My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum, as per my registered interests. Of course we have lawless roads, which has been a concern of mine for two and a half decades or so. Some of that is cyclists, and I would not for a moment defend cyclists who break the law; in fact, I shout at cyclists whom I see breaking the law, and I hope that every noble Lord here does the same. Some of the crime is from cyclists, but the majority of the problem is car drivers.
When I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority from 2000 to 2012—before Boris Johnson scrapped it—I kept asking how our roads had got so lawless and why it had not been a priority for the senior officers running the organisation. As the Mayor of London’s
road safety ambassador, I spent a lot of my time resisting proposed cuts to the traffic police and pressing for them to get more resources.
It is painfully obvious that many drivers ignore the rules, and the people who pay the price for that are often children, older people, pedestrians and cyclists. As has been said already, in 2017 there were 28,010 recorded hit and runs. That is around 77 hit and runs a day and, of those, more than two people a day were killed or left with a life-changing injury. This is not acceptable. It is a national scandal, and the way that the last Government dealt with it was to stop publishing the figures. I really hope that the new Government will end the cover-up and recognise the scale of the problem.
We have a national registration scheme for cars, but large numbers of car drivers just ignore their responsibility and the rules. Many go further and actively destroy cameras that enforce speed or air pollution rules. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said that the risk of being caught is the best way to stop this sort of lawlessness. When I was an assembly member, I used to cycle a lot and I was very careful not to get caught, because I could not have borne the publicity; I was very law-abiding. I see time and again that the best way of dealing with lawless drivers and lawless cyclists is to stop our overreliance on electronic enforcement and registration plates. We need more police out on the roads stopping people breaking the rules of the road. Let us remember that traffic police have always had a much higher arrest rate—seven times higher—than those on the beat.
For those suggesting a registration scheme for cyclists, I say that experience has shown that it would soon become impossible to enforce and the main impact would be to put another big barrier in the way of people who want a cheap, convenient, environmentally friendly and healthy way of getting around.
I very much enjoyed the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young. It is always a pleasure to agree with a Conservative Member of your Lordships’ House—and so rare. If we want a culture of safe and law-abiding cyclists, making cycling easy, safe and segregated from cars is the way to do it. We need to get more women and children on bikes in cities. That might start to embarrass any Lycra-clad men into slowing down and perhaps obeying the rules of the road.
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