Alarming hit-and-run figures suggest there were zero arrests from 106 reported incidents involving a driver hitting a cyclist in London last year — the collisions resulting in just four prosecutions, all of which only occurred after the drivers involved came forward voluntarily.
The London Cycling Campaign called the figures “absolutely unacceptable and shocking”, while Cycling UK warned the “fear of being caught is disappearing on our roads”.
It all comes after radio station LBC filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the Metropolitan Police and discovered that there were at least 106 driver-on-cyclist hit-and-run collisions recorded in London in 2025.
The actual number will of course be higher, these just the reported incidents, but from the 106 recorded, 52 resulted in personal injury and so far zero arrests have been made.
There have been four prosecutions, however in all cases the action only came after the driver involved came forward voluntarily.
Cycling UK warned the lack of action means “the fear of being caught is disappearing on our roads”.
Duncan Dollimore from the cycling charity said the figures were alarming, especially as among the hundred of reported incidents, there will have been many serious ones.
Tom Bogdanowicz from the London Cycling Campaign added: “If people think they can get away with it, they try and get away with it. It’s absolutely unacceptable and shocking.”
“One of the reasons behind hit-and-runs is the existence of unregistered or uninsured vehicles or drivers. The police can take action to reduce this by using the cameras that they have up on the roads and taking those vehicles off the roads. I think they should be able to do it even with the resources they have, by making better use of existing technology.”
LBC reporter Benji Hyer was one of the 106 victims of a driver-on-cyclist hit-and-run in London last year and included an account of his injuries in the report.
“The first noise I remember was the crunch of metal as the vehicle slammed into me from behind,” he recalled. “Next thing I knew, I was lying on the tarmac – bloodied, bruised, broken, and concussed.
“Instead of coming to my aid, the driver immediately sped away, leaving behind huge chunks of their car’s outer shell which were ripped off in the crash. I’m a cautious, law-abiding, experienced city rider. But I had just been a victim of a hit-and-run in the heart of London. I contacted the police. Yet the driver was never caught. It’s an all-too-common story.”
The Met insisted its officers are “working hard to reduce collisions and ensure the safety of all road users”.
30 thoughts on “Zero arrests from 106 hit-and-runs on cyclists in London last year, as cycling campaigners slam “completely unacceptable” figures”
I know two people in the last 18 months who have been victims of hit-and-runs in London, fortunately neither of them badly hurt; neither bothered reporting it to the police because they didn’t get a registration number and felt that even though they were in areas quite possibly covered by CCTV that the police wouldn’t bother much for minor injuries and no property damage. So yes, the true number is probably much, much higher.
And of course the only reason it would be submitted for property damage is to make an insurance claim.
Which in a lot of cases is either not covered, less than excess or will result in premium increase due to recorded claims that exceeds any payout…
Surely some arrests should be made in the Met Police for their total and utter failure to do their job. Disgraceful.
Meanwhile, City of London Police, covering the period from the start of April 2025 to the end of March 2026, has revealed that the force’s cycle team issued 1,315 fixed penalty notices to cyclists for riding through red lights.
Cyclists are the new cash cows.
Can’t be true – I keep hearing they’re unaccountable because they don’t have registration plates…
Surely some arrests should be made in the Met Police for their total and utter failure to do their job
The Met must be complaining that they just don’t have enough officers to cope with all the investigations into Met officers failing to do their job:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d96220wyro#:~:text=Eleven%20Metropolitan%20Police%20officers%20are,the%20BBC%20has%20been%20told.
They should draft in some staff from Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire forces and the IOPC to help them cover-up
These figures are an encouragement for reckless drivers and motorists prone to road rage to try their luck.
Coppers couldn’t care less, could they?
There’s another key factor in the under-count. The driver has 24 hours to report any hits. So if they hit you, drive off, and the plod catch them within 24 hours, then that doesn’t count as hit and run.
I had this. I got hit, and witnesses called 999, even though the driver fled the scene. The police quickly accessed APNR and knocked on their door within the 24 hour period – the driver denied everything until they mentioned the witnesses and ANPR, at which point they fessed up.
Although the driver fled the scene without knowing how badly I was injured (fortunately quite mildly), it doesn’t count towards hit-and-run stats because the driver was traced within 24 hours.
Ah… chalk another one up to “we could try to fix the problem, OR … we could fix the reporting!”
