Welcome to this morning’s evidence session. It is a one-off session to examine the work of Active Travel England, an Executive agency of the Department for Transport. Could I ask our witnesses to introduce themselves, please?

I am Chris Boardman, the active travel commissioner for England.

I am Graham Grant. I am the director of planning, development and strategy at Active Travel England, and currently deputy chief executive.

Welcome. I will kick off our session with the first question. What is the purpose of Active Travel England as an organisation?

I will keep this really brief. I know it is not where we want to linger. You can start your clock now; that’s absolutely fine. It is really important to context what the point is because some of the decisions are obviously very difficult. In essence, over several decades we have unwittingly designed health out of our streets. We are now driving almost 9 billion more miles around our homes than we were just 10 years ago. The implications of that are quite profound. We now have a quarter of people who won’t consider walking, wheeling or cycling for even really short journeys, which was my experience in Greater Manchester as well. This is leading to things like one in four children now leaving primary school obese. Inactivity is now associated with one in six deaths in the UK. It is a bigger killer than smoking, at a cost of nearly £7.5 billion to the UK economy. It is expected to rise further if action is not taken. The burden on the wider economy is massive; 3 million people are classed as economically inactive due to long-term health conditions. It is dampening our economic growth. We are 20% less active than we were in the 1960s, and that is forecast to rise to 35% less active by 2030 if unchecked. That is about a million and a quarter, Chair. To move to something more positive, there are pay-offs. We have looked at what the cost is of the status quo. The potential pay-offs are significant. We are currently working towards 50% of all trips being cycled or walked. If we get there, that is 4 million fewer sick days in every year. The return in value for money is absolutely enormous—the wider impact. The potential benefits are £124 billion for the economy. That figure was updated this week. This is the Treasury’s appraisal methodology. We had been using 2010 figures for value until earlier this week, hence the figures. Suddenly we realised that the value of this is absolutely enormous.

Thank you for bringing your sector into the wider context of other issues relevant to other Committees, particularly health as you mentioned. The organisation was established in mid-2022. What are you delivering that was not being delivered beforehand?

Active Travel England was set up to address some of the barriers, some of which I have just touched on. Essentially, safety, culture and convenience are the biggest barriers; 70% of people say, “We don’t feel safe.” Active Travel England was set up by the Department for Transport to address the key issues that are in the way. It has recruited just under 90 people, who have been working for just under two years to effect change. We do that in three distinct areas. We inspect and ensure the quality of infrastructure, to make sure it actually meets standards that will make a difference. Our local authority partners have been incredibly supportive. This is something they want to do. Then, it is to upskill and educate. There has been very inconsistent delivery because the expertise simply has not been there. That falls under our remit. Lastly, there is simply informing, to be part of the conversation. The bedrock for most journeys—cycling or walking in particular—has not been there. We are now part of weekly ministerial meetings. I advise the Secretary of State and other Departments as well. The progress in the first two years has been quite remarkable. I will come to that later.

Our questions will probably bring that out more.

On that, I would like to ask how you think Active Travel England has grown and changed over the last two years, and whether you think the responsibilities of Active Travel England have changed.

The impact that the organisation has had is—I am getting close to using the word—unprecedented. It is incredible value for money. I will let Graham speak to the planning part of our role because that is his area. We have used a system called capability ratings with local authorities. This came from my five years of working in Greater Manchester for Andy Burnham, as Active Travel Commissioner and Transport Commissioner, when we realised that just giving local authorities the cash for a high-level ambition was leading to slow delivery. We introduced what we call capability ratings, where a local authority assess themselves, and then we moderate to look at all the things from a political view, how many officers are employed and what you already have in the pipeline and rate it. A four would be a Holland level of ability to deliver. Nobody is a four. A couple of authorities that are leading are classed as three and two. It goes from one down to zero, where they have no interest in changing the status quo. We use that rating to match the type of resource and funding. For example, if a local authority said, “We want to do this high street for £20 million,” we would say, “Well, you’ve never done anything like this before; you haven’t actually got political consensus yet; you’ve only got one officer to do this job; you’re going to fail if you do that. Deliver a set of crossings around a school and everybody will thank you. It’s really good. You can deliver that with what you’ve got, and we will train you in the meantime.” By matching those two things together and taking that approach across the country, we have trained 7,500 officers in the last two years. We have halved—correct me, Graham, if I’ve got this wrong—the delivery time of schemes of that size because we have made sure that we funded things that councils are capable of delivering, so they have won. In the meantime, we have raised capability. It has led to a nearly 10% increase in their capability, and we have increased delivery speed and efficiency. We did that in one year and not two years. It is a model that looks so attractive that it is being considered for much wider transport. It is one of the reasons why our CEO, Danny Williams, is not here. He is now working on integrated transport for the greater picture.

In the light of what you have done, are your priorities changing going forward? Your recent corporate plan did not list your priorities beyond 2024. It would be great to get a little bit more around your strategic priorities for 2025-26.

