London Scrapped Its Biggest Motorcycle Safety Programme as Rider Deaths Keep Rising

Motorcyclist deaths on Great Britain’s roads rose for the second year running in 2025, provisional government figures show, climbing 13 per cent to 384. It is the only major road user group where fatalities are still climbing while overall road deaths edge down. Against that backdrop, the Metropolitan Police has disbanded the six-officer team that ran the country’s biggest motorcycle safety training programme, and will no longer deliver it in London in its previous form.

The programme is BikeSafe, a nationally recognised scheme that has run for 25 years and pairs riders with serving police motorcyclists for subsidised, post-test skills training. The Met’s Motorcycle Safety Team was, by a distance, the largest single provider of the course anywhere in the country.

What London is losing

Before the restructure, the Met’s dedicated team delivered between 800 and 900 BikeSafe courses every year, alongside around 200 specialist CourierSafe sessions built for delivery riders, a group that spends far more hours in London traffic than the average commuter. It was also the only force in the country offering the course to provisional licence holders at scale, meaning newer riders in the capital had access to police-led training that is not replicated anywhere else.

That specialist unit has now been folded into a broader Road Danger Reduction Team as part of a wider Metropolitan Police reorganisation, and Transport for London has confirmed that dedicated policing teams covering motorcycles, cycles and commercial vehicles will no longer exist in their previous, specialist form. Engagement and education work is being absorbed into general enforcement teams instead.

Colin Brown, Campaigns Director at the Motorcycle Action Group, called the decision an extraordinary betrayal of London’s motorcyclists. He pointed out that the change arrived just as BikeSafe was celebrating 25 years of proven results and had secured new funding for national expansion, and argued the Met is choosing revenue-generating enforcement over an education programme with a long record of cutting casualties. He also noted that Transport for London had reportedly offered increased funding to keep the specialist team running, which the force chose not to take up in its existing form.

The timing collides with the national casualty data

Motorcyclists already carry a level of risk on the roads that is completely out of proportion to how many miles they cover. The Department for Transport’s provisional 2025 figures put motorcyclist deaths at 384, up from a rise of 9 per cent recorded the year before, meaning fatalities among riders have now increased for two years in a row while cyclist and car occupant casualty trends have moved very differently over the same period.

The Road Safety Trust, a charity that funds road casualty reduction research, described the previous year’s 9 per cent rise as a deeply worrying trend and called for smarter infrastructure, better junction design and continued investment in rider training schemes such as BikeSafe. It specifically credited Project PRIME, a scheme improving motorcyclist visibility at bends that started life as a Trust-funded pilot, as the kind of intervention that saves lives when it is properly resourced and rolled out.

That is precisely the type of specialist, rider-focused work that has just lost its biggest single delivery team in the country. London is a uniquely difficult environment to ride in, with filtering traffic, congested junctions, bus lanes and a fast-growing volume of delivery riders sharing the road, and it is the city where the specialist policing model built to manage those specific risks has now been withdrawn.

An education programme built on trust that commercial providers cannot easily copy

Part of what made the Met’s version of BikeSafe distinctive was who delivered it. The instructors were serving police motorcyclists, riding the same roads in the same conditions as the people they were training, rather than commercial instructors brought in from outside. That gave the course a level of credibility that is difficult to replicate, especially for riders who might otherwise view any interaction with a police motorcyclist as enforcement rather than education. At around £45 a day for participants, it also offered a level of value that is hard to match once a specialist police-led team is no longer running it at scale.

The debate the decision has opened up is really about the balance between enforcement and education in road safety policy. Motorcycle Action Group representatives have argued that removing a proven, casualty-reducing education programme in favour of concentrating resources on enforcement sends a clear signal about where riders sit on London’s list of transport priorities, especially with motorcyclists remaining heavily over-represented in serious injury and fatality statistics relative to how many miles they collectively ride each year.

London’s roads present a specific set of risks that make specialist training more valuable, not less: heavy congestion, bus lanes, a growing number of e-scooters sharing space with motorcycles, and a fast-expanding delivery rider population working long hours in dense traffic. Institutional knowledge built up by a dedicated team over years does not transfer automatically into a broader enforcement unit, and once a specialist team is disbanded, riders and campaigners alike say it is rarely reassembled with the same depth of experience.

Training options that are still open to you

BikeSafe itself is not disappearing nationally. Courses are still running in 2026 across other forces, with the price for participants actually falling this year to £78 for all dates, down from £84 previously. The gap is specifically in London, where the volume and provisional-licence access the Met’s team offered is not currently being replaced.

• Search for a BikeSafe workshop outside London at bikesafe.co.uk. Many forces run sessions on weekends and evenings, and a short amount of extra travel can still get you onto a police-led course at the discounted 2026 rate.
• If you are a newer rider on a provisional licence, ask your BikeSafe contact directly whether provisional-licence places are available in your area, as access varies significantly by force now that London’s large-scale provision has stopped.
• Look into advanced training through IAM RoadSmart or RoSPA, both of which run structured post-test courses for riders of all experience levels and are active across London and the rest of the country.
• Delivery riders who relied on CourierSafe sessions should check with their platform or employer whether an alternative safety briefing or training subsidy is available, as CourierSafe was folded into the same Met restructure as BikeSafe.
• If you want to see the specialist team reinstated, the Motorcycle Action Group is asking riders to contact their local force and to respond to any public consultation on London policing restructuring. MAG argues decisions like this are more likely to be reversed when riders make their views heard directly.
• Whatever your experience level, take advantage of Project PRIME’s growing rollout in Scotland and other parts of the UK if it reaches your area, as its focus on motorcyclist visibility at bends addresses one of the specific hazard types most linked to serious rider injuries.

What makes this cut different from a routine budget reshuffle is the timing against the case Motorcycle Action Group and the Road Safety Trust have both made publicly: BikeSafe was not a struggling scheme in need of rescue, it was 25 years old, still growing, and had reportedly secured funding to expand nationally in the same period the Met chose to fold its own team into general enforcement. Education and enforcement are not interchangeable tools. A rider who has never sat on a police-led course does not become safer because a patrol car passes more often, and a delivery rider working long shifts through filtering traffic gets far more from a CourierSafe session built around that specific risk than from a generic safety campaign. Losing the provisional-licence access the Met offered hits hardest for the riders statistically most at risk, since new riders in their first year on the road are heavily overrepresented in serious-injury data across every force that publishes it.

Two years of rising motorcyclist deaths and the loss of the country’s largest dedicated rider-training team have arrived in the same twelve months. Riders who want the safety net that specialist, police-led training has provided for 25 years now need to look outside London to find it, at least until the capital’s replacement arrangements become clear.

Sources:

• https://www.visordown.com/news/mag-raises-concerns-about-future-bikesafe
• https://motorbikemad.com/blogs/press/bikesafe-25th-anniversary-overshadowed-by-met-police-restructure
• https://www.roadsafetytrust.org.uk/news/motorcyclist-deaths-rise-9-a-stark-warning-for-road-safety
• https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-provisional-results-2025
• https://bikesafe.co.uk/