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news
Big Ben © Simon MacMichaelBudget reaction: £2 billion for active travel not enough for government to meet its own targets, warn campaigners
Active travel campaigners have said that funding for active travel announced in today’s Budget and Spending Review from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak will not be enough to meet the government’s own target of doubling levels of cycling and increasing levels of walking by 2025.
In his address to the House of Commons this afternoon, Sunak said that the government would provide “funding for buses, cycling and walking totalling more than £5 billion” in England – misreported by the BBC in its live online coverage of the announcement as “spending on cycling infrastructure of more than £5 billion.”
In its Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021 (SR21) published today, the government says it “will invest over £5 billion in buses and cycling during this Parliament.”
It claims that the funding “delivers a step change in investment, delivering the commitments in Bus Back Better and Gear Change” – the latter being the document that set out its active travel pledges.
More than £3 billion will be spent on improving bus fares, services and infrastructure, and the government also says there will be “more than £2 billion of investment in cycling and walking over the Parliament,” and claims that it includes “£710 million of new active travel funding at SR21.”
It added: “This funding will build hundreds of miles of high quality, segregated cycle lanes, provide cycle training for every child and deliver an e-bike support programme to make cycling more accessible.”
It is unclear, however, whether that £710 million really is ‘new’ money, given that it is now 18 months since Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced in the House of Commons in February 2020 that the government would be spending £5 billion on buses and active travel between then and 2025.
And if – as Johnson promised – £2 billion of that money is for active travel, equivalent to £400 million a year, the question must be asked of when that funding is going to come fully on-stream, given that, for example, the amounts allocated to local authorities under the first two tranches of the £225 million emergency active travel funding announced last year total £217.5 million.
Besides the “more than £2 billion” set aside for cycling and walking, £6.9 billion in funding for eight English city regions announced today will also include some spend on cycling.
That includes investing in active travel in Greater Manchester, a Dutch-style roundabout in Bradford, and improvements for cyclists and pedestrians in Tees Valley and Bath and Bristol – although as this article from Transport Network points out, again it does not appear to be ‘new’ money.
Responding to today’s announcement, Sarah Mitchell, CEO of the charity Cycling UK, said the money fell well short of the investment needed for government targets for growing active travel set out in last year’s Gear Change document to be met.
“Ring-fenced funding of £2 billion over five years will enable councils to get on with building hundreds of miles of separated cycling routes in both urban and rural areas,” she said.
“However it won’t deliver the tens of thousands of miles needed to create the ‘world class’ network that the government promised in its Gear Change vision document last year.
“Meeting the government’s own targets to double cycling and increase walking by 2025 will require investment of between £6 to £8 billion,” she added.
“If England is to have a chance of making this target, local authorities must be able to make up the shortfall and secure additional funding if we’re to ‘build back better’.”
Xavier Brice, chief executive of the sustainable transport charity, Sustrans, warned that current levels of funding for active travel meant it was “unlikely” that the targets the government had set itself for 2025 would be missed.
“Last week, the UK Government’s Net Zero Strategy reiterated the target for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be cycled or walked by 2030,” he said.
“This is a very ambitious target that highlights the need for long-term, reliable investment in active travel, and also public transport.
"However, whilst the £2 billion of funding is a great starting point for building up walking and cycling, the UK government’s existing targets for 2025, which include doubling cycling, are unlikely to be met, and so we look forward to the government setting out how they will meet the 2030 target in the forthcoming second Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy,” he added.
Meanwhile, with less than a week to go until the start of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, the government has been criticised for continuing to freeze fuel duty and pledging to reduce air passenger duty for domestic flights – with Green Party MP Caroline Lucas tweeting that it looked as though Sunak “didn’t get the memo on the climate emergency.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- brooksby 2 sec ago
You mean that they are Otherwise Law-Abiding™ ?
- brooksby 7 min 53 sec ago
What fresh devilry is this??? - perhaps they had a design for some handlebars, and another design for some forks, and somewhere along the line the...