We are working on that at the moment. The context has changed, obviously. CWIS2—the second cycling and walking investment strategy—comes to an end in March. That statutory document ends in March this year. It needs to be redone and will become the new basis for our corporate plan moving forward. There are obviously changes in terms of devolution that are coming forward. There are the Government’s health missions and other such things. At the moment we are working with our Minister about what our corporate plan looks like from 2025 to 2029 to take into account the changes to the cycling and walking investment strategy, and the integrated national transport strategy. We are trying to dovetail the two to make sure that, at the point in time when the strategy and policy are confirmed, we are set up, as an agency, to be able to deliver that. To your point on the question as to how we have grown, we have come from about 30 people in 2022 to 90 now. Our staff profile has changed from being 29% female in 2022 to 47% female now. The scope of what we have done has changed as well. Obviously, at the start we were just looking at active travel funding. To Chris’s point about delivery, our most recent funding round showed that 45% of construction schemes were delivered within 21 months, which compares with only 11% of comparable local transport schemes from the levelling-up fund. To the point on what we have been doing, we have been linking funding with quality standards. The role of our inspections is to make sure that the funding only goes in if the scheme is good enough to be delivered. That drives up the quality. A really important stat that we have been working on shows that we have seen a 500% improvement in schemes meeting minimum quality standards, from when we start it to when we end. We can also tie that through to the fact that a better-quality scheme sees more people using it. We do not just look at our own funding any more. Through a sponsorship model we get involved with other Departments as well, to help them look at things like levelling-up schemes. We are also embedded in the Department for Transport major road network and large local majors committee to look at big schemes, to make sure that they maximise the opportunity for active travel. We are involved in planning, which you might touch on later. Another key thing that we have been doing is trying to standardise data sources so that in the future we have a good opportunity to look at anything across the country in a standardised way to understand what impact the schemes are having, how quickly people are delivering and what efficiencies we can help them make.

You mentioned that you now meet with Ministers on a weekly basis. Obviously, there has been a change of Government. Has that changed your working relationship with Government? Has it changed or impacted on your priorities?

The political landscape has fluctuated quite considerably since we were formed. In fact, almost from day one we had a very strong mandate and direction to increase levels of cycling, a very clear target that 50% of journeys should be cycled or walked by 2030 and a dedicated budget to achieve that. We were clear on the purpose of that: 3.1 million more people active. We estimated that would reduce GP visits by about 2 million and reduce sick days by 4 million. We were very clear on our purpose. Then very quickly, as ATE became established, the political priorities shifted. What Active Travel England did extremely well was adapt to that environment because we were working with local authorities and enabling them to do something that they already wanted to do. That is a really important point. We have looked at all the local cycling and walking investment plans around the country, and what they have chosen to design and plan for. It is between 15,000 and 20,000 miles. Our client base did not change with the politics. They still needed assistance with good design, and obviously some funding. Although our funding fluctuated massively, the mission did not change because it was embedded in local communities. As we have moved through the political changes, that client base and our role has remained steadfast. I am not quite sure if that answers your question completely. Certainly, the funding changes have impacted us in terms of that 50% by 2030. Well, 2030 is getting more and more challenging. That is a decision above my pay grade, but it has not helped. Devolution is now here to stay, so we are adapting yet again to less central funding and more devolved funding, and how to help local authorities stay on track with the myriad pressures they have in a transport settlement. We have ideas for that, though.

Good morning. This is a quick follow-up before I move to my question. Regular meetings with Ministers of Transport is really good, but you started off talking about health benefits. Do you have meetings with Ministers or officials from other Departments to talk about the benefits of what you are doing?

I preface my answer with two years in existence. We are building a lot of relationships. We directly benefit at least eight Government Departments and nearly all of the Government’s missions. We have reason to interact with lots of Departments. We are quite restricted on headcount. In the planning system—Graham can talk to the scale of what has been achieved with very few people—our public affairs function has largely been me. We have some fantastic allies. Chris Whitty is one of our main, and very active, supporters. He sees the clear benefits of building health back into streets. On the regular meetings with Ministers, there is a weekly operational meeting with Ministers which Graham and the team attend. I advise the Secretary of State directly. I am essentially employed by the Secretary of State. I had an excellent relationship with Louise Haigh. I am now very confident it is exactly the same with Heidi Alexander. That is very strong. I am reaching out to the Department for Education and DCMS. Some people may or may not know that I am also the chairman of Sport England. The title is “Sport”, but actually activity is what Sport England is about. We already have good reach, but I think there is room for a lot more.

It is good that these things are connected. On to my question. What are the barriers to you delivering some of the change that we need?

There are three main barriers to people’s uptake. No. 1 is safety; 70% of people tell us that safety is the biggest reason, so that is key. It can be achieved in a number of different ways, but it is by far the biggest barrier. There is culture. At the start I talked about designing out the cultural change that stops it becoming “something that people like me do”. If it’s a bit grim out there, the first step leads to a car. The impact of that is enormous. I won’t go too far down this road, but if somebody’s first step more and more is to a car—I mentioned 9 billion more miles being driven—they are no longer a potential client for public transport, so that investment suffers. That is your catchment. I visited a school last year with the previous Secretary of State. It struck me that when the children were talking to me about what they liked to do and were asked, “Would you like to be able to scoot or cycle to school?”, I realised that they had never even considered that as an option because they did not know that they were missing out, whereas 200 miles from here 63% of kids get around under their own steam every day. We have lost that. The culture is real and concerning. The last part is convenience. Probably, in a large sense, that is the most important one. We do the easiest thing. That is how we are built. If it is not an easy choice, the incentive to change just isn’t there. They are the three main things: safety, culture and convenience.

