Prosecutors in England and Wales currently rely on the Offences Against The Person Act 1861, which deals with horse-drawn carriages. Motorists, however, can be sentenced to life in prison for causing death by dangerous driving.

Mr Shapps said that prosecutions of killer cyclists in England and Wales depends on “a legal relic of the horse-drawn era” or “manslaughter”, which for reasons unexplained he described as “a draconian option”.

He added: “We need the cycling equivalent of death by dangerous driving to close a gap in the law and impress on cyclists the real harm they can cause when speed is combined with lack of care.

“For example, traffic lights are there to regulate all traffic. But a selfish minority of cyclists appear to believe that they are somehow immune to red lights.

“We need to crack down on this disregard for road safety. Relatives of victims have waited too long for this straightforward measure.”

He added: “As we move into an era of sustained mass cycling, a thoroughly good thing, we must bring home to cyclists – too often themselves the victims of careless or reckless motoring – that the obligation to put safety first applies equally to every road user.

“There can be no exceptions.”

Solicitor Nick Freeman, known as Mr Loophole, said: “I’ve been petitioning the government to do this for a long time. There should be parity between all road users – motorists, cyclists, e-scooter users.

“How perverse is it that at the moment there is no speed limit for cyclists? You can have a 20mph limit but many fit cyclists can go faster than that – but there is nothing to stop or deter them.

“There’s also no drink-drive limit for cyclists. The law in relation to motorists is moving swiftly, but the law in relation to cyclists remains in the Dark Ages.”

Thomas Mitchell, senior solicitor at Cycle Law Scotland, told Scottish Legal News that cyclists who kill or cause serious injury would be prosecuted under culpable homicide or culpable and reckless conduct.

He added: “However this is very rare. There have been no cases reported of prosecutions of cyclists for culpable homicide in Scotland and the last prosecution of a cyclist for culpable and reckless conduct was in 1956.

“The Transport Secretary’s focus on this issue seems misguided considering that of the 346 pedestrians killed on Britain’s roads in 2020, only four were involved in a collision with a cyclist and, between 2015 and 2019, 99.3 per cent of pedestrian fatalities involved motor vehicles, while only 0.7 per cent involved bicycles.”

Mr Mitchell concluded: “In Scotland, the common law can be used to prosecute in cases where a cyclists has killed or seriously injured another but as these cases are so few and far between, we must question whether the law does need modernising in this area?”