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David Cairns: On peer pressure and what children will or will not do, does my hon. Friend agree that young people regard going to school as deeply uncool and unpopular and that if it were voluntary, many would not go? However, it is the law, so young people go to school. It is feeble to argue that we should not even try simply because something is considered uncool and there is peer pressure to resist it.
Mr. Pike:
I agree. Many young people would not go to school if it were not the law. Once the law exists,
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people accept it. The breathalyser has been mentioned several times. When we introduced that and other drink laws, they were resisted. Nowadays most people accept them. When I first started to drive and I worked in a bank, we opened on Saturdays. We used to cash up at 12 o'clock and rush over to the pub where the senior staff had to buy all the junior staff as many drinks as possible before closing time, when they drove us home. I now wonder how on earth they drove. That was not challenged in the 1950s but we would regard it with horror nowadays because we understand that someone who has had a drink is a dangerous driver, just as we increasingly accept that speed is a killer and a cause of accidents. The same applies to seat belts. Who nowadays would say that we should abolish the law on seat belts? It is mostly accepted. In a small percentage of incidents perhaps a driver would be better off without a seat belt, but such instances are rare.
Mr. Lazarowicz: Is that not the crux of the difference between seat belts and cycling helmets? Those who oppose the Bill suggest that its consequences of encouraging obesity and the negative public health effects far outweigh the benefits of the measure. Only a tiny number of lives would be saved by not wearing a safety belt. That is the difference between bicycle helmets and seat belts.
Mr. Pike: I have great respect for my hon. Friend but I do not accept his point. I do not believe that any evidence exists to show that fewer people will cycle and that the health effects that he fears will happen. If the Bill saves some young people, however small the number, from death or serious injury, we have a responsibility to support it. That is the overwhelming argument in favour of the measure. Earlier, I referred to the death of my brother in a motor cycle accident. It was argued that fewer people would drive motor bikes if helmets were made compulsory, but that did not happen. Nowadays, more and more people are driving motor bikes. The increase in motor bike use is incredible.
I accept that there is a balance to be struck, but I believe that it is in favour of passing the measure. I have examined the evidence of those who oppose it and those who have written to me to say that it will discourage bike riding. I have received three copies of the postcard published by the campaign to oppose the Bill. The postcard shows a photograph of a father with two kids on bikes, with the caption "Criminals?" splashed across it. People who organise such campaigns should be a little more sensible because the cards do not include space for an address, so I cannot reply to the three people who have written requesting my views. I take it that they are from Burnley, but I do not know.
"Whatever your views on helmet-wearing it is clear that such a law would seriously threaten the efforts of Government and others to maximise the many health and other benefits of cycling. The available evidence shows that imposing helmet-wearing reduces cycle use, whilst the safety case for such a measure is far from clear. At a time of acute concern about Britain's obesity epidemic, the last thing we should be doing is legislating children and young teenagers into car-dependent sedentary lifestyles."
Although one agrees with the objective of encouraging cycling, I do not agree with the conclusion. The campaign has not changed my view.
Mr. Russell Brown: My hon. Friend has been reading part of the postcard, but the card also says of the Bill:
"Its purpose is to ban under-16s from cycling unless they are wearing a helmet."
That is not what this legislation is about; it is about encouraging young people and ensuring that they make safety a priority. It is not about banning under-16s from cycling.
Mr. Pike: My hon. Friend makes a valid point. It is a question of how we read the card. It has been written in a way that is most damaging to the case made by the Bill.
We are debating a Bill that will protect young people, and I would hope that every young person would be encouraged to cycle as well as to participate in other healthy sports. I have no objection to that, and all of us who support the Bill want to see it happen. We do not want to see any reduction in the number of young people cycling. All we want is to see them cycling safely and getting to the end of their journey safely—whether it is for pleasure or for going to school or work—and not suffering serious injury or death that could have been prevented by their wearing a helmet. I shall certainly vote for the Bill, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle on introducing this most sensible measure.
11.1 am
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con): I very much enjoyed the speeches of the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew), my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) and the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike), but I shall be the first Member today to oppose the Bill. I am a father, and all my children have cycled. Like all fathers, I have tried to encourage them to wear helmets. As they get older, it gets increasingly difficult to make them wear helmets, to cycle or to take any exercise at all.
To take up the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire, I do not take an extreme libertarian view on this matter. The House is entitled to legislate on matters of safety, but if it is wise, it will do so only when it is riding with public opinion. It was clearly doing that when it introduced the legislation on front seat belts, and I understand that 90 per cent. of people are sensible enough to know that it is wise to wear them. The battle to persuade people to wear rear seat belts in cars has been far more difficult. I always wear one, of course. I am certainly not going to announce publicly in the House of Commons that I break the law. I am told, however, that only about 50 per cent. of people use rear seat belts—the legislation on which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) in 1991. That shows some of the problems involved in such legislation and it is one of the problems with this Bill. We need to ride with public opinion.
It worries me that there is a huge number of statistics going back and forth in this debate. It is dangerous to produce statistics, because someone can immediately
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intervene and produce a statistic to support the other side of the argument. We know, however, that the use of cycle helmets by children is very small, perhaps between 6 and 15 per cent. If any hon. Member wants to intervene and tell me that the figure is actually much higher, I will certainly give way, but I think that those figures are generally accepted.
Mr. Martlew: I would agree with the hon. Gentleman's figures. If the figure were 70 or 80 per cent., I would probably not be introducing this Bill. It is because the figure is so low that I am introducing it.
Mr. Leigh: That is a very honest intervention, and the hon. Gentleman has used it to make his point.
There would be a serious problem of enforcement in regard to these measures, and I think that that is a problem for the Government. I suspect that that is why they will not give the Bill an entirely fair wind. The hon. Gentleman said that the Prime Minister supported it, but the Prime Minister actually said:
"We will give serious consideration to it . . . if we can support it, I am sure that we will."—[Official Report, 31 March 2004; Vol. 419, c. 1594.]
I do not know what that means; I do not know whether the Government support the Bill or not. If I were speaking from the Government Front Bench, I would be very understanding of the problems that we face.
The number of child deaths in these circumstances is small, although it is an appalling tragedy for the parents of every child who dies, and for their community. Even if only 20 children a year die, that is still 20 too many. However, the jury is out on whether we would save those lives by passing the Bill. My point is that there would be a serious problem of enforceability. When we introduce a law, we generally need to have the tide of public opinion with us.
Shona McIsaac: The hon. Gentleman and I represent neighbouring Lincolnshire seats, and I hope that he will accept that we have some of the worst road traffic accident statistics in the entire UK. I have no doubt that he constantly reads in our local newspaper, the Grimsby Telegraph, about the number of young cyclists who are injured in our area. Will he tell me whether he is against the wearing of cycle helmets, or purely against the element of compulsion?
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