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Mr. Forth: No.

Mr. Leigh: A possible exception is my right hon. Friend, who would not be seen dead on a bicycle.

Mr. Martlew: Earlier, the hon. Gentleman warned us about statistics, but he has gone on to quote them several times, although he has not mentioned British Columbia in Canada. May I point it out to him that cycle use in this country is dropping like a stone anyhow? We do not have that particular policy, but there has been a 30 per cent. drop in 20 years. That is set out in the document, "Bicycle Helmets: review of effectiveness", which I am sure the Minister is aware of. The number of people using bicycles is declining. I believe that parents would be happier if they felt that their children would be safer.

Mr. Leigh: That is a fair point. Obviously, we each have our opinion. The hon. Gentleman is right: since 1991 in Great Britain, the fall in cycle use has been almost twice the increase in helmet use, so that fall has been dramatic without a dramatic increase in helmet use. I doubt whether the Bill would discourage that fall in cycle use.

The hon. Gentleman will not accept any of my statistics and I am sure he could introduce others to the debate, but surely, as a reasonable man, he accepts it as
 
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a reasonable supposition that there has been a dramatic fall in cycle use in this country. Relatively few children wear helmets; his Bill might aggravate the situation. There is already a problem with child health and a huge problem with encouraging children to take exercise, walk, play games and cycle. We have different medical and expert opinions on how many lives would be saved by the Bill. Given all those facts, is this the time to introduce the Bill? I do not believe that the Bill is timely. There is a lot more that the Government could do to encourage safety, to try to take the voluntary route and to persuade parents that it is advisable that their children wear cycle helmets.

A lot of fun has been had at the expense of cycle organisations—the men in lycra—and over whether it is possible to achieve any agreement among those people, who are just enthusiasts. We should beware any Bill that appears to be opposed by so many representative organisations in the cycling world. Does not that give us pause for thought, at least for a moment?

Cycling use has declined dramatically and virtually every cycling organisation is against. The hon. Member for Carlisle has already been asked in an intervention whether a single cycling organisation supports his Bill.

Mr. Martlew: The organisation that supports the Bill is behind professional cyclists. Wearing a helmet is compulsory for them.

Mr. Leigh: I heard the hon. Gentleman making that point, which, if he does not mind my saying so, I think is very weak. Professional cycling is a completely different world from what we are talking about. Those are sporting people who are at the edge of what is safe. They often ride in very difficult circumstances. Does not the fact that only one organisation supports the Bill give us pause for concern?

We are supposed to be encouraging people to cycle, and I do not think that this Bill will do so. I am sorry to say that ultimately, the Bill will result in more ill health in the long term, as there will be less healthy exercise, which will have an impact on the national health service. I do not think that this measure would have saved all those 28 lives, and the Bill should be opposed and resisted, or at least heavily amended.

11.20 am

Mr. Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh, North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) on the way in which he presented his Bill, and on taking on a subject that any of us who have been involved in transport issues, especially cycling, knows will be liable to provoke strong emotion on either side of the argument. When I was fortunate to come high in the private Member's Bill ballot a couple of years ago, the subject that I chose, employee share schemes, did not seem to provoke the same enthusiasm or emotion on either side of the argument that understandably exists on an issue of this nature.

My constituency is a long way from London, so I, like my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike), do not find it possible to attend regularly on Fridays for private Member's Bills. I therefore look at the agenda to work out which Bills I want to be in Westminster for. On
 
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this day, this Bill, and the subsequent Bill, which I am sure will also be worthy of detailed examination, attracted my attention, so I decided some time ago to make a specific effort to be here for Second Reading. At that stage, I generally supported the Bill's objectives; like most people who are interested in road safety, including those in the Chamber today, my gut reaction was that the Bill must be a sensible idea. However, as I have had information sent to me, and as I have tried to investigate the subject in more detail, I have swung from being generally supportive to being extremely sceptical—certainly about the breadth of its proposals. I am not saying that I would oppose the Bill in its entirety, but I would have to be convinced strongly that it would be right to take it forward. In those circumstances, I am sure that my hon. Friend wishes that I had not bothered coming here today, but having made arrangements to be here a long time ago, I want to contribute to the debate.

My earlier interventions may have given some indication of the reasons for my shift of position, and I want to explain the reasoning behind my growing doubts. My attention was first drawn to possible problems with the Bill by the postcard from the CTC to which my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley referred. Like him, I was somewhat amused that the letter inviting me to express my opinions did not give me an address to which I could respond. I was also struck by the way in which the postcard featured a picture of a happy family cycling in summer on a rural path, with, stamped across it, the word "criminals". I wondered whether that was really the content of the Bill.

On issues of this nature, I am aware that when people try to lobby MPs, they put their case in the strongest possible terms, and, like the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), I am aware that, in this field in particular, emotions and simplifications of the argument can be the order of the day. I was therefore dubious about whether the Bill would make this happy cycling family into criminals. I therefore studied the Bill, and it is true that it would make that family, apparently doing no harm to anyone by cycling along a rural off-road path, into criminals.

I looked at the Bill in a little more detail and considered an example that I gave in an earlier intervention from when I took one of my children to a local park, and she met one of her friends, who offered to let her ride her bicycle for a short period. That indicates the problem with the Bill's approach. We must move towards regarding cycling as being as natural a way of getting around the community as walking. We do not want it to require special protection. No one suggests that pedestrians should have to wear helmets when they cross the road, but pedestrians are much more likely to suffer head injury than cyclists.

Mr. Martlew: Is my hon. Friend really saying that, in percentage terms, children are more likely to suffer injury as pedestrians than the 6 per cent. of children who cycle? I do not accept that.
 
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Mr. Lazarowicz: I am saying that if we consider the overall figures, we see that children are more likely to be injured as pedestrians than as cyclists. When using statistics in this argument, we must be very careful, as I said earlier. My point was that we want to make cycling a natural activity. One of the reasons that I was happy on the occasion that I mentioned to let my child cycle without a helmet, although I encourage my older children to wear cycle helmets, was precisely that I wanted to encourage the younger child to learn to cycle. It seemed natural to allow my child to cycle in the park on that occasion. My hon. Friend says that, although in theory I would be a criminal for allowing her to do that, the law will be ignored, and nothing will be done to enforce it. That may be the case, but as a general principle we should avoid making laws that, in many circumstances, we do not want people to obey. The Bill provides for the banning of off-road cycling without a helmet by children under 16, which is an extreme measure that I would not find acceptable.

I accept that there will be some occasions when an injury or, in extreme cases, a fatality, of a child riding a bicycle off-road could have been prevented if a cycle helmet had been worn, but we must guard against seeking to legislate against all danger that could conceivably occur. There are many dangerous things in the world, including in playgrounds, but we do not legislate to make them all entirely impossible. I do not want to go into the statistics in great detail, but I suspect that the most dangerous thing in many playgrounds is play equipment. It has been made much safer in recent years, but injuries and fatalities of children still occur in playgrounds. We are not suggesting, however, that we should take away play equipment in its entirety to reduce injuries and deaths. We try to minimise the danger, but we must recognise that there must always be some level of risk in any human activity.

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