I’m surprised anybody is surprised about this ‘attack the reporters, not the offenders’ police policy in practice!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d96220wyro#:~:text=Eleven%20Metropolitan%20Police%20officers%20are,the%20BBC%20has%20been%20told.
Yup. Another case of we don’t need new laws, we need the existing ones enforcing.
If the police did that then they weren’t doing their job properly because there are two separate offences, one is leaving the scene of an accident that involved property damage or injury without giving your details to any party with a reasonable right to demand them and the other is not reporting the accident within 24 hours, so when they caught your chap he did not commit the second offence but he definitely committed the first, which is a minimum five points and can be up to six months’ chokey. Was he charged with this as well as whatever he did to hit you in the first place?
IANAL, but The RTA 1988 seems (with somewhat imprecise grammar) to permit a driver to leave without giving details and avoid an offence, so long as they report, through (3) below. Not saying it is right, but I can imagine justifications, e.g the driver believing they were now in danger from an angry victim.
—
170 Duty of driver to stop, report accident and give information or documents.
(1) This section applies in a case where, owing to the presence of a [mechanically propelled vehicle] on a road [or other public place], an accident occurs by which—
(a)personal injury is caused to a person other than the driver of that [mechanically propelled vehicle], (etc)
(2)The driver of the [mechanically propelled vehicle] must stop and, if required to do so by any person having reasonable grounds for so requiring, give his name and address and also the name and address of the owner and the identification marks of the vehicle.
(3)If for any reason the driver of the [mechanically propelled vehicle] does not give his name and address under subsection (2) above, he must report the accident.
(4)A person who fails to comply with subsection (2) or (3) above is guilty of an offence.
—
So I read that as you have to stop and you have to report to the police, the only element that has leeway is giving details (as you say, there may be safety reasons why someone doesn’t want to give an irate third party their address etc). Which I think makes two offences if you don’t stop and don’t report, though IANAL either…
The CPS guidance suggests that failing to stop is an offence on its own (even if you report it later). And that you don’t get carte blanche to report it a day later – it’s as soon as reasonably practical: https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/road-traffic-summary-offences
That is insane and illogical.
In California hit-and-run is simply fleeing the scene of an accident (VC 20002a) which is a misdemeanor. If there are injuries this can lead to up 12 months in jail and/or $10,000 fine plus two points. There’s no 24 hours to sober up, discard drugs, hide your mistress.
That’s the way it should be.
But yea, cyclists should definitely have to have registration plates because… ummm…
I was once reliably informed by a traffic officer that 1 in 7 cars in London is not registered / not taxed / not insured.
There was a time when I would see groups of police pulling over illegal vehicles. There would be an ANPR van and then further down the road a squad of police pulling over and impounding non street legal vehicles. I haven’t seen that for years now. If that was a real genuine deterrent I’m sure there would be less evasion.
The problem with certifying a vehicle (MOT, VED, insurance) is that it is almost self regulating now. During Covid, when MOT and VED were suspended for a bit I completely forgot where I was with it all and didn’t have either for well over a year. (When I should have had both) We don’t use the car much, sometimes it sits there for weeks unused, so it just went out of my mind. Obviously I was never stopped by the Police when I did use it or no agency wrote to me with a photo of the car being used ‘illegally’. I thought ‘that was easy, no one seems to check these things’
That figure wouldn’t surprise me in the least, nationwide I believe the estimate is well over 1 million of the nation’s 35 million cars is missing at least one of VED, insurance or MOT and you’d expect that to be higher in London. I do see occasional roadblock checks – outside the Tesco Express on the Clapham Road seems to be a favourite spot – although the last few times I’ve seen them they were mob-handed and visible from miles away so quite a number of approaching cars and motorcycles were just pulling U-turns when they saw them and nobody seemed to be interested in stopping them.
Add to that all the illegal e-scooters and e (motor) bikes that Plod do nothing about.
all the illegal e-scooters and e (motor) bikes that Plod do nothing about
Indeed, only last night at 11:30pm in Preston as I was cycling back from Southport (surprisingly cold!), I saw an obviously illegal fat-tyred motorbike (no number plate, no pedalling, big box for fast junk-food on the back- although that could just be a cover for drug-dealing). Although I am still waiting and hoping for video of a police vehicle overtaking and ignoring such a vehicle, they could still rake these in and discourage them if they chose to do so. They don’t even have to charge the rider, as they seem to have forgotten how to do this ‘charging’ stuff, just give them some incident number, confiscate the motorbike, and wait for them to not do anything about it.