May I add to that? The barrier also depends on your own personal circumstances. This is something that our Minister has been very keen on, particularly in terms of ensuring accessibility and inclusion for people who have mobility impairments or disabilities. One of the biggest barriers to being able to get around is fundamentally the quality of pavements. That is the No. 1 barrier to disabled people accessing transport for 77% of all respondents to a survey by Transport for All, who represent people with all manner of disabilities in terms of their needs from the transport system. Obviously, the barriers to children might be different as well. That is one of the things that we look at. In the way we inspect and assure schemes, we look at making sure that we try to help local authorities design in accessibility inclusion at the earliest possible opportunity. As I am speaking, I also point out on how we reach across to the Department of Health and Social Care and so on that our Minister met recently with Andrew Gwynne from the Department of Health and Social Care. They are building on that relationship. Chris is hosting a roundtable in mid-February on the health mission, which brings together both the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Transport. We try to look for opportunities to work together, to deliver things more efficiently.

That is good. I think Andrew Gwynne gets this, to be honest. You talked about people with disabilities and access to transport, so I have to mention this. Where is Active Travel England on a pavement parking ban and giving councils the power to implement something?

Again, that is above our pay grade, but it is a very live issue for Ministers. It is being actively considered at the moment. I know that Edinburgh has taken some amazingly bold action, as has Scotland, and there is a lot to learn. On how we address it, there will be a lot of pressure because we have allowed pavements to be used as overflow parking for a long time, outside London. To change that will be difficult. How we frame it is really important so that people go with us. Lilian Greenwood is the Minister responsible. She is actively looking at it at the moment. We have discussed things. Something we have not been good at in the past is to say that we want to make sure that every pavement is usable and would want to be used by a parent with a double buggy. It is something that the public can context in why this is important to them and what they are trying to achieve. Once you have made that emotional connection, you can get down to what is required. Some of it will be Lime bikes parked on pavements. Some will be cars parked on pavements. We really have to look at EV charging, because when that comes online we could unwittingly clutter the pavements and lock in behaviour that is not beneficial to us. It is a really live issue, and Ministers are actively looking at it now.

It is good that you are having those discussions. Where should we focus if we want to deliver the health objectives that you are talking about—walking or cycling, if you were to choose your favourite child?

Walking will always do the heavy lifting. It is the majority of active journeys. The average walking journey is 0.8 of a mile. Then it becomes less convenient as it takes up too much time. That is one of many different reasons why it drops off. The average cycling journey is 3.8 miles. Walking is the one that we can get to quickly. We can do a lot and connect with a lot of people. Of the two, relatively it is the least beneficial in health terms. It is the most beneficial in getting somebody from nothing to something. In that sense, it is beneficial. After that, the health benefits are less than cycling, which is slightly more vigorous. The important thing to note is that if we think of it in integrated terms—the work I started to do in Greater Manchester before I left: the Bee network—you realise that if you have a good network and encourage active travel, as happens in other countries, that 3.8 miles means that you can increase the catchment for public transport twentyfold, if you make the parking convenient and make the routes safe and consistent. It isn’t just the short journeys. You can feasibly make an attractive longer journey, mixing modes. Therein lies the real potential. One is a lot easier to address than the other, but the benefits of one are significant and give a much bigger ripple effect.

Thank you. I am really glad you asked that question. One of the things that Active Travel England is doing is regularly commissioning data from local authorities, to understand “Did it work?” The Department for Transport recognised the deficiency, but we didn’t know how much impact there was. I think a Public Accounts Committee inquiry a couple of years ago found that we did not know how the money was being spent. We are now actually actively going and finding out what works. We know, for example, about LTN 1/20. We are producing guidance notes all the time based on what we have now found works. We are constantly updating. We know that you can build the most amazing piece of infrastructure, but, “Don’t do those junctions because it is a bit difficult.” You’ve just wasted a lot of money because it will not get used because of the breaks. Using our own funding, we have made sure that you have to do it all or don’t bother, because it is a waste. There is emerging research that we have done looking at a large number of schemes of designing the old way, with a painted white line, a stop at the junction is a bit difficult, so another painted white line, versus building to LTN 1/20 standard. At the moment, Active Travel data shows that building the old way is actually increasing risk. To be slightly melodramatic, you are killing more people than doing nothing at all. You are getting no uptake either because people do not feel safer. We now know that, if you build to LTN 1/20 properly and consistently, we see figures of 60%-plus increase in uptake and a halving of KSIs. Because the DFT has established a specialist unit, we are gathering that information at pace. It is then going back to local authorities. We are trying to speed it up by producing advice notes, so they get updates regularly as opposed to waiting for statutory guidance, which can take a very long time.

That picks up a lot on the infrastructure, and the point about behaviour change is really important too. It speaks to the question that we had earlier about areas that we might expand into more in the next corporate plan. We have spoken about data. To use some of the data points on what we have collected, in 2023-24 the ATE-funded Walk to School Outreach Project delivered by Living Streets resulted in a 37% mode shift to active travel, with pupils and their parents logging 9.3 million new walking journeys. That removed 1.8 million car kilometres from roads at peak times. An increase in funding of £5 million in 2025-26 will still only enable approximately 10% of primary schools in England, outside London, to be reached. That is one of the things that we are discussing with Ministers in the context of the roundtables that we talked about earlier. Two thirds of authorities in England outside London take part in something called the Modeshift STARS education scheme. In 2023-24, an average school accredited at the top “Very good” level saw active modes of travel increase from 53.8% to 58%, which is a mode shift of 7.7% or 4.1 percentage points. The programme is estimated to cost less than 1p per stage. They are the areas that we want to try to build in, to make sure that we can add more value for local authorities in the future. In 2024 there was a study led by the University of Westminster. It was a systematic review of interventions on changing travel behaviour. It resulted in a very clear position that sustainable active travel behaviour change is best achieved when you mix behaviour change measures alongside built environment changes in the environment at the same time, so that when you are trying to engage with people, they actually see that they have a safe route that they can use. That means that you lock in the behaviour a lot more easily.

