Lord Blencathra (Con)

I am grateful to noble Lords and the Minister for speaking in this short but important little debate on cycling. I am particularly grateful to my noble friends Lord Goschen and Lord Cameron of Lochiel, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss—and, for the first time, a Lib Dem spokesperson has supported, in concept, one of my cycling amendments. I am either on the right side, maybe, or I am doing something terribly wrong if the Lib Dems are backing me. Over the past few weeks, as we debated various amendments that I put down on bikes of all sorts, and looked at delivery couriers cycling on pavements on these big, fast, heavy, illegal bikes, and the scooters and bikes dumped on the pavements, the general mood was, “Well, your amendments are not perfect, Lord Blencathra, but there’s a problem here and something needs to be done about it”. I hear what the Minister has said, as far as these big, illegal bikes like motorbikes are concerned: they are already illegal and the police have power to do something about them. He suggested that the powers in the devolution Bill will deal with all these cycling problems. Between now and Report, I shall look more carefully at the Bill to see if it does cover all the gaps, but it may be that on Report we will still want to bring back some little amendment on one of these issues—possibly on the precarious criminal liability of delivery couriers, which we discussed last time. A lot of colleagues thought this was terribly wrong and that something needed to be done about it. However, if the Government do something about it, I will not need to, but if they do not do what we think we need to do, I will do something on Report. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.