Cycling Safety

Annette Brooke Excerpts

Wednesday 21st November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I will move fairly quickly over some of the issues that have been raised, and I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) on securing the debate. He comprehensively covered the whole range of measures that we need to take to improve cycling safety. With cycling, there must be a package of measures, right through to dealing with those important instances highlighted by the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), when we are all concerned about sentences perhaps not matching the incident in question. I understand the points that she made.

For a long time, I have been involved, in a fairly small way, in promoting cycling. It is so important—environmentally, for transport purposes, for health and leisure, as well as for family activities. In the early 1990s, I was chair of planning and highways at Poole borough council, where we introduced a big network of cycleways. We are moving forward; how exciting it was this year with the Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins, the Olympic success, and then seeing all those youngsters out on their bikes. It was absolutely amazing. I am still staggered walking the streets in London to see the number of people on bikes. It is all absolutely fantastic. I wholeheartedly support The Times campaign, which has driven this issue much further forward than we could have hoped to do by ourselves as parliamentarians.

I want to touch briefly, however, on the issue of cycle helmets. I, too, have worked with the Bicycle Helmet Initiative Trust, and I have also worked with local organisations. I am a patron of Headway Dorset and in Dorset, we have an organisation called Streetwise. It is a safety centre that covers all aspects of safety education, but it and the volunteers who work there are very concerned about cycling safety. A competition has recently been promoted among schools to design cycle helmets to raise awareness of how important it is to wear them. Raising awareness of that issue is crucial, and if we could achieve all that was needed to be achieved by doing that, we would not have to look any further.

I sometimes wonder why we need to go further. I look at BMX cycling on the television, and they are all wearing helmets, as, for the most part, are the children at the local skate parks. However, there does seem to be a common issue that it is not quite cool enough to wear one. It is certainly not good for a young person’s hairstyle at the age of 12 or 13, and it does not help if their friend is not wearing one. I have spoken to so many parents who say, “If only there was a law about this, I would feel happier about my child cycling.” When I raise such issues—I am thinking of this from the children’s standpoint—I have only ever looked at the possibility of a law for 14-year-olds and under. There is an issue of freedom of choice, but it is a vulnerable age group, and are we doing everything that we can?

It is suggested that my comments will result in the next generation of children being obese, but I find that difficult to believe. I would like to join the call made by my hon. Friend, not for the setting up of the law, but for a review of the evidence. I have heard the Australian evidence quoted to me so many times, but we need to know whether we would be deterring children in large numbers from cycling. There must be a lot of evidence out there; we should look at it and at the end of the day, ensure that we put our children first.