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news
Cyclist in London (Ruoyu Li on Unsplash), Rachel Reeves (World Economic Forum on Flickr, licensed via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)Cycling UK lauds Rachel Reeves for recouping additional £100 million for cycling & walking in Autumn Budget, but “disappointed” with another fuel duty freeze
Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s first budget delivered today has been met with mixed reactions from active travel campaigners and charities, with Cycling UK giving the new administration credit for “recouping additional £100 million funding for cycling and walking infrastructure”, while at the same time, saying it is “disappointed” to see fuel duty frozen yet again, which could further incentivise driving.
While presenting the Autumn Budget, Reeves didn’t spare any mentions for active travel, however, the full document says that the budget is intended to provide “increased investment in local roads maintenance and local transport” by “providing an additional £100 million investment in cycling and walking infrastructure in 2025-26, to support Local Authorities to install cycling infrastructure and upgrade pavements and paths”.
The budget also aims to provide a nearly 50 per cent increase in funding for local roads maintenance to fix an additional one million potholes across England each year.
However, the fuel duty is also set to be frozen, extending the temporary 5p cut for one year “to support hard-working families and businesses” and “save the average car driver £59 in 2025-26”.
Responding to the Chancellor’s Autumn Budget statement and how it relates to transport and active travel, Sarah McMonagle, director of external affairs at Cycling UK, said: “Credit where credit’s due; today the Chancellor has helped to recoup funding for active travel that was cut in March 2023 by committing an additional £100m to cycling and walking infrastructure.
“However, much greater investment is needed if the government is to achieve its ambitious health and economic growth missions. We know that for every £1 spent on cycling and walking schemes, £5.62 worth of wider benefits are achieved. This far surpasses the return on investment for road building.
“We were disappointed to see that fuel duty has been frozen yet again, which means the cost of driving is not increasing in relative terms. Research suggests that in the past, savings from the fuel duty freeze have not been passed down to consumers. Revenue raised from an increase in fuel duty could make public transport more affordable, and cycling and walking much safer through more investment in active travel.
“Increasing investment in walking and cycling stands to benefit us now and in the future. There’s still time to take bold action, and we will continue to impress upon the government the potential for cycling to transform our communities into greener, healthier and more prosperous places to live.”
> “A backward move” – Government slashes active travel budget for England
Yesterday, Cycling UK and British Cycling, along with a host of academics, health groups and cycling organisations wrote to Reeves calling for active travel funding to be increased to 10 per cent of the overall transport budget.
The organisations concluded: "With the right commitment, together we can transform our villages, towns and cities into healthier and more liveable spaces. Investing in walking and cycling won't just help to balance the budget — it would be a promise to prioritise our health, our economy, and our planet.”
Xavier Brice, CEO of walking, wheeling and cycling charity Sustrans said: “Amid a tight spending landscape, it’s great to see investment in transport. Alongside investment in buses, rail, and fixing potholes and pavements, we welcome the additional £100 million investment in cycling and walking paths, reversing previous cuts. This will boost the economy, improve people’s health and help us all get around.”
Transport journalist Carlton Reid wrote: “Budget provides additional £100 mn for cycling and walking infrastructure in 2025-26. This is NOT the "unprecedented level of funding" that Transport Secretary Louise Haigh told Laura Laker was coming. Meanwhile, motorists get yet another fuel duty freeze. Climate change anyone?”
In August, newly appointed Transport Secretary Louise Haigh had pledged “unprecedented levels of funding” in cycling as the Labour party got to work after its landslide election victory earlier in the summer.
Meanwhile, Green Party co-leader and MP for Bristol Central Carla Denyer expressed her frustration at the discounted fuel duty on social media. “Fuel duty staying frozen and discounted for another year, at 10x what it would have cost to keep the £2 bus fare cap, Make it make sense,” she said, referring to the Prime Minister’s announcement that the bus fare cap will increase by a pound in England at the end of this year.
Trade consultant Mark Sutton said: “£100 million extra for walking and cycling in 2025-26 budget for active travel. It’s a drop in the ocean accounting for the reality of change needed & urgency, plus the fact that potholes alone got £500m extra, but at least it’s not a cut.”
