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Road Safety Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 22:"After Clause 58, insert the following new clause—" ““REGULATION OF HUMAN TRANSPORTERS (1)   Within one year of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State shall publish regulations on the construction and use of human transporters. (2)   For the purposes of subsection (1), a ““human transporter”” is a self-balancing, electric-powered, software-controlled device, with the two wheels on the same axis and a top speed controlled by encrypted keys not exceeding 12.5 miles per hour.”” The noble Lord said: the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, asked me to apologise on his behalf because he cannot be here, but he supports this amendment. This is another attempt at a different way to try to persuade the Government to bring forward regulations to make these ““human transporters””—I do not particularly like the name, but Segway is the name of the manufacturer at the moment—legal somewhere, be it on a footpath, going slowly on a cycle track or a bit faster on the road where it will presumably operate like a powered bicycle. Some noble Lords tried one out in the car park earlier. I remind noble Lords that these transporters are already in use quite widely in Italian cities by the police for catching people. They are clearly effective there. One of the people who gave us a demonstration before Christmas sent me an e-mail this morning saying that he had been stopped by a police car in the middle of Hyde Park Corner going through Wellington Arch and told that he was riding a power-assisted vehicle illegally. He replied that the policeman was also driving his car illegally on a footpath or cycleway but I do not think that it did much good. It was actually harassment. Why is this man being harassed by the police just because there is no regulation? Why should he not use his vehicle? He is happy to comply with any regulations, but there are none. Therefore, I thought, ““Let’s put this amendment down and hope that within a year the Government will bring forth regulations””. The key to the ““encrypted keys”” is that there can probably be three different maximum speeds which could be preset depending on whether you are on a footpath, cycleway or road. With that short introduction, I beg to move.