Parents are being asked to think again about buying their children electric scooters for Christmas by the police.

E-scooters are illegal to ride on roads, pavements or public places in the island. However they can be driven on private land with the landowner’s permission.

In the United Kingdom, the law is the same, however, some locations have started trials for privately-owned e-scooters to be rode in public places.

UK law states that you also need a full driver’s licence to ride an e-scooter anywhere, the scooter must also be fully-insured as it is classified as a PLEV vehicle, the same classification as a moped.

Gravity, an island-based company, has permission from the Department of Food, Environment and Agriculture to run guided tours of the South Barrule plantation on electric scooters.

The scooters used on the tours have a speed limit of 10 miles-per-hour and are the only legal option to ride an e-scooter in the island aside from private landowner permission.

In some cities, e-scooters are able to be rented and paid for using contactless payments, riding an E-scooter that has not been rented is illegal in the UK and can result in a fine, penalty points on your driving licence and the impounding of the electric scooters.

A spokesperson for the police’s Road Policing Unit (RPU) said it has publicised this campaign because it ‘was and still is getting a lot of queries from the public about purchasing them, especially running up to Christmas’.

However, it also confirmed that ‘the constabulary have had very few complaints about e-scooters’.

The police could not provide figures about incidents involving e-scooters and stressed that ‘this post is not incident related.’