E-scooters: Trials

Question

14:37:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to release the results of the trials of e-scooters in England.

I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I refer noble Lords to the Private Member’s Bill that I have before the House at this time, creating new offences for illegally used e-scooters.

The last evaluation of the e-scooter trials took place in 2021, and the results were published in 2022, but, despite saying that they would, the last Government took no further action. As travel patterns have continued to change, the Government have decided to undertake a second evaluation, due to start this spring. This evaluation will be important to collect up-to-date and robust evidence on safety, mode shift and usage to inform future legislation. It will finish in May 2026.

My Lords, while I am grateful for that Answer, it begs the question: how many evaluations do we need? There are 1.2 million e-scooters currently illegally used in general circulation, and 47 people have been killed since 2019. The status quo cannot continue. E-scooters are mounting pavements at speed, terrorising pedestrians. I urge the noble Lord and the Government to ensure that, if the current ban on illegally operated e-scooters is not going to be observed, they look to introduce a regulatory framework with proper insurance, otherwise it is going to be a complete drain on the resources of the Motor Insurers’ Bureau.

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.

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.

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.

My Lords, given that these rental e-scooter pilots have been running for some five years, since 4 July 2020, what is the Minister’s definition of a trial? Or is this in reality the legalisation of e-scooters by the back door?

It is certainly not legalisation by the back door. As noble Lords will know, there are many of these things on the streets and, sadly, on the pavements of towns and cities, where they should not be, but to frame the appropriate legislation—bearing in mind, as the noble Baroness knows, that there is considerable variation in regulation across other countries—it is right to understand how they are currently used and how best we can regulate them. There is no intention to let this drift, because it is an important matter, and many people, including vulnerable and disabled people, are badly affected by the way that these things are used—and not used, being left on pavements to be tripped over and cause injury.

My Lords, there may be no question of letting it drift, but the Government are letting it drift until May 2026, with the prospect of legislation no doubt in the second half of 2026 or early 2027—who knows, we might be into a general election before we get to anything. This is all a distraction from the real experience of e-scooters, because the trials that will be examined are highly artificial constructs where particular areas and locations are designated for legal use of specific hired scooters, which are usually clunky and highly coloured. Examining the evidence from the trials will tell one almost nothing about the real experience of the use of e-scooters by private individuals. Is it not time that the Government simply got on and legislated for both standards of behaviour and technical standards, such as on batteries?

Gosh—I do not much care to be lectured about drift by somebody who represents a party that did an experiment in 2021, published some results in 2022 and then did nothing. In any event, these things are becoming part of life, whether we like it or not and whether they are brightly coloured or not. The point at issue is to discover how they are used—rental trials in various towns and cities are as good a way of finding out as any—and then to work out what the legislation should say. It is a challenge for anybody, including the noble Lord opposite, to work out what the right standards are from the variety of regimes in the 21 European countries. We shall work that out carefully.

My Lords, earlier this year from the Dispatch Box, the Minister, with his customary good grace, committed to “consultation with all the enforcement authorities” before any changes in the law on e-scooters. He also gave an assurance that any new law “is framed in a way that can be enforced both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere”.—[Official Report, 7/1/25; col. 612.] To that end, has any representative of His Majesty’s Government been in recent contact with the PSNI to inquire about the ongoing experience of e-scooters in Northern Ireland, where they remain banned on public roads?

If the noble Lord is accurate, I must have been correct in what he reports I said, so I am sure that I did. I cannot immediately answer him on whether and to what extent there has been consultation in Northern Ireland, but I take his point. I will take it away and write to him about it.

My Lords, they glide among us on illegal, uninsurable vehicles, delivering our groceries and our takeaways. What are the Government going to do to help the workforce who use these types of vehicles and go after the faceless bosses who employ them, rather than the low-paid workers themselves?

My noble friend makes a really good point. That is one of the subjects which the Employment Rights Bill seeks to remedy. I do not think that we can do it directly through road traffic regulation, although when there are rules for these things, it will be incumbent on the employers of the people who ride them to comply with the rules as well as the people who ride them.

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We will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

My Lords, I am very glad that the Minister raised the issue of poor parking of hire e-scooters and e-bikes. At Aldwych Kingsway, it is now almost impossible to get access to the bus stop, not just if you are in a wheelchair or with a guide dog but for a passenger as well, because there are sometimes as many as 100 of those vehicles parked around them. What powers do the police have to corral—perhaps that is the wrong word—these bikes and scooters and make sure that access to buses continues?

The noble Baroness makes an excellent point. I strongly sympathise, as she knows, with the difficulties that people with any sort of disability have boarding and alighting buses and using pavements. The intention is that local authorities correctly control hire schemes so that the people who run them are obliged to make sure that the bicycles or scooters they hire are properly parked, collected and moved on.