There are budget restrictions. There are a lot of things we can do. We have to choose which are going to give us the most bang for our buck and which are the most effective. To build on both that and what Graham has just said, Bikeability training is really effective at whatever age. If you combine that with the creation of infrastructure and the ability to feel safe, with the two things going together you get a huge increase in take-up. I think 90% of parents would like their children trained, but if you say, “Would you let them ride to school?”, it drops quite dramatically. If you combine targeted training with infrastructure, you can get a shift that sticks. In terms of adults, we know that the impact of adults taking Bikeability training and then continuing to ride afterwards is very high because it is a conscious decision to take that training. In the round, it is more a case of where we spend our resource, but we are getting much better at knowing what interventions work. There is certainly a lot of evidence around walking, as Graham alluded to, that these interventions work. What we need are interventions that do not just get people involved in something new and interesting, but that when we move away it continues. That is where we have to do the two things together.

You say what we need is putting the Bikeability, the training, in with the physical changes, but are you initiating or encouraging that in the programmes that you are doing? “It’s a good idea, but—”

Yes.

Yes, we are, but it is local determination to highways authorities and mayoral combined authorities as to what they want to focus on. Only a matter of three weeks ago, some of my colleagues and I met with the active travel leads for all of the urban transport group areas to discuss exactly what we have just been talking about in terms of development of a programme that would pick up both maintenance and other such things. Many of them are already doing it. One of the things that is really important is to recognise that within the context of devolution that is a transition. Having worked in a local authority for many years myself, I know that different local authorities and different mayoral combined authorities are at different stages of their evolution. One of the things that we have been trying to do is to make sure that we understand their needs by talking to them, and tailor what we offer them based on what they need. Areas that have been devolved for longer, like Greater Manchester or perhaps West Midlands, for example, are in a different situation than those that are just starting out on that journey. Therefore, the type of support or network planning that we would offer them might be different on that basis as well.

Maintenance and training are revenue spend, whereas infrastructure changes are capital, and local authorities treat them differently. Is that part of the challenge in putting the two together at the same time?

Yes, it can be. Having experience of leading a highway authority, I know it is really difficult to make sure that you are on top of absolutely everything that is happening. It is even little things like, for example, making sure that if you are resurfacing a road you don’t put in place lines and signs that do not meet new guidance and so on. It is an issue, but different local authorities have different ways of trying to approach it.

There is a learning aspect of having, essentially, a centre of excellence with Active Travel England. Because we are commissioning and gathering data, when we had more centralised funding to direct we made sure that the two things went together. We know that if ambition is low it is much easier to train kids to ride a bike in a playground and parents like it. It looks like you are doing something, but the actual outcome that we want is not being heavily affected, whereas if somebody is actually doing the hard yards and producing a safe space to get to school, in that area of work we would be more inclined to fund people who are doing both. Now, it is regional. It is still effective because we can supply information to local authorities and shine a spotlight on it. If you are just doing this and not that, it is not very efficient.

Sometimes the media can be focused on a never-ending argument between cyclists and drivers. I find that quite depressing at times. Has Active Travel England done any work to find out what real people think about the kinds of interventions you want to promote, as opposed to what we sometimes see in the media?

Yes. We did some quite extensive focus-group work last year to understand what motivates people’s thoughts. A lot of it was affirmation, which is not unhelpful, of things we already believed, but it was great to get it confirmed. We found that when you talked in big numbers—I mentioned over £120 billion to the economy—and those were the kinds of things that we put in front of focus groups, it had no resonance: “It doesn’t touch my life. I don’t believe that number. I don’t know what it means, and I am even getting slightly irritated now because I need to pay my mortgage.” When we talked later on about giving their children transport independence—a thing that other people a few hundred miles from here just accept as normal—and giving them the freedom to stay at after-school clubs, and when I mentioned the double buggy test that every pavement must be usable by parents, they would want to. For cycling, it is the 12-year-old test; it must be usable and want to be used by a competent 12-year-old and their parents would let them. When you describe difficult things in those ways, it connected very strongly. In fact, the majority of the focus groups were leaning in and starting electively to tell you what they would give up to have that. This topic has always been popular, despite segments of the media. I will come back to that in a moment. There is 80%-plus support consistently for more active travel and more cycling and walking provision. People want it; it is popular. On the media aspect, we have a concerted sector of the media now that portrays cycling in particular as something that is taking away from you, when in fact we are trying to give more transport choice because we have lost the options to do differently. That part of it—the hearts and minds bit—is probably more important than anything else. You don’t get to build anything if people don’t want you to. We are just starting to mature in that and realise the importance. You can see that it is important in wider politics, but that is far beyond this Committee’s brief.

We are running two webinars in the coming weeks to help to train communications professionals in local authorities about the findings of the research that Chris just mentioned. They are already the second most popular that we have had, even though they have not taken place yet, in terms of the number of people who have signed up in advance to take part.

That is powerful. Is part of the issue how these schemes are promoted? Traditionally, a scheme would be consulted on and then implemented. There would be some push-back as people got used to it, and then they would come to terms with it over a six-month period. Now, more particularly with the LTN-type approach, we implement a scheme and then seek feedback over a number of months, sometimes as much as 18 months. Isn’t that kind of framework ideal for creating a campaign against the schemes? It is an ongoing conversation rather than asking people to look at a scheme, come to terms with it and figure out how to benefit from it. Do you understand the two approaches?

