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Zhu Rongji obituary
Zhu Rongji, who has died aged 97, was the fifth premier of the People’s Republic of China and one of its most effective administrators and economic reformers following its foundation in 1949. In 1991, Zhu was summoned to Beijing, in the footsteps of the then president and party secretary Jiang Zemin, and in the aftermath of the 1989 uprisings in Beijing and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As vice premier in the state council, and governor of the People’s Bank of China (1993-95), Zhu was put in charge of China’s economy at a time of immense turbulence, with many fearing that the country would once more turn inward as it had under Mao Zedong. Zhu implemented contentious and tough reforms to straighten out the highly inefficient state-owned sector, and to modernise China’s infrastructure. By the end of the decade, Zhu could rightly declare that the country had become “the factory of the world”, a status that in many ways it maintains. A straight-talking and forceful figure, he was famously harsh on corruption, once sacking a governor of Heilongjiang province on the spot for failing to meet growth targets. This laid the foundation for his popularity within China generally, and the high regard with which he was held abroad. He seemed to come close to the ideal image of a Chinese leader possessed of moral dignity. Alone among high-level politicians of his period, he attempted to reach out to the population at large, and speak to them as an equal. Nor was he willing to stand on ceremony. As he stated in 1998: “I have prepared 100 coffins here – 99 for corrupt officials and one for myself,” according to the party newspaper People’s Daily. This gained him the nickname of “the Boss”. His most significant achievement as premier was to secure China’s entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO). What had begun in 1986 as negotiations over entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Taxes (Gatt), had spanned out over a decade, involving an epic series of agreements with both the EU, the US and dozens of other countries. In 1999, the deal with the US, which was the most contentious and important, was almost completed. Zhu was on a visit to Washington, expecting to sign this off, but it was pulled by President Bill Clinton at the time because of domestic problems following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Aiming some of his famous sharpness and temper at the Americans, Zhu reportedly told his officials that he was in awe of Washington’s incompetence and lack of foresight. The final deal was signed in 2001. It can be seen as a watershed moment in China’s attempts to modernise, and to internationalise its economy, with strong growth and a doubling of the Chinese economy over the next five years. Zhu retired after one term in power, in 2003, and was replaced by his protege, Wen Jiabao. For all the successes of his time in power, these did not come as easy gifts. In the 1990s, the state sector, which comprised most of the key enterprises, was riddled with debt, inefficiency and poor management. To address this, the whole social welfare and public sector framework had to be changed. Up to 60 million workers were laid off, some of them never employed again. Unrest was a striking feature of this period, with one commentator calling it a period of “ferment”. Even WTO entry offered no panacea, with the agricultural and manufacturing sector going through painful adjustments. Zhu was an obstinate and hard-eyed man: he had to be, to deal with the issues he faced. Much of this toughness came from his early years. Born in Changsha, the capital of the central Hunan province – Mao’s home province, too – Zu was orphaned when young and brought up by two of his father’s brothers. He enjoyed a typically technocratic education, joined the Communist party in 1949, and graduated in electrical engineering from the elite Qinghua University in Beijing in 1951. His career through the 50s and into the 70s was rocky. He worked largely in the state development and planning commission (in charge of national implementation of the various five year plans), as an engineer, dealing with the typical duties of resource allocation in a command economy. But his criticism of what he saw as the inefficiency of Maoist policies during the infamous Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956-57, where intellectuals and officials were invited to offer their opinions on the party, led to his being branded a “rightist” and sent to the countryside to be a teacher. His rehabilitation back into the central government in 1962 was short lived. Once branded with the stigma of being politically unreliable in Maoist China, suspects were never fully rehabilitated. In 1969, in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started to wage war against what he called “bureaucratism and capitalist tendencies” in the CCP, Zhu was once more sent to one of what were euphemistically called “7 May schools” named after the central decree that had set thousands of them up across the country. In effect, they were mini-concentration camps. There he languished until 1975, when he was sent to Beijing for a third time to work at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as an economist. A spell from 1979 to 1982 in the state economic commission, at the start of what has come to be known as the reform and opening up period, led to him being appointed as a vice minister. This marked his full transition from engineering to economics. It was as an economist that he