In other news from the 2024 Autumn Budget that could affect the UK’s bike shops adversely, Reeves also announced that the business rates relief would drop from 75 to 40 per cent, while National Insurance contributions from employers would increase from 13.8 to 15 per cent from 2027.
The £100 million additional funding comes after the former Conservative government decided to slash the budget for active travel schemes in England outside London in March last year, in what was described as “a backward move” by the Walking & Cycling Alliance (WACA), which estimated that two-thirds of previously promised funding will be lost, making it “impossible” to meet Net Zero and active travel targets.
Adwitiya joined road.cc in 2023 as a news writer after graduating with a masters in journalism from Cardiff University. His dissertation focused on active travel, which soon threw him into the deep end of covering everything related to the two-wheeled tool, and now cycling is as big a part of his life as guitars and football. He has previously covered local and national politics for Voice Wales, and also likes to writes about science, tech and the environment, if he can find the time. Living right next to the Taff trail in the Welsh capital, you can find him trying to tackle the brutal climbs in the valleys.
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42 comments
booze in pubs will be around 20% more expensive after this budget, so much like this 100m announcement, or the announcement to fund electrification of a railway line thats already been completed, the real devil is in the real details, not the soundbites.
Yeah... and it's not selecting reverse gear on the face of it (quite).
But what was the ratio of the active travel budget to the road budget again though? And how many normal junctions (say proper Dutch was the same price for argument's sake) can you get for 100 million?
I'd love to see a commitment to something like we were aiming at * in Scotland eg. a sensible fraction of the transport budget funding every year on active travel, ramping up to start (ATM as Chris Boardman points out we probably can't even spend the money usefully, lack of staff and knowledge never mind will amongst the councillors).
Even this is ignoring the massive "infra debt" we have in terms of all the routes we didn't make accessible to all and public transport we canned to make space for motor vehicles.
But this would be wild dreaming in the UK...
* we didn't quite reach and didn't spend a well as we could have.
I don't know those numbers, but I did see this graphic showing that the cost of motoring has gone up less than the cost of bus travel has gone up faster than the cost of rail travel, which has gone up faster than the cost of motoring.
Via this twitter post - https://x.com/i/bookmarks?post_id=1851616883096633752
How so?
The budget also introduced a number of measures around business rate relief, employers NI, minimum wage as well as putting non draught alcohol (which is often between 1/3rd to half of pubs trade) duty rates up by RPI.
Consequently pubs are looking at between 20k to 75k in additional costs to pay somehow.
The 1p cut on draught beer will be kept by the brewer, it won't be passed onto the pub.
Those in the pub trade I've spoken to estimate a minimum 20p to 30p per pint rise will be needed just to keep operating.
And this is without accounting for more inflation, instability in energy prices or what the IHT changes to farms does, the farms being the ones who grow one of the core ingredients in beer
It seems to me there's been a lot of misinformation and confusion surrounding Inheritance Tax and farming, but regardless - I don't think that a theoretical future increase in the price of beer due to a handful of farms maybe paying inheritance tax is top of my things to worry about.
The increase in the price of all food, incluing barley because of extreme weather because of the climate and nature breakdown on the other hand ...
Well I specifically said without accounting for such things yet, just to highlight some policies impacts might not be felt for a while and might not even be considered a factor, so im not sure what point you were trying to make there.
There have been some increases, e.g. on the first year VED rate, which will at least double. VED will also be payable for EVs, though that was already planned.
I think a lot of that was lurid speculation, with a few leaks. The Daily Telegrunt went full on fruitloop, and have been running fake poverty-porn narratives even about pensioners with quite sizable portfolios of Buy to Let properties.
But that's the Telegrunt in its new putrid edition.
I'm still trying to work this one out. RAF pension, work pension, 2 state pensions but they are hard hit with their 60 buy to lets !!
I'm not sure that this couple are representative of a typical pensioner…
Reminds me of the people complaining about VAT on private schooling because they are so hard done by and just scraping through, yet can currently afford to pay tens of thousands of pounds per year to send their kids there.
It can sometimes be a question of priorities though. Reading one BBC report I was surprised at how much of their income some people spend on school fees. In this report one family spent £8k a year on school fees out of a combined household income of £70k. I know that's not exactly scraping by, but it gave me a different view of private school demographics.
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