There are different strengths and benefits to the different routes that you can take in terms of traffic regulation orders, which is what you are referring to. You can either do an experimental traffic regulation order, which enables you to put in place a measure and then see how effective it is, or you can consult in advance and then determine exactly what you are going to do thereafter. Having delivered both, I can see that there are strengths and weaknesses for different ways of looking at it. One of the benefits of the experimental approach, which has been used for decades—let’s not think this is new because a lot of pedestrianisation of major high streets in the 1980s or otherwise was done using exactly the same methods—is that it gives you the opportunity to listen to people and determine whether or not there are knock-on implications that you need to intervene on. One of the things that we have done is try to develop tools that enable local authorities to plan as best they possibly can. We have a route and area check tool, which enables people to look at what changes they might be making. It then identifies where the knock-on implications might be so that they can look at those as well. We are trying to make sure that they have efficiency in their planning, but different routes have different benefits and issues.

Doing serious public opinion work rather than just listening to the loudest voices is key to understanding what people think. Moving to safety, how much of a barrier is safety to people who are starting to walk and cycle more? I am thinking particularly about more vulnerable people and people moving around in the evenings. How much of a challenge is that? Do your design standards try to alleviate those challenges?

As we discussed earlier, the fear for personal safety is the biggest thing. It actually goes wider than infrastructure and traffic. Women do not feel safe at night, even on quiet local roads. There is a much wider safety issue. That is the biggest barrier to address, and it is one we need to address first. We can then build all the activation work on top of that. Underpinning that is the desire to change, which we have just touched on. That is absolutely fundamental. The ability to consult better is absolutely key, because then we get to try new things. Some of it is very simple. It is narrowing the radius of kerbs at the mouth of a side road and reducing the distance to cross. These are things that you do not actually acknowledge or see consciously, but that you would notice if you were walking across that road. There might be 20 of them on the way to a school, and because of that parents go, “Do you know what, I’ll run you there.” One of the interventions that we are looking at now—in fact we started back in 2018 in Greater Manchester—is the possibility of using zebra markings across the mouth of side roads to reinforce the highway code. There are a few outside this building; Westminster is experimenting on it now if you want to try it for yourself. At the moment that is not possible in our guidance without zig-zags and Belisha beacons, which make it very expensive. That is an intervention that we are particularly interested in. Ministers are very keen on it as well because we could act quickly and cheaply to transform the school run and give parents the confidence to let their kids walk. In 2019, Greater Manchester commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory to conduct a full package of research. That was a paper exercise, off-road trials and on-road trials. They found that 65% more cars stopped. It was overwhelmingly popular with the public and there was no increase in collisions. That has real potential. It is a simple thing, and very subtle, which reinforces a right of way and gives people confidence—elderly people, the disabled or somebody who is a little bit frail. It is all the people, as I mentioned earlier, we want to get from nothing to something. It is the small interventions that we can make locally to change school runs and getting to the shop.

You are right to highlight motor vehicles as a significant risk to people in urban areas, particularly children going to school. We are all concerned about that. Of course, the media also focus on dangerous cyclists. I like to think that I am a sensible cyclist, but there is nothing that depresses me more than a cyclist going through a red light or zipping through a zebra crossing, even outside this building. Do you think we should do more to enforce safer cycling as well?

I am very glad you raised that. It is an excellent question. The answer is yes. Where I would spread out is in the context for that. At the moment the actual danger of pedestrian KSIs involving a cyclist is a fraction of 1%. It is hyperbolic, I know, but I have said in the press that more people are killed by cows and lightning than by cyclists. I know that sounds incredibly crass, but in my position—my mother was killed in a road traffic accident—I am one of the few people who can do that because that contrast needs to be made. That said, perception is critical. Whether they feel intimidated changes when somebody makes a journey, particularly the partially sighted or the disabled. It is actually, “Am I going to make this journey in the first place?” Perception is really important. To answer your question, we should be doing more. We have laws at our disposal already; we do not need new laws. What we should do is take it in the round to reduce road danger. It is not to increase safety; that is a different thing. Everybody is safe if nobody walks or cycles. There are no accidents. We mean reduce danger. This should be part of a wider campaign, looking at where the real dangers are, what the evidence is and what is stopping people, and then focus on that. If we go for what is in the press at the moment and deal with that one thing, does society benefit or lose out? The context is important.

You were talking about focus groups and about how you are the media for your organisation. I was wondering about the name of the organisation, Active Travel England. Do you get the impression that people out there have the faintest idea what active travel is? What do you do to try to explain what it is? Would it be better, perhaps, if we were just talking about cycling and walking? Most people know what that is.

I agree with that completely. Active travel has to be explained. It is one of the things we ran past a focus group. It does not mean anything outside our industry. Outside this sector we do not know what it means. We are actively changing to using cycling, wheeling and walking all the time now, for that very reason. In terms of the name of the organisation, I was speaking with another colleague. I cannot divulge what they have come up with because they are going to launch it in the next few days, but it was very good. It just spoke to the reality. I think that is really important. Acronyms are something to be avoided. If I might go slightly sideways, but it is exactly the same point, the term “LTN” now makes people think, “Ooh, controversial thing,” when we know thanks to the previous Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak’s report, that we stopped counting at 25,000 around the country. It is an old thing. Imagine if we had called them “Child safe zones”, which is what they do, and didn’t let them get reduced to an acronym. I think we would have been in a very different place. I agree with you on Active Travel. We just have to decide whether the view is worth the climb in going back and changing that. Yes, in terms of our language, we are changing it for that very reason.