I’ve been involved in one hit and run. It was just outside London, so Surrey police. To their credit, they were really good. Someone got the number plate and they tracked the driver down – which wasn’t straightforward. Then it got complicated. He was a villain, and using an alias. The long and the short of it, he was prosecuted under his real name. His driving licence was in a different name. The clerk to the courts was essentially wet, and urged caution over who the driver was, and the case was dismissed by the magistrate. The driver, of course, didn’t turn up. The police were livid – this being the whole reason why the driver was using an alias. The police sent me a letter and asked me to call for a proper explanation. Their final words were that that if it was any consolation, they knew who he was, their paths would cross again, and they would get him
That’s unbelievable, not in the sense that I don’t believe you of course. Or maybe it is all too believable, twice in motorcycle incidents, once with me and once with Mrs H, in both cases where the driver was bang to rights (my one pulled out of a junction without looking and hit me from the side, with Mrs H he pulled a fast U-turn in front of her without signalling and she went into the side of him), the driver was highly apologetic and good as gold about exchanging details. My one, turned out he had given me a false phone number and address, hers when we called the number he had given someone (quite possibly him of course) said he had gone back to live in Jamaica. Despite having the car registrations the police attitude seemed to be that it was an administrative matter that we would have to sort out ourselves, one officer going so far as to tell me “we’re not an insurance bureau”. Fortunately neither of us was badly hurt in these incidents but the combined repair costs of £1400 were pretty painful (this was in 2001/2 when £1400 was worth rather more than it is today, it was more than my monthly take-home pay as a fairly newly-qualified teacher).
I’ve had someone give me false details after driving straight into the back of me at a junction after apparently failing to see me despite it being daylight and me wearing high vis. Bike was a write off and I still have some issues from the shoulder injury I sustained 15 years later.
After having to do my own detective work and being able to give the Police his actual name and address, it turned out he had had already had his licence revoked on medical grounds and was obviously uninsured. They didn’t seem remotely interested in taking any action against the driver, but one officer was very helpful with my Motor Insurers’ Bureau claim, told me exactly what I should say and it went straight through, so I was able to replace the bike.
turned out he had had already had his licence revoked on medical grounds and was obviously uninsured. They didn’t seem remotely interested in taking any action against the driver
Looks like these police tactics didn’t, after all, originate in Lancashire in the last 10 years
As a cousin from the other side of the pond, I am baffled by this data. London is supposedly laced with CCTV cameras. How can NONE of these incidents have been caught by them and used to identify and eventually prosecute the vehicle’s driver?
Not that we have it better here. No way I’m getting a report taken, much less investigated, unless I’m lying in a hospital bed or the morgue.
The primary answer is the same as for you, police regard car on bike crime as pretty unimportant unless there are serious injuries involved. London is indeed bedecked with CCTV but often it belongs to private companies and the police can’t be arsed to go round asking for footage, and of course the cameras are clustered around main roads and valuable infrastructure; if you’re hit on a suburban street you’re unlikely to get video of it unless it happened in front of someone’s Ring doorbell. Most worryingly, it’s estimated that up to one in fifteen numberplates in the UK are illegal (the total will obviously be higher in London): some of these are simply illegally spaced or coated to make it hard/impossible for them to be read by cameras, but a lot are simply clones of registrations from similar models (it’s estimated that illegal plates cost Transport for London £900M a year in unpaid congestion charges). It doesn’t need much of a logical leap to assume that the sort of person driving around with a fake plate is one of the most likely to drive recklessly and least likely to stop after an incident.
“One of the reasons behind hit-and-runs is the existence of unregistered or uninsured vehicles or drivers. The police can take action to reduce this by using the cameras that they have up on the roads and taking those vehicles off the roads. I think they should be able to do it even with the resources they have, by making better use of existing technology.”
As I’ve said before, most current/older vehicles require petrol.
So the government should require all petrol stations to tie in their CCTV to police, DVLA and MIB databases.
Any wanted vehicles/drivers can be tagged by whoever pays for fuel and police can follow up.
Or if serious enough, the station can refuse to dispense fuel and Bat-phone the police to come and arrest.
“We have the technology.”
We just don’t have the political will to put it in place.
I also have this case where the police issued an NIP, so obviously the driving was dangerous enough for them to want to take further.
But the plate was found to be cloned so the Met police gave up on the case.
So the police had TWO reasons to want to nab the driver but gave up…