Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

It is ultimately for the Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for the Sentencing Bill, to look at sentencing guideline issues later. I cannot give assurances on those points today. However, the Sentencing Bill is currently before this House and it is trying to look at those issues as a whole. When it is law, my noble friend Lady Levitt and others will look at guidelines and those potential enforcement issues as a matter of some urgency. The Sentencing Bill proposes, in some way, one of the issues that the noble Lord seeks to achieve. Again, self-evidently, a registration scheme for cycles would make enforcement of offences easier. The absence of a registration scheme does not make enforcement impossible. As the noble Lord will know, the police would be expected to pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry that are open to them by examining other evidence before them at the time of any potential incident. As with the example of licensing for cyclists that I referred to earlier, the House must accept that the likely significant cost and complexity of introducing a registration scheme for cyclists would mean, for example—this was mentioned in one of the contributions today—that all cycle owners, including children and those making new purchases, would have to submit their information to a central database. That central database would be required to keep the information and the ownership up to date, and some form of registration plate would need to be affixed to a cycle. To give the noble Lord one statistic, the Bicycle Association has estimated that nearly 1.5 million new cycles were sold in 2024. That is a big undertaking. I know that the noble Lord understands that, but the enforceability of the existing legislation is the key, and the work that we are doing, which I have opened my remarks with, would be key to that and would counterbalance the potential cost to the public purse of establishing the registration scheme. Amendment 346B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, seeks for e-bikes, which are currently faster and more powerful, to be treated as motorbikes or mopeds for policing purposes. The Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycles Regulations 1983 mean that e-bikes which do not comply with existing regulations will be treated as motor vehicles for policing purposes. The Department for Transport, which has overall responsibility for these areas, has published fact sheets explaining that e-bikes which do not comply with regulations will be treated as motor vehicles. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has tabled Amendments 341, 343 and 344, which seek to reduce the penalty for causing death by dangerous driving from life imprisonment to 14 years’ imprisonment. We have taken the view—I am pleased with the support of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, on this—that the offences in the Bill bring into line this behaviour so that it is subject to maximum penalties equivalent to those already in place for dangerous driving offences, which is life imprisonment.