Luke Taylor

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) for bringing this important debate to the House. It is worth making it clear that I am a huge fan of e-bikes. I rode my e-cargo bike to the station this morning, and in term time I would have dropped my two boys off at school using the bike. I have covered more than 18,000 km in the last six years. Our discussion today should focus on illegal e-bikes and e-scooters, but we need to be clear that we support the contribution that e-bikes make to active travel, taking cars off our roads, and reducing emissions, congestion and road danger. I differ slightly from my hon. Friend, however, as I believe that e-scooters are far too dangerous to be considered for regulation and legislation. They do not in any way qualify as active travel. They should be banned or removed from our streets entirely. I have spoken repeatedly about the need for tougher regulation of illegally modified e-bikes. These vehicles plague the high street in Sutton, and sadly deter many local residents from visiting the shops that my town centre has to offer. Delivery drivers on e-bikes treat the stretch of Sutton high street like a racetrack. They rampage along pavements at speed, with no consideration for pedestrians around them. The nights are getting darker, but many ride without lights, endangering pedestrians and the riders themselves. My constituents should not have to spend their weekly shop looking over their shoulder, worried they might be mown down by a vehicle that should never have been on the road or the pavement in the first place. The dangers do not end when the bikes stop moving. E-bikes are causing fires across the capital. We saw that recently in Mitcham, where a fire ripped through homes, as the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) mentioned. The increase in illegal e-bike conversions, fires and accidents on our streets is driven by two main causes: the sale of high-powered e-bikes like Sur-Rons, and the multimillion-pound delivery companies that incentivise riders to use faster vehicles but take no responsibility for ensuring that they are legal and being ridden legally. We Liberal Democrats want delivery platforms to be required to verify that bikes being used by riders are road legal. Regular checks should be made to ensure that illegally modified vehicles are not being used to complete food orders for pay. There must be clear consequences for companies that repeatedly fail to act to protect the public. Corporate giants of the gig economy world cannot continue to hide behind the self-employed status of their riders to seek impunity from responsibility. They already have the technology to track their drivers, identify them and verify that they are using the right accounts. They must be required to take reasonable steps to ensure that vehicles being used to make deliveries are legal.