I want to go back to the issue of safety and what puts a lot of people off walking or makes them nervous, particularly at junctions. Why a lot of people do not cycle more is driver behaviour. The last Government, to their credit, changed the highway code and brought in the concept of a hierarchy of vulnerable road users. That was really good stuff. Our junction rules now comply with most of the rest of the world. Do you have a view about how that could be embedded better in driver culture?

Yes, to a degree. A lot of the issues that we are dealing with are managing things that probably should not exist in the first place. We are not enforcing consistently the rules or laws that we already have to drive the behaviours that we want to see. For example, I mentioned side road zebras. If we had everybody using our roads complying with the fact that it is a pedestrian’s right of way if they are crossing, or intend to cross, we would not need them. Potentially, we could spend hundreds of millions on doing something just to enforce something that we should not need to enforce. It is much bigger than us. We talked earlier about wider engagement with wider government. It is the ability to police consistently, to make sure that there are consequences—

Chris, obviously you agree with it.

Yes, I agree.

Does Active Travel England have a role in encouraging Government to look at this? Have you discussed it with Ministers?

Graham will build on this, but internally, yes. I am involved in road safety roundtables and strategy co-ordination now. That, internally, is the role we can play. The actions are for partner Departments and organisations to take, but we are now a voice that can illustrate that.

Graham, going back to your comments on disability participation and working with local authorities, what does that work look like in practice, and do you monitor disability participation and set targets in that regard?

Authorities have a legal responsibility to design roads to be accessible. We try to make sure that the toolkits that we create for them take that into account. It is not just on accessibility; we also design in the best practice that we can find on things like neurodiversity as well, to make sure that we incorporate that in our planning guidance and other street design toolkits. We do not set targets specifically on the number of people with disabilities who should be using a scheme. That is not really our role. We try to ensure that, from a monitoring and evaluation perspective, we provide good advice to local authorities and a consistent means by which they can report. We have pioneered a system, which was launched just before Christmas. We are piloting it at the moment, for over 80 local authorities to put their information into an online system that means they have to report on it only once. We are trying to extend that across different ways of working as well. At the moment, we are also doing advice on various specific types of infrastructure that have been prominent in reporting as to people’s perceptions of or issues with safety. We are working with DFT to try to design guidance on that. We take it into account in the toolkits and design guidance that we create, and we try to advise people how best to deliver inclusive and accessible schemes. We also train our staff in it. Earlier, Chris mentioned the safety of women and girls. All our designers, inspectors and planners were trained in the latest thinking on that, just before Christmas, to make sure that they carry it into every element of the work that they do, and into the development of the tools we create for local authorities.

Thank you. Are all of those toolkits in the public domain?

They are. They are available on our website, and our website is effectively a one-stop shop. It gives access to webinars that we have done. We have also pulled together all the different advice on how people might plan different types of housing development, from masterplan down to street level. We have taken advice from various Government documents and put it into a format that is easy to understand and navigate, so that designers from any local authority can easily find the best practice examples and advice quickly through our website.

I think you have touched on this, but do you take a view on the merits of particular types of schemes? I am thinking in particular about bollards on streets that can prevent pavement parking, but which can be hard for some road users to navigate; or floating bus stops, which can be convenient for some cyclists but less accessible for cyclists with visual impairments. Do you take a view on whether local authorities should make those types of intervention?

It is their legal responsibility, and their roads. Therefore, they are the ones who have to take the decision. We provide them with advice about what pitfalls to avoid, and how best to design things. Our design toolkits, for example, take into account what we call critical issues—the 10 most critical safety issues that you can design into a scheme, and you need to avoid. If people come to us for funding, or to other areas of Government whose funding we look at as well, and there are elements of those critical issues, we flag them up and say that they need to be resolved before Government should consider giving them funding. That is our approach in trying to help and support local authorities in designing those issues out, at the earliest possible opportunity. As to floating bus stops, we have been asked by the Minister to make sure that we come up with some guidance.

Rapidly.

Yes. We have engaged with the local authorities and urban transport group areas that are most prominent in terms of where these things feature, to ensure that they look at them as well.

About half of those bus stop bypasses are in London. We are actively looking at those. The Minister is really keen, and we are very supportive, on helping to make sure the designs work properly, because there is inconsistency. That is very live at the moment. We have looked at the actual safety, and at the perception. We think there are about 3 billion bus journeys in London a year to one collision, but that perception is really live and important. Designs can be better at working on that. Operationally, we are actively working now to include the disability community at the design stage: not the consultation method, “Here’s what we’ve done; what do you think?” Actually, they will be involved and help us with the hard compromise choices: “Where would you go?” We are involved with DPTAC, the DFT’s advisory body. Isabelle Clement, who is a wheelchair user, sits on my board, so we have that advice and are ramping up our engagement with those organisations to help us get it right in the first place. Lived experience is critical.

We have also been doing pilots to look at how technology can aid us in this. There is a trial scheme outside Manchester’s—

Outside the blind school in Manchester, yes.

We have floating bus stops just over the bridge, here, which I have used, and I could suggest, possibly, zigzags in front of the zebra crossing, to make it clear that people on bikes have to give way to the pedestrians crossing to get to and from the bus.

I agree.