was to have the greatest impact on China in the years ahead. Zhu’s first step towards national and international prominence came in 1987, when he replaced Jiang Zemin as mayor of Shanghai. Shanghai was then at the dawn of its extraordinary growth, starting to build a foundation as the commercial centre of China, a position it had ironically enjoyed before the revolution, in the 20s and 30s. He was instrumental in making the city one of the special economic zones, in 1990, joining places such as Shenzhen, adjoining Hong Kong, and Xiamen, on the coast facing Taiwan. He also steered the city successfully through the trauma following the 4 June massacres in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989. Shanghai was largely to avoid the turbulence and recriminations that this event led to elsewhere. Zhu was frequently called the “Gorbachev of China”, though it was an epithet he disliked. Despite his suffering in the past, he remained resolutely committed to the Communist party and its continuation in power, and his economic reforms were targeted at ensuring that this happened. He did not propose, or support, political reforms, and regarded Mikhail Gorbachev with something approaching contempt, for the way in which his policies had effectively led to the fall of the Soviet Communist party, and the break up of the USSR. Zhu’s fundamental objective, which he achieved, was to ensure that the PRC remained stable, and that it continued to deliver economic growth. He spent his retirement largely uninvolved in politics, appearing only from time to time at high-level party congresses, the last of which was in 2017. The last image of him appeared while he was in hospital in 2020. There is no record of what he made of the leadership of Xi Jinping, or of whether he shared the view that, after Mao and Deng Xiaoping, he was the person who had contributed most to China’s current economic success. He is survived by his wife, Lao An, a retired business executive, and a son and a daughter. • Zhu Rongji, politician and economist, born 23 October 1928; died 12 August 2026
Israel deliberately starting wildfires in southern Lebanon, firefighters say
Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing. Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment. On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih. “Most of our missions are now related to fires,” Fakih said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.” The Israeli military has caused fires across south Lebanon, in particular in olive groves and on agricultural land, according to videos and testimony from emergency services, in the nearly two-months since the 17 June ceasefire that mostly ended fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. “They started doing this right after the ceasefire, and there have been incendiary bombs every day,” Fakih said. “Small drones come out and drop incendiary materials, [white] phosphorus shells are fired at the woodlands, in addition to illumination flares that they drop during the daytime so the vegetation catches fire.” Firefighters and residents of other areas in south Lebanon describe similar blazes being started by Israeli munitions and drones in dry scrub and woodlands. On Friday, Israeli munitions created large wildfires in two heavily forested areas, in Kfarchouba, close to the border, and between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley. The civil defence station chief in the area, Samir Hardan, said a fire was started near Kfarchouba on Friday afternoon after a drone dropped a munition in woodlands. After battling blazes overnight and extinguishing them on Saturday, a second drone started another fire on Sunday, Hardan said. Firefighters are required to coordinate their movements with the Lebanese army, which relays their request to a “deconfliction” group that includes the Israeli military. They were given permission to fight the fires at only two spots, and not other areas where fires were raging. According to environmental groups, the fires are part of a pattern of Israeli attacks against Lebanon’s environment that threaten the country’s woodlands and the biodiversity they support. Hisham Younes, the founder of Green Southerners, a Lebanese conservation organisation, said: “These are long-established woodlands, dominated by productive stone pine alongside oak. They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds.” Younes called the Israeli attacks an ecocide. “It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate and sustain life. When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.” Since fighting started on 8 October 2023 when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack a day earlier, Israel has repeatedly targeted Lebanon’s woodlands. The Israeli military has said in the past that Hezbollah used these forested areas as cover for its fighters and its tunnels. Ecologists and rights groups have said fires and other forms of widespread environmental destruction will have wider effects on civilian populations. Asked for comment on each of the recent wildfire incidents, the Israeli military said its operations were “conducted while taking precautionary measures to mitigate harm to civilians and the environment”. It is not the first time Israeli forces have been reported to have set fires deliberately. In the summer of 2024, Israeli troops used trebuchets – medieval catapults – to fling flaming debris over its border wall with Lebanon, while the Lebanese army published photos of Israeli drones that carried hoses that doused forests in flammable materials. Health and environmental