- brooksby 11 min 32 sec ago
And finally: I wonder how many of the "more than 3,000" signatures on that petition are actually locals, who live or work there (and are not just...
- Doug_D 1 hour 47 min ago
Another book suggestion - I can highly recommend "Lost Summers and Half-Forgotten Afternoons: A Mint Sauce collection" - a beautifully presented...
- chrisonabike 3 hours 5 sec ago
But... the last is only not the case with drivers on normal roads because driving on the cycle path / footway / rolling a vehicle up there is seen...
- mdavidford 3 hours 38 min ago
I think you're missing an opportunity to pack even more tech into it - add accelerometers that can detect whether they're pedalling or stepping....
- chrisonabike 4 hours 2 min ago
Thanks. I guess the question is "need". If the road is busy, it sounds like it is a desired route between places? In which case (given this an...
- mdavidford 4 hours 10 min ago
Don't know what you mean. I thought my suggestion was entirely practical.
- Rapha Nadal 4 hours 45 min ago
I'd buy a motorbike fo rthat kind of money!
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62 comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59069121
How can Rishi Sunak say that he is not prepared to borrow money to tackle the climate crisis and at the same time find money to cut tax on short haul flights (where there are cleaner options ie trains) and plough huge sums of money into building new roads which we all know will only encourage yet more road traffic. Refusing to borrow money to tackle climate change is like being on a sinking ship and refusing to borrow money to repair the hole. At least when you drown you won't owe any money! Madness!!!😡
What you saw yesterday is indicative of a struggle in Government between those who want to change things for the better (there are some, I promise - and £2 billion is more than we have EVER had) and the politics and wrestle for control at the top table.
HMT are clearly trying to show who is in charge. It's our money they are spending, never forget that, and we must keep challenging decisions that most of us see as insane. The fuel and air duty decisions alone point to a complete and utter lack of awareness and recognition of the dire situation we are in.
I expect to be shouted at by a woman with loose dogs telling me I shouldn't be cycling on the pavement down a brand new Sir Chris Boardman beeline soon.
I was once shouted at by a woman for endangering her dog, off the leash, on the Forest of Dean mountain bike circuit.
I was walking near an unfamiliar mountain bike trail with my dog during the summer. The end of the trail was marked with some sort of no cycling sign - so that cyclists woud know not to cycle the wrong way through the trail. However, it was a lot less clear to pedestrians and I almost walked through it - and (from a distance) I saw quite a few other people walking that way.
It was only because I have some idea of what a mountain bike trail looks like that I realised it wasn't a foot path.
Yep. Apart from Manchester and London, cycling infrastructure is almost exclusively designed to get pesky cyclists off the road and stop them from apparently slowing down cars.
So cyclists get to share a crappy failing pavement blocked with trees / lightposts / bollards / signs with pedestrians and dogs, giving way to superior humans in their cars at every intersection, and sitting at the bottom of the priority queue at every traffic-light-controlled crossing.
I'd be happy with infrastructure that was designed to do that.....
Sounds like an ambitious target to commit to an even more ambitious target next time. Luckily if they can only get cycling down to 0.5% of trips then they might just be able to double it within the time allowed.
Cynicism's wearying but marginally less so than being naive. We've recently passed the 25 year anniversary of the 1996 National Cycling strategy and a recent hearing saw essentially everything in the same position with the government asking the same questions and plucking "targets" out of the air in the same way. I'm - cautiously - less cynical about Sustrans than I was but if they're telling you that you won't be able to fudge some declaration of success you've definitely not pulled your finger out.
Cynicism? Realism, surely?
Funny how the self-identified "Green Chancellor" didn't say the word green once in his address to parliament. The most puzzling thing is why he wasn't glowing bright red, as everything in this budget is a contradiction of what they've been doing for the past eleven years. Possibly the least tacit admission of defeat ever.