How does your approach to increasing cycling and walking differ between, say, cities, market towns and more rural areas?

The local transport note LTN 1/20, which was referred to earlier, is predominantly focused on urban areas. At the moment we are working on what is effectively a bridging document, to say how we take the principles of the note and apply them to more rural or semi-rural areas. Our local authority customers have asked us for that. We look at the merits of each funding bid based on, well, its own merits, and we try to determine what we think would add value in the best possible way. I am going to try to find a stat—I have a stat—as to where a lot of our funding has gone. We have tried to make sure that we engage with all authorities, not just those; it is clear that urban areas have the highest propensity and potential to change more trips towards walking, cycling and public transport, but that does not mean we do not focus on rural areas as well. We make sure we have an agent in every area of the country who will go out and speak to local authorities about what they need.

The last time I appeared in front of this Committee I was asked, “What about rural areas?” There are two points. The first is very practical. If our target is 50%, and we focus on urban areas and estimate at the time that it will cost about £8 billion for a country to achieve the target, and if we want to do it equitably and include all areas with that level of service, it is £16 billion, I am absolutely fine with either. That is a political choice. Give us a steer. As a qualification of “rural”, we generally mean extra-urban—so two miles from the rail station to the town, I think. They are often perfectly applicable for cycling and walking to be a viable mode to connect, and to get to the resources, but the cost of providing the safe space does not vary a great deal. Whether you have 10 people or 10,000 using it, the cost is the same. That is the challenge we face.

Obviously, there is very different physical geography in different places. It is flat in East Anglia and hilly in the west country. Does that have a big impact on the interventions that you think need to be taken?

The propensity for each mode will change depending on the geography, to some degree. I went with the previous Secretary of State to her area of Sheffield. It is very hilly, so there is much more emphasis on bus public transport and e-bike provision, with a local bike scheme putting in e-bikes, which are becoming incredibly popular. The Committee might want to touch on that topic at some point. Yes, I think that is where the local area has to drive what is needed, based on the geography. There is just one tiny additional point on the rural aspect: we tend to avoid shared use space for cycling and walking, because it just creates conflict, but once usage goes down quite dramatically, in a rural setting, it might be a quite applicable and cost-effective way to provide a safe space for either of those modes, because the interaction is much reduced.

Finally, presumably across the country, there are a lot of similarities. In my constituency we have a canal towpath. It is the Grand Union Canal; it goes all the way up the country. To what extent do you look at how walking and cycling have worked in one place like that, particularly when it is a piece of infrastructure that stretches a long way and, therefore, through various different councils and funding bodies?

That was my opening position, or rather Andy Burnham’s opening position, when I worked with him. Certainly, the central city of Manchester—it connects out—has a canal network in place. That is space that is already there; can we use it? Then you bump into lots of restrictions. Essentially, if you want to change it from being a nice place to connect with nature, to go for a jog, or to fish, that small space has to get bigger; and the only way to get bigger is to go out over the water. Then you bump into people who want to keep it the same, and quite rightly so; there was the Canal & River Trust, and we had to deal with Peel Holdings, which owned the land. The biggest issue was narrow bridges. What do you do? You have to choose: are we going to use this for a boat or for people? Importantly, we have built up our cities with their backs to the canals, so often they are spaces where you would not go when it is dark; you would not be comfortable for your kids to walk home that way. We realised that there were many barriers. It has potential to be used as a network, but once you go past a very small amount, it starts to create issues. In London you use quite a lot of the canals for that very reason, but there is a lot of conflict, because there is a big speed difference between two sets of people. I agree with you: I would take that on, but it is a different set of battles, with a different set of people.

Hello. I was a bit late, so apologies.

It was the best bit at the start.

Sorry. Following Alex’s question, particularly on the urban fringe and boundary issue, how do you seek actively to work where there is a changing responsibility? I am thinking of one brilliant example. One local authority has a brilliantly laid cycle path that becomes the responsibility of another where it turns into a mud track, on the way into a city—you can work out which of the two organisations cares more. Also, how do you help, particularly in rural areas, to plug the gaps? I am down in the south-west, so we have the hilly issue. Often, things seem to be pieced up—sliced into small bits; then local campaigners say, “We still can’t go from A to B, because this little chunk here has never been finished.” How actively are you, Active Travel, working with local authorities to tackle those specific gaps? If you can do that, you win a whole load of plaudits from both cyclists and pedestrians. We had a cycle path that ended in a flight of stairs, based on the funding available at the time. Clearly that is not a great look for the local authority.

I will start, and Graham may want to build on this. Again, that was a very live issue for me in Greater Manchester, when I started to work with 10 authorities. The bedrock at the start was to help them to create, very quickly, a network plan, which they then put to the public. That went from 1,000 miles to 1,800 miles because in the public consultation the biggest complaint online was “Where’s our bit?” That gave political consensus for doing something that crossed boundaries. We ran into a lot of challenges on delivery, because we had 10 different highways authorities, with different motivations. In some cases it was, ludicrously, one side of the road versus the other. That is a real challenge. It is the opportunity for combined authorities to start to have combined plans. There is something to be considered nationally about requiring the provision of a consistent level of service, no matter where you are in the country, as we do for driving. I am sorry to thrash the phrase, “It’s above my pay grade,” but it is a live issue and it speaks to efficiency and to costs from having to do things multiple times and mesh with different political motivations. There is real potential to speed up delivery and reduce costs by getting consistent guidance. I would support that if it was brought forward. I am not sure whether that entirely answers your question. On a smaller scale, I think Active Travel England could help to plug the gaps. Graham has done some work identifying areas where—

Can I come back? In response to that, one of the challenges you have—we had this when we were talking about railways last week—is that we already have the big combined authorities, but the vast majority of councils do not have those. As a local politician I have brought officers together to talk to each other across three councils, because they weren’t doing that, but they find that accessing things together is potentially a challenge. When you are dealing with a quarter of a million city and district councils, that is completely different from the power that Greater Manchester has to go in and leverage its position. I don’t know what impact that would have.