experts raised the alarm in February when Israeli planes dropped herbicides linked to cancer on farms in south Lebanon. Besides the environmental and health consequences of these fires, residents of south Lebanon have mourned the loss of the green spaces in the villages where they grew up. On 1 August, displaced residents of the border village of Yaroun found their olive and fruit groves, as well as their homes, had been set ablaze by occupying Israeli troops. People living in the nearby Christian towns of Rmeich and Aïn Ebel, among the few villages near the border not emptied out by the Israeli military, sent pictures of the fires. Hafez Ghasham, the mayor of Yaroun, said: “They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees – large groves, with very old olive trees. They started there, then the fire spread along the outskirts of the village.” People in Yaroun had already watched in previous months as all but 20 of the 900 houses in the village were bulldozed by the Israeli military. They pooled resources to buy expensive satellite imagery of the village during their displacement. Ghasham said: “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village. “They are trying to make the land uninhabitable. They are erasing our entire history, our entire culture, all our memories. Maybe the idea is that after some time, it will look as though nobody had ever lived here.”
Canadian airline WestJet agrees to settle flight attendants’ sexual harassment class action
The Canadian airline WestJet has agreed to pay C$4.5m (£2.4m) to settle a decade-long sexual harassment class action lawsuit levelled by its female flight attendants, who alleged the company failed to maintain a safe workplace. The suit followed allegations by Mandalena Lewis, a former flight attendant, that a pilot had sexually assaulted her and a colleague, but that WestJet kept the pilot flying, thereby putting other employees at risk. A British Columbia judge on Monday approved the terms of the settlement, which were finalised on 22 June after months of negotiation. The payment will be distributed among the 3,452 flight attendants in the class action after expenses are removed, including legal fees. WestJet agreed to hire a third-party to conduct a workplace inquiry that will examine the prevalence of harassment, the extent of underreporting and how reporting systems can be made more effective. The suit had called on WestJet to implement mandatory anti-harassment training for pilots, along with an admission of wrongdoing and an admission of a breach of employee contract. None were included in the settlement. Lewis filed the initial class action against the airline in April 2016. She said she was dismayed by the results, especially given that two years ago WestJet paid out $12.5m in a baggage fee class action, nearly three times the amount agreed to in the sexual harassment suit. “I’m glad it’s over … but I’m just exhausted. I’m shaking my head,” she said, adding that she was advised the amount was the most that could be achieved given that legal expenses were piling up. Under BC law, the suit included all female flight attendants who worked for the company between 4 April 2014 and 28 February 2021, because Lewis’s suit alleged that all of them had their contracts violated by WestJet during that period because its employee policy promised that the workplace would be free from harassment. The suit claimed WestJet broke its policy by not taking enough steps to address reports of assault or to prevent harassment in the first place. Lewis said she was sexually assaulted by a WestJet pilot while on a layover in Hawaii in 2010 when she was 25 years old. In court documents, she said the same pilot had also assaulted another flight attendant in 2008. Though she reported the assault to WestJet, the pilot remained at the company and Lewis was eventually fired in 2016 for “gross insubordination”, according to court documents submitted by WestJet that year, which she and her legal team allege was retaliation for trying to hold the airline accountable internally. She said she abandoned an individual civil claim and instead created the class action after learning other flight attendants had also experienced harassment. Lewis said she reported the assault to police in Maui but alleges WestJet rerouted the pilot so he would not face questioning in Hawaii. She said fellow members of the class action suit were also disappointed with the result. Eight of them had already asked the province’s supreme court not to approve the settlement in February when some of the details first emerged, citing a low payout and a lack of accountability by WestJet. “We didn’t get justice here,” said Lewis. The case garnered national attention for exposing pilot behaviour toward female flight attendants and the vulnerability of the scores of young women who have historically been the target demographic for the job. A 2018 survey of more than 3,500 flight attendants by the US Association of Flight Attendants found that 68% had experienced sexual harassment in their careers while only 7% had reported an incident to their employer. WestJet did not respond to questions about Lewis’s claims of assault, and the allegations that it failed to keep the workplace free of harassment and does not properly investigate alleged sexual assaults. In a statement, the company said it was “pleased to have reached a mutually agreed upon settlement”. It said: “We are committed to strengthening our operations and training, focused on the safety and wellbeing of all WestJetters and we are focused on advancing a culture of empowerment.”
