Crime and Policing Bill

Report (3rd Day)

Clause 121: Dangerous, careless or inconsiderate cycling

Amendment 318

318: Clause 121, page 163, line 32, leave out “(6)” and insert “(6A)” Member's explanatory statement This amendment introduces subsection (6A) inserted by another Lord Lucas amendment.

My Lords, before we go through the listed amendments, I would be grateful if I could make a short intervention.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has been called to move his amendment. The debate will proceed from there.

My Lords, in moving Amendment 318 I will speak to the other amendments in my name. Amendment 318 is a revised and strengthened version of a proposal that was kindly spoken to in Committee by my noble friend Lord Blencathra. It has been modified in light of comments made then, particularly from the Government Benches. It bears on disqualifying persons convicted of a serious cycling offence.

I suspect most of us, particularly those of us who spend any time in London, have experienced the enormous discomfort of being ridden past on the pavement at speed by a cyclist who has absolutely no interest in your comfort. If one has spent any time outside this Palace, one will also have noticed that the police have no interest in enforcing the law in these circumstances. It is up to us to do something to tighten the screws on cyclists like this. They make life for pedestrians extremely uncomfortable. The practice of continual and open law- breaking just brings the whole of the law into disrepute. It is really important that we tighten things up.

Amendment 319 would insert a new offence of riding or attempting to ride a cycle while disqualified. Such an offence requires accompanying sanctions. A licensing system seems to me entirely disproportionate; it would be a heavy weight of bureaucracy. I prefer the solution adopted by the Government in their approach to cycling offences in the Bill, which is to leave them to be enforced if circumstances allow—for instance, where somebody has been involved in a serious incident that the police have taken an interest in, or a member of the public makes a complaint that the police choose to follow up. That would sit easily with current policing practices. Continuing enforcement along these lines, though limited, would, if and when a prosecution or conviction was reported in the media, send a warning message to disqualified cyclists generally.

Turning turn to Amendment 321, the thrust of Clause 121 is to bring cycling offences pretty much into line with those applying to motor vehicles, but it leaves out disqualification. This is a missed opportunity to provide a substantial deterrent to offending. Proposed new subsection (9A), to be inserted by Amendment 321, prescribes that the period of obligatory disqualification for the two most serious offences of causing death or serious injury by dangerous cycling will not be less than five and two years, respectively. As for the other two offences of causing death or serious injury by careless or inconsiderate cycling, where the culpability is less, they will be subject to obligatory disqualification for not less than 12 months.

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments I propose. There are three sets affecting two themes. Amendment 343 is about the registration scheme for cyclists, and the two other groups—Amendments 326 to 328, and Amendments 330 to 332—are about creating a system to award points for offences committed by cyclists against their driving licence. They have the same theme, which is trying to get more accountability for cyclists when they hurt people or commit offences.

I do not intend to take as much time as I did in Committee, because I think the argument is fairly straightforward and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has made it. In 2015, 444 pedestrians were injured by cyclists; in 2024, that had increased to 603 and, of that number, those seriously injured had risen from 97 to 181. These numbers are based on police reporting, where the police attended. It is clear that these are minimum numbers. As a correspondent reminded me recently, it is not a legal requirement for the police to record an accident that occurs between a cyclist and a pedestrian, because it does not involve a motor vehicle. The numbers do not include incidents where the police did not attend a collision, where the pedestrian did not need medical treatment or attend their GP or a hospital— I think we have a serious gap in that information as well, because the data is not recorded well or collected at all—or where the police were not told.

As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, set out, and as I think is our common experience, particularly in our large towns and cities such as London, every day we see cyclists ignoring traffic regulation and putting people at risk. I am a cyclist, and I am not against cyclists. This is not about cyclists being a different genre of people who just go out to hurt people. I think it is to do with the fact that we are all guilty of this at times: when we are not challenged, if we think we are going to get away with it, we carry on doing it— I probably ought to speak for myself. I think there is that human behaviour element where, if there is no deterrence by detection, I am afraid that behaviour can deteriorate.

This particularly affects pedestrians with disability or lack of mobility, even when crossing pedestrian crossings. At night, many cyclists are not displaying lights and are wearing dark clothing and riding dark cycles, and pedestrians just cannot see them.

I have re-presented these amendments on Report because the Government do not dispute that there is a problem. Every time we have talked about this, nobody has said that there is not a problem. However, in my view they are not prepared to take any action to improve the situation.

The standard response from the Government—from the Department for Transport or more recently, in this Bill, from the Home Office—is essentially that this is a matter for police enforcement. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, raised that, and I agree. I think the police can do more and could be more organised in doing it. In any case, the Government cannot tell the police what to do: that is operational control. Nobody argues for that, and I am not arguing for it. My challenge is that even if the police had a more organised approach to this problem, I am afraid that they would not deliver a strategic improvement to road safety.

The City of London Police, the smallest force in the country with only about 600 cops, does a very good job. It has a really good sergeant, who has a team of 10 that goes out, sees lots of cyclists and challenges people about bad behaviour. I went out with them one morning. We walked out of the police station, and they were just about to start an operation. Despite the fact that there were 10 of them in full uniform outside a police station, there were cyclists going through the pedestrian crossings and ignoring everything else. They were doing a great job, but it was just an example of how, even if they enforce at the level at which we would all like, I am afraid people will still ignore it. That appears to be the reality.

We know that the improvements in motor vehicle safety have been achieved by vehicle design, use of endorsable points, disqualification from driving for persistent and serious offenders—as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned—and, more importantly, the use of technology to enforce the law when the police are not present. I am afraid the technology works only when there is a registration mark, which is why I argue for a registration mark system for cyclists. I accept that the Government might challenge this, which is why I probably will not push this to a vote: it could be a great bureaucracy. There are about 7 million cyclists and that is a great task—I get that—but my point is that unless we consider that possibility, I do not think some things will improve, because the registration mark not only works for the technology but allows a member of the public who is affected by bad behaviour to report to the police something that has just happened. At the moment, they do not have a cat in hell’s chance of identifying that rider after they have ridden past them on a pavement, hit them or anything else. The only time you really get an investigation is when someone dies or is seriously hurt, and then you have a chance of challenging the cyclist about their behaviour.

Penalty points work only if they can be endorsed on a licence, which cyclists do not have. That is why my amendments argue that the points that cyclists could have been awarded for cycling offences should be endorsed against their driving licence if they have one. At the moment, 74% of adults in the UK have a driving licence—81% of males and 71% of females—so, as the vast majority of us have one, this is a possibility.