E-scooters: a menace on Britain's streets.

zE-scooter accidents in Britain are rising sharply, with hundreds of riders and pedestrians suffering serious injuries and hospitals seeing a worrying increase in children hurt while using electric scooters. They are fast, cheap, convenient and now thoroughly woven into city life. They are also, increasingly, a menace on Britain’s streets.In this episode of Mark and Pete, we look at the growing problem of e-scooter injuries, road safety and regulation in the UK, and ask whether it is time riders had to prove they can actually use one before being unleashed upon the rest of us.Recent figures from three major children’s trauma centres in England make grim reading. Between 2019 and 2024, 477 children were treated for e-scooter injuries, with cases rising from fewer than ten in 2019 to nearly 150 in 2024. The average age was just 12. Around a quarter suffered head injuries, almost one in five suffered facial injuries, and fewer than 2 per cent were recorded as wearing helmets.Nationally, the picture is scarcely more reassuring. In 2025 there were 1,377 reported e-scooter collisions in Great Britain, resulting in 1,477 casualties, including 484 people seriously injured and ten deaths. And because many incidents never reach the police statistics, the real total is almost certainly higher.The oddest part of all this is that privately owned e-scooters are still generally illegal to ride on public roads and pavements, while rental schemes operate under special rules. Britain has therefore managed to create the perfect regulatory muddle: thousands of machines being sold, thousands being ridden, and a legal framework that seems to hover somewhere between prohibition and a shrug.So what should happen?We ask whether e-scooter riders should have to earn some form of competency badge or basic licence, perhaps rather like the old cycling proficiency test. Nothing elaborate. A little Highway Code knowledge, some practical riding, braking, signalling and basic road awareness. In other words, evidence that the person travelling silently towards you at 15 mph has at least met a traffic cone before.Would compulsory helmets help? Should scooters carry visible registration? Should there be age limits, insurance or proper enforcement?E-scooters are probably not going away. The real question is whether Britain can make them useful without turning every pavement into a low-speed obstacle course.