Delivery Firms to be Liable for Vehicle Safety

[Drago]

is a new law targeted at immigration actually going to result in them starting to actually enforce anything? Or maybe I'm just too cynical?

No, you're quite right.

As a practionioner of law enforcement for near on 3 decades I came to that conclusion quite quickly. When a law is being broken, the answer is not to simply introduce another law - as you correctly surmise, they've ignored one law up until now and will merrily carry on and ignore the next one. Some enforcement is what it needed.

Sadly we live in an age where governments can point to such nonsense and claim to be doing something or, my favourite, having a "crackdown" and we're all supposed to feel reassured. Sadly some are gullible enough to believe it.

But, given they are already illegal yet the Police seem to not make much progress enforcing anything (never understood why),

That is easy to explain. Officers have to be specifically trained and authorised to pursue a two wheeler. Bear in mind that Home Office guidance on the matter makes no distinction between "follow" and "pursue", which really shafts the individual bobby concerned where something goes wrong.

We also live in a strange world, unique among western societies, where a bobby can be held responsible or even imprisoned for the actions of another person. Get into a pursuit with a two wheeler and the little luvvie fails to comply with a lawful request to stop, and they go haring off and kill themselves or someone else, potentially the individual copper faces prosecution for a "death by" offence. It's very rare they get as far as prison, but not so rare that they don't appear in court on a fairly regular basis over such a scenario.

An example of how absurd it can be. I was out on a fully liveried off roader one day one dark December evening, stuck at the lights in Friday evening traffic as i tried to head back to clock off. I was not trained or authorised to pursue any vehicle at all on the motorbikes (I had the car ticket, but not for the off road bikes.) Unbeknownst to me a Herbert on a stolen moped travelled up behind me and spotted me in the distance, still perhaps a hundred metres off. He panicked and tried to ride up a kerb to escape down an alleyway, but fell off and broke his leg. I didn't even know he was there, yet was subject of a brief criminal investigation, interviewed under caution with a Fed solicitor present, etc. With so many witnesses corroborating my account it should have been bleeing obvious what had gone on, but no, they still tried to shaft me. CPS laughed at Professional Standards, and demanded to know why they didn't NFA it instead of wasting CPS time, and I told them to stick their RPU job where the sun doesn't shine. That is the sort of reason why the police make little progress with such scrotes, and why far from being the glamour job the public seem to think it is RPU roles are quite difficult to fill.

The answer is to ensure coppers are properly trained (there always seemed to be time for training when it came to using the latest politically correct word or concept, often quickly replaced with a contradictory new one 6 months later), and to change the law so that criminals and criminals alone are lawfully responsible for their own behaviour. Coppers love nothing more than chasing villains (short of hitting villains with a stick its the most fun you can have), and if they're properly trained and empowered to do so they'll go at it with a vengeance. As it stands today they are constrained from doing so by police regulations and criminal law, and few are willing to risk losing job or liberty to chase Johnny Sheetbag on an illegally enhanced ebike.

 

[brommieinkorea]

No, you're quite right.

As a practionioner of law enforcement for near on 3 decades I came to that conclusion quite quickly. When a law is being broken, the answer is not to simply introduce another law - as you correctly surmise, they've ignored one law up until now and will merrily carry on and ignore the next one. Some enforcement is what it needed.

Sadly we live in an age where governments can point to such nonsense and claim to be doing something or, my favourite, having a "crackdown" and we're all supposed to feel reassured. Sadly some are gullible enough to believe it.



That is easy to explain. Officers have to be specifically trained and authorised to pursue a two wheeler. Bear in mind that Home Office guidance on the matter makes no distinction between "follow" and "pursue", which really shafts the individual bobby concerned where something goes wrong.

We also live in a strange world, unique among western societies, where a bobby can be held responsible or even imprisoned for the actions of another person. Get into a pursuit with a two wheeler and the little luvvie fails to comply with a lawful request to stop, and they go haring off and kill themselves or someone else, potentially the individual copper faces prosecution for a "death by" offence. It's very rare they get as far as prison, but not so rare that they don't appear in court on a fairly regular basis over such a scenario.