In Venice, it’s not politics as usual as film-makers aim to recapture our attention
Europe is in an economic crisis that, unlike the eurozone downturn at the beginning of the millennium, cannot be measured in ratings downgrades and borrowing costs. For metrics, try engagement depth and consumer trust instead. The unedifying spectacle of the European Union’s falling out over the Ceuta crisis looks like the latest symptom of Europe’s shrinking attention economy. When more than 70,000 people crossed over from Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the start of the month, Rome hastily reintroduced air and sea border checks with Spain for one month; Madrid retaliated with spot-checks on travellers to Italy. Politicians were falling over themselves to match the wildfire speed of social media, for this was a geopolitical flashpoint that appears not just to have been engineered but also politically processed via short video clips online. The crossings were reportedly triggered by viral videos suggesting that Spain’s border with Morocco was opening, while their framing as an “assault” or “invasion” was amplified by accounts with links to the Russian military, as Aisha Down reported. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are built to reward content that instantly hooks in viewers – three seconds long is the golden rule. How can lawmakers ever keep up? Yet what if, paradoxically, our attention economy is both shrinking and expanding at the same time? I’ve found it hard to shake that impression after perusing the lineup at the forthcoming Venice film festival, opening on 2 September. This year at the Lido, you can watch a three-hour film about the Italian Communist party sending a camera team to the Soviet Union (Imperium, by Ukrainian auteur Sergei Loznitsa); a four-hour documentary about Elon Musk (Musk, by American director Alex Gibney); or a more than five-hour video diary about Russian dissident journalists in exile (Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II). Too short for you? Then, get tickets for Luca Guadagnino’s Joie de Vivre, a lengthy analysis of the films of compatriot Bernardo Bertolucci. It clocks in at seven hours. For the most part, these are surprisingly politically forthright titles at a film festival that in the recent past has focused on glitz and glamour. Loznitsa’s documentary seeks to shatter the remnants of the left’s illusions about the Soviet Union; Loktev gives a voice to the journalists silenced by Putin; Gibney’s Musk film has already been preemptively dismissed by the far-right tycoon as a “hit job”. But are they trying to stretch out attention spans so much that they risk playing only to a gallery of cinephiles? *** On the topic of impactful film-making … Perhaps there is a point between both extremes to capture people’s imaginations and attention. That’s what the Guardian is hoping to prove, in collaboration with Franco-German culture channel Arte. We are inviting film-makers to propose short-form documentaries exploring democracy in Europe today. The winning submission will be presented at the DOK Leipzig film festival at the end of October, and subsequently receive funding, editorial support and distribution through Guardian Documentaries and Arte platforms. The deadline for submissions is 14 September. Crucially, they should be no longer than 20 minutes – a length that Jess Gormley, the Guardian’s executive producer of documentaries, argues “encourages participation and debate”. She points to recent Guardian documentaries such as Liane Aviram and Louis Hollis’s 23-minute short The Oath, about a Palestinian doctor in Israel’s healthcare system, which led to its protagonist being invited to speak in front of the UK parliament – a film that held, rather than overwhelmed our attention. • To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
At least 44 dead after overcrowded ferry capsizes on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe
At least 44 people have died after an overcrowded ferry capsized on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, police said. The boat had a capacity of 90 people, but was carrying 114 adult passengers, five crew members and an unknown number of children, Zimbabwe’s civil protection unit (CPU) said earlier on Wednesday, citing ticket sales. A crew member told the national broadcaster ZBC that there were 153 people onboard when the ferry overturned on Tuesday after it hit large waves. A passenger told ZBC that the boat began taking on water about 30 minutes after it left the lakeshore town of Kariba, heading for islands and fishing camps. A specialised underwater team was flown to the area, the CPU said, as search and rescue continued on Wednesday. At the time, the CPU said the death toll was 15, with 27 known to be missing. Zimbabwe’s police updated the death toll on Wednesday afternoon in posts on X twice in the space of 32 