Anyone who actually thought that they were serious about active travel will be sadly disillusioned by now, but maybe they'll learn from it, and not trust a bunch of liars led by a an incorrigible, congenital liar next time.
This would appear to be normal tory election tactics; austerity for years then they take the foot off the hose a year before the next election and the gullible forget all the bad years.
I'd a appreciate a like or two, at least for my restraint in the use of language.
Unparliamentary! Better that the last bloody time though, have a like.
The devil is in the detail as always.
Seems like a pretty decent allocation to active travel on first glance but will need to let the IFS etc get their teeth into it before we will actually know.
Is this misleading spin or outright dishonesty from the government?
You decide; the government is led by Boris the Liar.
What's the difference? And why would we care either way?
You don't know what you're talking about. Fear of motor vehicles is what puts most people off cycling.
Potholes may be your main problem, but it's not all about you.
He also doesn't know what he's talking about on ebikes.
Which implies that he knows what he's talking about on other matters; no.
I think the rest of the forum is best placed to judge that. I wouldn’t be too confident if I were you.
"I was"
Bloody empty. Everyone of them.
Yep, those cycle lanes have help up pretty well over time, probably thanks to not having metal boxes weighing between 1.5 and 10 tonnes sharing them.
And unicorns and leprechauns will frolic in the streets.
Well, at least until the next time it rains, anyway.
Hear hear! Put it in the money pit! I wish they'd come and fix the potholes and the waves in the tarmac and craters caused by these cyclists stop-starting just before every bus stop. If it weren't for them - probably hefty unfit ones on eBikes or speeding TT racers having to slam on the brakes - those cheap patch repairs would stay put!
Actually I really do wish they'd fix these if they can't provide some carriageway for people that's not ravaged by heavy vehicles. Apologies for the picture quality, this is far from the worst local spot, just one I had to hand.
Could there be a better way? (I do love a bicycledutch video...) Or a change of material?
No quick fixes for this in the UK I suspect. There is something amiss with our combination of public provision of highways but a very laissez-faire approach to their private use. Companies obviously derive benefit from them (and not just directly e.g. haulage, transport companies) and that's good - but do they adequately compensate for the wear? There's also the issue of companies frequently digging up roads and making substandard repairs. I suspect it's always the "chain of contractors" and a feeling that this is unlikely to be challenged.
On the plus side, at least bicycles have been given their own space away from the, er, bicycles...
I'm pleased you've noticed one of the innovative features of Edinburgh's Covid "spaces for people" schemes. Most cycle lanes just "give up" at bus stops or pretend that you'll limbo under the bus. I mean, the bus has to be next to the people on the kerb so it's just impossible to have a cycle lane too, right? However, taking inspiration from the knight's move in chess our sign-painters have literally jumped round the obstacle! Two lengths forward, one sideways.
To give them their due they do understand a bus stop bypass here - but like all councils when the covid cash came they couldn't not spend it. Can't do infra for the cost of paint though.
If you fix potholes they will be fixed, for now. But yes, they should fix them because they are a very real danger to users of two wheeled vehicles.
I totally agree that historically, cycle lanes get built (a few occasionally), but very little ever gets done to maintain them. Near where I live, a very nice new 4-ish metre shared use path was built at the end of last summer, by the middle of summer, much of it was so overgrown it was barely a metre wide, some places less than 18 inches.
Remember Nigel’s posts show that he isn’t interested in encouraging people to cycle.
His posts, when not made to inflame a response, are to defend motorists and motor car dominated society. Or right wing culture war dominated posts
His contributions don’t merit a response. He is not interested in active travel, the subject of this thread, so let us not get distracted once more.
thats an interesting graphic, it suggests that if you don't get people cycling on the roads by their mid twenties there is much less chance later.
No, "fear of motor vehicles" is what most people *say* puts them off cycling. What actually puts them off cycling is that driving is more comfortable and convenient - that and the fact that they want to get as much use as possible out of the vast sums of money they spend on their car.
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