An example of how absurd it can be. I was out on a fully liveried off roader one day one dark December evening, stuck at the lights in Friday evening traffic as i tried to head back to clock off. I was not trained or authorised to pursue any vehicle at all on the motorbikes (I had the car ticket, but not for the off road bikes.) Unbeknownst to me a Herbert on a stolen moped travelled up behind me and spotted me in the distance, still perhaps a hundred metres off. He panicked and tried to ride up a kerb to escape down an alleyway, but fell off and broke his leg. I didn't even know he was there, yet was subject of a brief criminal investigation, interviewed under caution with a Fed solicitor present, etc. With so many witnesses corroborating my account it should have been bleeing obvious what had gone on, but no, they still tried to shaft me. CPS laughed at Professional Standards, and demanded to know why they didn't NFA it instead of wasting CPS time, and I told them to stick their RPU job where the sun doesn't shine. That is the sort of reason why the police make little progress with such scrotes, and why far from being the glamour job the public seem to think it is RPU roles are quite difficult to fill.

The answer is to ensure coppers are properly trained (there always seemed to be time for training when it came to using the latest politically correct word or concept, often quickly replaced with a contradictory new one 6 months later), and to change the law so that criminals and criminals alone are lawfully responsible for their own behaviour. Coppers love nothing more than chasing villains (short of hitting villains with a stick its the most fun you can have), and if they're properly trained and empowered to do so they'll go at it with a vengeance. As it stands today they are constrained from doing so by police regulations and criminal law, and few are willing to risk losing job or liberty to chase Johnny Sheetbag on an illegally enhanced ebike.

This pretty much makes the case for going after the business owners who are profiting from it and making these crimes possible.

 

[Anthony-C]

Surely it would just be easier to ban the sales of the damn things rather than force responsibility onto businesses that the riders and bluff and bull sheet?

The bike the rider shows to the business isn't necessarily the one theyll be riding once theyre outmof view round the corner, and irs unfair that a diligent business thwt has done the requisite checks gets bent over for something a sly subcontractor has done behind their back.

The issue with banning tools, in this case e-bikes for off-road use, is that the immediate problem 'just goes away' only to be replaced by another. When used on the road these are cheap, illegal motorbikes that the police can't catch. Ban them and people will take the plates off second-hand motorbikes resulting in cheap, illegal etc. Ban guns and you get knives, then broken bottles, then head-butting.... We needed a culture and policing aimed at anti-social behaviour before it got established.

If this law does ban illegal delivery bikes will it achieve much? OK, legality and fire safety are partly associated but fundamentally independent. OK, legal electric bikes would be somewhat slower, when not going downhill. It doesn't feel like a convincing win and if 'blind' legislation forces employers to come up with their own ways to attach responsibility/employability to riders they can hardly be blamed for any unintended consequences.

 

[classic33]

The issue with banning tools, in this case e-bikes for off-road use, is that the immediate problem 'just goes away' only to be replaced by another. When used on the road these are cheap, illegal motorbikes that the police can't catch. Ban them and people will take the plates off second-hand motorbikes resulting in cheap, illegal etc. Ban guns and you get knives, then broken bottles, then head-butting.... We needed a culture and policing aimed at anti-social behaviour before it got established.

If this law does ban illegal delivery bikes will it achieve much? OK, legality and fire safety are partly associated but fundamentally independent. OK, legal electric bikes would be somewhat slower, when not going downhill. It doesn't feel like a convincing win and if 'blind' legislation forces employers to come up with their own ways to attach responsibility/employability to riders they can hardly be blamed for any unintended consequences.

One of the "issues" is that the majority of electric bikes in use is that they're not off-road bikes. They just happen to have fat/oversized tyres to compensate for the wheel size and lack of suspension on the bike frames. That's part of the reason for their tyre size, act as suspension, on-road.
They were never legal, in the UK, from the word go. Certainly since the regulations were changed, across Europe, to bring the regulations into line by establishing a common baseline.
How do you ban something that isn't legal to begin with? They're getting cheaper now anyway. What cost four figures in 2020 is now well down into three figure territory. £100 upwards on FB marketplace, at one time they were free. Questions arise about how someone can afford to give 10 or 20 of them away.

They're use is being driven by a society that's getting lazy. Why go to the shop, when you can get the shop to send the goods to you?
Time to start thinking about funding an illegal vehicle if you use such deliveries. You're contract lies with the person delivering what you're too lazy to go for, not the company whose name is on the bag your goods arrive in.

Maybe we can start, at a local level, by getting councils to act on illegal vehicles parking on the streets. Then move onto removing electric bikes from the cycle to work schemes they operate.