minutes. In the first post, it said the death toll was 38, adding: “The bodies have been retrieved from the lake.” Then it said that 44 people were now known to have died. A video shared by ZBC on Tuesday showed several people appearing to be sitting on the upturned ferry, while at least four speedboats came to their aid and a helicopter circled overhead. Maxwell Kanhema Page, who describes himself as a media practitioner and originally posted the video shared by ZBC, reshared a video on his Facebook page filmed from the shore, in which he had noted that the lake was “angry”. He said: “A few moments later I get over 200 calls about [the ferry] sinking. A sad day indeed.” Lake Kariba is the world’s largest human-made lake by volume, stretching about 150 miles along Zimbabwe’s northern border with Zambia. It was created in the 1950s during British colonial rule, when the Zambezi River was dammed, displacing about 57,000 people. The Kariba dam supplies at least a third of both countries’ electricity. It is not uncommon for boats to overturn on the lake. In 2014, 26 people, 24 of them children, drowned in Zambia’s part of the lake, when the boat meant to transport them to independence day celebrations capsized. On the Zimbabwean side, five drowned in a 2021 incident and three were feared dead in an October 2023 capsizing. The month before, a police boat overturned although no one died. Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
Germany approves lifting curbs on spy agencies in security ‘revolution’
The German government has approved a draft law aimed at lifting many of the restraints on its spy agencies imposed during the postwar period as the country reels from two attacks in a month that have exposed serious security gaps. The controversial changes, which must still pass parliament, largely comply with a wishlist pulled together by the foreign and domestic intelligence services, which have long complained Germany lags behind its allies and enemies. “We are turning our intelligence services into genuine secret services,” the interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, told Bild newspaper, which called it a security “revolution” and “historic”. He said: “It is high time we positioned ourselves to be competitive and on an equal footing with our partner services around the world. This requires operational capabilities and active powers to tackle modern state terrorism and extremist groups more effectively.” A deadly car ramming in late July at Berlin’s huge annual Pride parade by a German-born Islamist known to the authorities was followed by the discovery last week of a drone laden with explosives near a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport, a key defence transport hub. Friedrich Merz’s unpopular centre-right, centre-left coalition government is under pressure to demonstrate it can modernise to keep its citizens safe, while preserving rights and principles laid out in Germany’s Basic Law. The intelligence services reform plans have been in the offing for months and were repeatedly fine-tuned before being presented to the cabinet on Wednesday. The federal foreign intelligence service (BND), which turned 70 this year and is run by a former ambassador to Ukraine, Martin Jäger, will gain new powers to confront emerging threats from state actors such as Russia and China with fewer impediments, and with the help of AI. German authorities say the threat level has soared since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as agents linked to Moscow have allegedly carried out repeated sabotage, spying and hacker attacks against critical infrastructure and military equipment manufacturers. Jäger said Germany must be able to show adversaries “that we’re in a position to do similar things so the other side also feels the pain”. The BND has until now overwhelmingly had a defensive position, making it largely a repository for information with few operational powers. According to the draft law’s more than 700-page text, German spies will have permission to manipulate or delete data known as “hack-back” cyber-attacks. Other options include, altering instructions on how to build weapons or rendering arms harmless during production. Digital payments to low-level “disposable” agents, employed on a one-off basis by foreign governments, could be blocked to thwart attacks. The use of force by intelligence personnel abroad will remain forbidden – keeping it far out of the league of the CIA, the Mossad in Israel or the DGSE in France. But agents will be able to carry weapons for self-defence more often without explicit permission. The law, which the government hopes will be in place by 1 January 2027, would loosen rules around data protection, widely mocked as exaggerated and self-defeating. The BND and the domestic security watchdog, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), will be unshackled to