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Reckless drivers 'blighting roads' hiring Ferrari supercars 'deadly in wrong hands'

Labour MP for Halifax Holly Lynch says a clampdown is needed on hire companies and drivers taking out vehicles like Lamborghinis and Ferraris and putting road users, pedestrians and the driver at risk

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A Ferrari supercar ended up on its roof in a dramatic crash in the High Peak area of Derbyshire(Image: Derbyshire Police / SWNS)

Supercars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris are being hired out and drivenat "dangerously high speeds", blighting UK roads, it's been claimed.

Holly Lynch, the Labour MP for Halifax, said her constituents had been raising the issue of high-powered vehicles - where the driver is often not the owner - being used "recklessly" in and around neighbourhoods for years.

The MP recalled how a police officer had recently stopped two high-performance vehicles on the same 40 mile-an-hour road in Halifax - one going at 76 miles an hour and the other 86 miles an hour, Yorkshire Live reports.

"In recent years, we've seen a rise in cars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris being hired out to someone who goes on to pass the keys to someone else, if not, several other people," she said during a ten-minute rule bill in Parliament.

"Vehicles are then driven at dangerously high speeds, putting other road users, pedestrians and the driver themselves at risk."

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Ferrari supercar on its roof, having smashed through a barrier on the M621 near Leeds(Image: PA)

Ms Lynch said she was proposing two measures to tighten the law, including that all rental vehicles with a horsepower of 300 and that are intended for use on public highways be fitted with a black box.

This would be able to record information on how, when and where a vehicle is being driven and the information would be made available to the police on request.

The second is that a person hiring a car must be insured as the named driver for that specific vehicle for the entire duration of the rental agreement.

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The hire car company must be satisfied of this before allowing the driver to take the vehicle.

The MP said that in many cases, the drivers hiring the cars do not have the appropriate insurance and often claim it is covered in the rental agreement, or that the person who had hired the car had given them consent.

"In a majority of cases they will not have the experience of handling a 300 plus horsepower vehicle, which we know can be deadly in the wrong hands," she said.

She said her proposals might sound "incredibly basic, and you would hope this is happening in law already".

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Labour MP Holly Lynch is calling for change(Image: Internet Unknown)

"But as I've already said, too often keys are swapped around those who do not have the appropriate insurance under a vague sense that the car came with a package, which allows others to drive it or that a driver's own existing insurance covers them to drive other vehicles, but it's just not the case."

She is also calling for the government set up a taskforce to tackle the problem, which she said was happening across the country - including in affluent areas of London such as Kensington and Chelsea, where "super rich" visitors hire cars before leaving the country before they are sanctioned.

She wants them to consider introducing measures such as minimum licensing requirements for those seeking to hire supercars of more than 300 horsepower, including being a certain age, a clean licence or a minimum number of years of experience as a driver.

Such amendments would stop "law-abiding" road users for paying the price of small minority, she said.

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