A few years ago, I bought one of those irresistible Christmas presents that you pretend are for the kids, but which you really want to try out yourself. 

It was a quad bike. To be accurate, it was a mini quad bike. It was superb. In length and breadth it was no bigger than an armchair, but it was full of grunt.

We would all pile on it in a pyramid of humanity and careen around the garden: up the bank, into the ditch, slap bang into the tree. It had fat round tyres with deep grass-chewing treads. It roared with a proper trail bike roar, and sent out pleasing clouds of aromatic white smoke.

We gave it some welly, I can tell you; and after a while our tyres began to feel the strain. One day the technical demands became too much. I gave it away to the next door neighbour, who is more mechanically minded than I am, and whose kids are younger and certainly less heavy.

So it is in his interests that I now report an appalling development in the life of off-road quad bike owners. If my neighbour wants to continue to enjoy that quad bike; if he wants to thrill his children; if he wants to exercise the right of every free-born Brit to pootle blissfully on his own quad bike on his own private land – then he is going to have to pay. As things stand, he is going to have to find insurance. Yes: to find a broker to cover the risk posed by his quad bike – to any human being or property coming into contact with that rumbustious rugrat of a machine. 

I hope I do not have to try too hard to convince you that this is insane. Of course this quad bike is dangerous, in the sense that the contents of your cutlery drawer are dangerous. It is perfectly true that if you drove that quad bike at full tilt over a 6ft ha-ha, you would probably do yourself an injury. If you happened to be hurtling round a blind corner, and your neighbour happened to be coming the other way, planning to remonstrate with you, perhaps, about the noise, your neighbour might suffer in the collision. But this country has rubbed along for decades – more than a century, in fact – without seeing any statutory requirement to insure off-road vehicles such as quad bikes. 

Where does it come from, this new rule, or this threat of regulation? There is not a single MP – not even a Liberal Democrat – who has campaigned for the compulsory insurance of off-road children’s quad bikes. There is no pressure group; there have been no querulous voices on the Today programme. There is no need, no call, no demand, no appetite, no reason, no justification, not even the shred of the beginnings of a case – in the United Kingdom – for this kind of pointless and expensive burden on millions of people.

David Fuller's view

It is hardly surprising that the number of new regulations increases in line with the number of unelected regulators in office.   

Here is a PDF of Boris Johnson’s article.