One of London's largest e-bike operators will introduce third-party liability insurance from September, following reporting by The Times that found people suffering life-altering injuries in collisions with its bikes were receiving no compensation.
Forest, which operates across 20 of the capital's boroughs, will offer the cover at no extra cost to users. The new policy will protect third parties who are injured or whose property is damaged by cyclists on Forest e-bikes. The decision makes Forest the latest - though not yet the last - operator to add liability cover to its offering, and throws a sharp light on the fragmented and inconsistently applied insurance landscape across London's micro-mobility market.
In October last year, Sandy Peters was thrown face-first into a brick wall by a teenager riding a Forest bike on the pavement in Sutton. Paramedics placed a tube down her throat and suctioned blood from her airways multiple times before she was rushed to hospital, where she remained for seven days, according to The Times. She still has several broken bones, which will take up to two years to heal, and faces an estimated £10,000 worth of dental repair work after permanent nerve damage left her unable to bite. Peters has been paying for her own transport to weekly hospital appointments and any private medical bills from her own pocket - because, until September, Forest carried no third-party liability cover.
She is not alone. Jane Ouartsi spent 36 days in hospital and had to relearn how to walk after being hit by a boy on a Lime bike. Despite Lime carrying third-party insurance at the time, Ouartsi received no compensation, according to The Times - an outcome that underscores a problem that extends well beyond which operators have cover and which do not.
Forest's move does not resolve a market-wide inconsistency. Competitors including Lime, Bolt and Santander already include third-party liability coverage, at a cost to the rider of approximately one third of a penny per minute, according to The Times. Voi, which operates in seven London boroughs, carries third-party insurance for its scooters - where it is a legal requirement - but not for its e-bikes. The company told The Times it was exploring insurance options.
The inconsistency matters because the injury profile of e-bike incidents is materially more severe than conventional cycling collisions. A peer-reviewed study of emergency department visits at a London university hospital between 2022 and 2025, published in ScienceDirect, found that e-bike injuries were associated with a 41% higher relative risk of head or neck injury than non-e-bike injuries, and that 81% of e-bike riders involved were not wearing helmets. There were 5,823 cyclists seriously injured on UK roads in 2024, according to Department for Transport data, with e-bike casualties representing a growing and distinct sub-category within that total.
Will Jansen, Forest's chief operating officer, said the direction of travel was clear.
"I think it's quite clear that there's been a call for e-bike operators in London to have the rider liability cover," he told The Times. "These kind of questions are getting raised along with a number of other things around raising safety standards or, you know, what a template scheme could look like."
Jansen said Forest could not afford third-party insurance when it was founded in 2020, with many providers reluctant to work with a start-up e-bike operator. Six years on, the market has moved - Lime, Bolt and Santander are all carrying cover, specialist micro-mobility underwriters have emerged, and the loss data that was absent in 2020 now exists. The capacity question that prevented Forest from insuring in its early years is no longer the barrier it was; the question the sector is now grappling with is whether the products that capacity is producing are fit for purpose.
The more troubling issue raised by campaigners is not which operators have cover, but how that cover behaves when a claim is made. Phillip Watkins, an activist and the former head of insurance at Bolt, said significant loopholes in existing third-party policies meant injured pedestrians could still find themselves without recourse.
"There remains much to be done to ensure that these insurances react in the way that the public would rightly expect, as motor insurance would, with no possibility of denial of a claim by an injured third party," Watkins told The Times.
The exclusions he identified are material: policies typically do not respond where a rider is on the pavement, under age, or has passed through a red light. Sandy Peters was hit by a teenager riding on the pavement. Jane Ouartsi's claim against Lime failed despite the company carrying cover. In both cases, the existence of a policy was not sufficient to produce compensation.
Watkins called for third-party insurance to be made mandatory across all personal and commercial e-mobility, including cargo bikes and electric unicycles. "It shouldn't be a lottery for injured third parties whether they will have the prospect of compensation," he told The Times.
Peters said she was encouraged by Forest's announcement but echoed the call for government intervention. Both Forest and Voi said they were working with insurers to create more robust policies, with Forest saying it was looking for the most "sensible approach" so that "insurance companies aren't going to be the only winners out of this."
The current position - voluntary cover, inconsistent exclusions, no mandatory minimum standard for operator liability insurance in rental fleets - creates an unresolved challenge that sits at the intersection of regulation, policy design, and market appetite.
Compliant e-bikes meeting the EAPC definition require no insurance under UK law, and the Government confirmed in a June 2025 Lords debate that it has no current plans to legislate for e-bike registration or insurance, citing concerns about discouraging cycling, according to Hansard. The mandatory insurance requirement that exists for e-scooters - a legal requirement specifically because they are classified differently - has not been extended to rental e-bike fleets. That regulatory asymmetry is where the current controversy sits.
The micro-mobility market in London alone involves millions of trips annually across multiple operators, a diverse rider population with widely varying ages and behaviour, and a physical risk profile that existing policy wordings were not designed to accommodate cleanly. Watkins's comparison to motor insurance is the appropriate benchmark: a third-party motor claim cannot be denied on the basis that the driver was speeding or ran a red light. The equivalent standard does not yet exist for e-bike liability.
The product that would close this gap - a genuinely responsive third-party liability policy for shared e-mobility, structured so that injured pedestrians cannot be excluded by conduct clauses - has not yet been designed. The work of creating it falls to underwriters willing to price the risk properly, brokers who understand the exposure well enough to articulate it, and an operator community that has just demonstrated, through Forest's announcement, that commercial appetite to carry the cover exists. Whether government mandate or market innovation gets there first is the open question.