collect, store and analyse more information for longer with the help of AI. It will also be easier to gain permission for online searches and home surveillance against criminal suspects. Germany will also beef up oversight of the BND and the BfV by an independent board, in addition to powers already granted to parliament’s intelligence control committee. Although reforms were widely seen as necessary and overdue, some politicians warned of overreach. The federal commissioner for data protection, Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, said her office would be stripped of oversight powers over the BND and criticised the expanded access to CCTV footage in public spaces in Germany and abroad. Konstantin von Notz, the opposition Green party’s spokesperson on intelligence oversight, called the changes “urgently needed” and said he backed “stronger powers” for the BND. But he said the draft law “overshoots the mark”. He was particularly critical of the powers granted to the BfV, which he said were “difficult to reconcile” with the principle of separation between the powers of the intelligence services and the police – a lesson drawn from the darkest chapters of German history. The legislation could face court challenges mounted by its critics. Faced with rising geopolitical uncertainty and doubts about the role of the US as guarantor of the country’s security, Germany is also in a major rearmament drive. Merz took office last year pledging to turn Germany’s armed forces, or Bundeswehr, into “Europe’s strongest conventional army”.
Number of children injured in e-scooter crashes in England surges
The number of children involved in crashes on e-scooters has soared in recent years, with some as young as nine involved in collisions, research has found. Researchers carried out a review of injuries among the under-16s at three specialist paediatric trauma centres – Alder Hey in Liverpool, and Sheffield and Royal Manchester children’s hospitals – between January 2019 and December 2024. They found the average age of those involved in e-scooter collisions was 12, and almost 65% of those injured were male. The most common injuries were to the limbs, followed by head and facial injuries. Fewer than 2% of patients had been wearing a helmet. Half of the children injured were between 10 and 13 years old, with the youngest only nine. The three hospitals had recorded a total of 477 e-scooter injuries, with a significant increase in numbers since 2019. More than 80% of the injuries were sustained on private e-scooters, which can only be ridden legally on private land. The majority of the accidents had happened on public land, roads and parks. Up to 1.2 million people in England are believed to privately own e-scooters, which are available to buy from many high street retailers. “Clearly, reporting these accidents is important to influence and change policy,” the researchers told the Emergency Medicine journal, adding: “There must also be an onus on retailers to clearly advise customers of the law, and policymakers to regulate private e-scooters, such as with speed limiters, or mandate helmet use.” Rented e-scooter are legal to ride on public roads. The rider must be 16 years old or older and hold at least a provisional driving licence. Rental scooters are typically speed limited to 15mph, and companies must have appropriate insurance. In June, a 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named because of his age, was sentenced to a youth referral order and a driving ban, after earlier pleading guilty to causing the death of his friend Jacob Calland, 14, who was a passenger on the back of his e-scooter when it collided with a car in Wythenshawe, Manchester. After her son’s death, Carly Calland launched Jacob’s Journey, a campaign that aims to raise awareness about dangerous e-scooter use and the legalities around riding them. “No words will ever be able to describe the pain caused by Jacob’s death,” she told the court in a statement as his friend was sentenced. “My heart has been smashed into a thousand pieces and there is nothing that can be done to fix it. My life is a living nightmare.” DC Steve Pennington from Greater Manchester Police’s serious collision investigation unit said: “E-scooters are not harmless toys and they can lead to horrific consequences when used by inexperienced riders and without the due care required. I would urge parents to check what their children are using and to ensure they are educated about the risks of using them on the road.” A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “These are concerning findings, and our thoughts are with anyone who has been injured on our roads. It is illegal for private e-scooters to be used on roads, pavements or in other public spaces, including by under-16s, and we’re bringing forward new laws to make their use safe and legal, including consulting on requirements like helmets.”