E-scooters: Trials

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

Your Lordships’ House will know that there have been several Questions on this subject in recent weeks, and certainly in one of them I referred the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, to the regulatory regimes of 21 European countries, which, sadly, have huge variation between them with regard to minimum ages, whether you have to wear a helmet, and so forth. So the Government need up-to-date evidence. Evidence raised in 2021 could have informed legislation in 2023 and 2024, for example, but that did not happen, but now we have to inform ourselves. In the meantime, it is quite clear that hazards are involved as the noble Baroness describes—although, of course, enforcement is a matter for local police chiefs.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that half the trouble with e-scooter and e-bike rentals, and with buying them, is the batteries, which catch fire for no particular reason when they are not linked to the equipment concerned? Is not it more important to have some proper standards for quality and for the way in which batteries are fixed to cycles and scooters so that they do not cause the trouble that they have done; for example, causing TfL to ban non-folding electric bikes from its trains—and why non-folding? I hope that the Government will be able to look into this soon.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. On batteries, last October, the Department for Business and Trade launched the “Buy Safe, Be Safe” campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of buying faulty and unsafe e-bikes, e-scooters and components such as batteries, for the very reason he suggests. Noble Lords who have seen the recent film of the spontaneous e-bike fire at Rayners Lane station will understand perfectly well why Transport for London has taken that view, because anybody standing remotely near that incident would have been severely injured, if not killed, by the spontaneous explosion and subsequent fire.