic really hit me:

“Every day, walking, wheeling”—


whatever that is—

“and cycling in … cities take up to 2,300,000 cars off the road”.

There is a health and accident issue there and I think it is something we need to look at in the round.

The proportion of residents who think cycling safely in their local area is good is actually not very high—somewhere between 31% and 44 %. It should be better, and the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, is quite right that proper police enforcement is one thing that really should come in. One final statistic is that cycling actually keeps the cities moving, as 290,000 return cycling trips are made per day:

“If these cars were all in a traffic jam it would tail back 867 miles”.


I am sure noble Lords will like that.

We need to have a debate about this and we need common sense applied to all the issues that the noble Lord has mentioned. But let us not forget quality of life, safety needs and health. We should encourage other people to obey the lights and the rules. There are pedestrians who jaywalk, as well as cyclists. I am not in favour of licensing either walking or cycling. Do we want to have a licence to walk? That would be fun. But we should do more and there is good work done already on cycle training around the country. We need to do more of that and much more education, with some enforcement.

Every debate we have in your Lordships’ House tends to say that there are not enough police to enforce things, but we need this so that people can do what I love doing in Germany when I go there. There are cycle lanes for cycles and scooters. There are footpaths and road lanes and everybody obeys the lights and waits their turn. That should be our objective here.