Lord Berkeley (Lab)

My Lords, I join my noble friend in congratulating the Government on this pavement parking issue. I will speak in a bit more detail to Amendment 100 and focus on insurance, which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has been speaking about. She was talking about things that she does not remember in the Highway Code. I suppose that I do not remember things in the Highway Code that were published 50 years ago, when I had a driving licence. The issue is: what are we trying to achieve? Surely the most important thing is safety on the roads. That safety covers not just fast cars, large trucks, fire engines and ambulances but ordinary people trying to get around, often on equipment which has wheels. Are we looking at a series of amendments in this group which say that anything with wheels is, by definition, bad? I hope that this is not the case, because wheels are an essential part of mobility. Occasionally, the use of this equipment needs to be separated. We spend a lot of time talking about scooters, freight bikes and other related things in between, some of which need insurance and some of which probably do not. You could widen this to a situation where if you are a pedestrian in London and cause an accident which is demonstrated to be your fault, you get the blame. Should you therefore, as a pedestrian, have insurance? It is a very wide subject and I am not sure that it is covered in this amendment. As it stands, I cannot see why we should have special regulations “to prohibit the provider of micromobility vehicles from providing a pedal cycle or electrically assisted pedal cycle to a person who does not have insurance”. Surely it is for the user to decide whether they should have insurance and what the insurance is for. The alternative is to lock it. I cannot support Amendment 100 and hope that my noble friend will agree.