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Big Ben © Simon MacMichaelMPs call for £10 a head spend on cycling as Cycling Delivery Plan consultation nears close
Three MPs belonging to the All Party Parliamentary Cycling revolution have urged the government to commit itself to spending £10 a head on cycling in a letter to The Times.
The group’s co-chairs, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge Dr Julian Huppert, and Dudley North Labour MP Ian Austin were joined in making the appeal by its treasurer, Dr Sarah Wollaston, who is the Conservative MP for Totnes in Devon.
They wrote: "The future of UK cycling will be decided soon as the Department for Transport brings to a close its consultation on the draft cycling delivery plan. The government has already acknowledged cycling’s health benefits and its high return on investment. While the DfT’s draft plan is a step forward, it is still flawed.
"For cycle growth, we need long-term dedicated funding of at least £10 per head a year, which could be met from existing budgets. Cycling and its benefits are not purely a transport issue, and there must be full commitment and collaboration from other government departments in the delivery of the plan.
"Overall, the plan must be ambitious, and set itself the target of an increase of cycle use from 2 per cent to 10 per cent of all journeys by 2025 as recommended in the report Get Britain Cycling from the all-party parliamentary cycling group.
"Today we call on the government to use this opportunity to create the prime minister’s “cycling revolution,” they concluded.
The consultation remains open until 27 November and can be found here.
On Monday evening, the Department for Transport hosted an hour-long webchat on the Draft Cycling Delivery Plan. A transcript has been published on the DfT’s website.
The online event, led by Naomi Green and Junakie Begum from the DfT’s Cycling and Walking Team, does not appear to have been widely publicised in advance and attracted just seven contributors.
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.
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7 comments
I'm really worried that this much-vaunted "£10 per head" spend will be utterly pointless if there isn't a national plan in place - the infrastructure that needs to be built and the people/companies in place to build it.
Without that it'll simply end up as some big pot of money handed out willy-nilly to councils who are promising some vague "cycling spend" and we'll end up with a whole load of green paint splashed randomly around the place and a forest of blue "cyclists dismount" signs.
Every single road build / maintenance project needs to incorporate cycling right from the start and not some weird "trial", not some unique "ooh we're reinventing the wheel" thing - a proper build of existing Dutch/Danish style proven designs. Yes it may not match up with the next junction down the road quite yet but this isn't going to happen overnight.
However without that kind of national plan and national design standards, it isn't going to happen at all no matter how many £ per head of population you throw at it.
I don't think it's sufficient to simply whack £10p/h into action and hope everything materialises, but I do believe it's necessary. Clearly having vision isn't sufficient either, but also necessary. You need both.
I think pushing for £10p/h before the next major transport policy is announced in sensible. For one thing, I think that people might only begin to take cycle planning seriously (rather than occasionally implementing the odd dodgy token gesture) when sustained funding is clear and available. It's hard to plan for something that only flits into possibility every few years.
Fundamentally, it will be an uphill struggle, with many battles to be fought on many fronts. But actually getting a reliable source of money for cycling seems a good place to start. Arguably, the best place to start. On that basis, this sort of pressure is A Good Thing.
So, they want to increase cycle use from 2% to 10% but they don't want to spend 10% of the roads budget getting there even after decades of cycling infrastructure neglect.
This per head thing is a red herring, the way forward is to build cycling into all new infrastructure - if that's not 'affordable' then the new infrastructure itself should be considered unaffordable.
I've shared this a few times, the Governments cycling targets in a nutshell (via Private Eye).
http://i.imgur.com/0iEJGjA.jpg
"All Party Parliamentary Cycling revolution"
I guess should actually read "All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group"
Meanwhile, last week at the CBI conference, David Cameron announced a £15 billion investment on something he called a "road revolution".
I'm actually quite impressed.