I mentioned earlier that we have regional managers who are based in each of the regions. One of their jobs is to try to engage with everybody and bring them to the table. If the scheme that you are referring to ends in a flight of stairs, I think it is one of those that we are funding through active travel fund 4 to the tune of £2.1 million, to make sure we get rid of that barrier.

I knew that was happening.

That is pretty good detailed knowledge, Graham: a set of stairs.

But that is exactly what we would do. I can pretty confidently say about our investment team that if a scheme came to us and it looked like it was only “Point here to point here”, and it didn’t take into account the junctions at the end or the other issues you referred to, we would refuse it on that basis. We have refused lots of funding bids in the past few years on that basis, because they do not take into account the coherence of a network. As I pointed out, we would instead try to route the funding to the things that plugged the gaps.

An additional point is that our regional team, in less than two years, has had 2,600 engagements with local officers, to try to address that, and get consistency. We have trained more than 1,000 local authority officers in bespoke design and planning, so we are starting to address that connectivity piece.

Thanks for what you have offered us so far. I totally support what Olly said; it is very refreshing. I am also left feeling insanely frustrated about the last few decades of failure in this country and the general inability, it seems, to think strategically, particularly when it comes to rural areas, as has been described. I will save my rant about that for later, when we talk about integrated transport. I want to ask you about two other dimensions. We have looked at things from the dimension of mode, urban-rural and mobility. There is also professional transport, as in people who are travelling for work, rather than to work. I am visiting an e-bike in Wells-next-the-Sea shortly, not because it is the first horseless box we have had in North Norfolk but because it is being used by a first responder and paramedic. Have you looked at how transport used in the course of work could be made more active? In the dimension of economics, I think Sustrans recently published a report suggesting that lower economic groups and lower-paid workers were being excluded from cycle-to-work schemes. Are you aware of that, and do you have any views on it?

I am glad you touched on the cycle-to-work scheme. It is a great scheme, and I don’t think we have yet achieved its potential—the ability to remove the barrier to access to what is then a virtually cost-free form of transport that can cover significant distance. For access to work, it is huge, but, as you have alluded to, at the moment it excludes about 2 million people, who are priced out because they do not have access or are self-employed. It is quite a large group, and I am aware of Sustrans bringing the report forward last year. They recommended something like a 40% discount, and I think it was going to cost about £18 million to extend the scheme to cover more people. They estimated that it would realise about £60 million in benefits. We are in fiscally constrained times, as we know, but it fits with the ethos of the Government—wanting to make sure that people do not get left behind and that they have access to work. I think it is a very attractive tool to use, and I would support the Government if they wanted to explore it further, but it is a tax scheme as opposed to an intervention.

Yes, that’s right. And the issue of possibly using active travel to carry out work?

It is not in our remit, but once you make safe space, particularly in dense urban areas—you see it in London a lot, obviously—it is a really efficient tool, and it is used across the world. We would support it. I am not sure we have a direct role in encouraging people to use it in a particular way. If you like, we create the landscape and that is the kind of thing that can happen. It is a very wide answer.

The size of the agency is only 90 people. We have to prioritise the work that we do, so we focus on the things that we feel will add the most value for our core customers at the moment, but within the context of what you said, and what Catherine brought up earlier, it is the kind of thing we could seek to extend into; but we are focused on doing the basics right and improving things, to start with.

Would it be fair to say that, if the infrastructure and the safe routes were there, there would be a commercial imperative for employers to encourage it? If you have a fleet of people cleaning public toilets, for example, going by bike rather than van would happen as a natural extension of having the operations and infrastructure there.

It could do. That would be strengthened by the procurement regulations, or decisions that people take through procurement as well, and by making maximum use of things like the Social Value Act. If you have a big agency with a significant procurement opportunity they can really help that.

Parcel delivery is a big part of the same grouping. In London, Amazon in particular uses an awful lot of cargo bikes, because it is a more efficient way. It is actually more cost-effective for moving things around. They are now trialling it successfully in Manchester. The potential for micro-mobility to become part of the mix is high.

Thank you. You just touched on funding, and your specific roles, and that takes us on to targets and funding.

Are you still working to the targets as set by the second cycling and walking investment strategy?

We have not been instructed to do otherwise; 50% is still the target that we have and that we are working towards. It is reasonable to say that the timeframe, the political priority changes and the funding that changed—we had our budget cut by two thirds a couple of years ago—have made it more and more challenging as the timescale goes down; but we are still working to 50% as a goal at the moment.

That document set a short-term target to increase the percentage of short journeys in towns and cities undertaken by active travel to 46% by 2025. What is the current, or latest, figure?

We were ahead on walking. That has slipped back.

Yes, we were ahead. We had met it. We are below it at the moment. One thing to note, though, is that the total number of walking and cycling trips is relatively static at the moment, but the total number of overall trips has increased. As a mode share, walking and cycling has gone down, despite the number staying reasonably consistent. Also, we have been in existence for two years, so we are hoping to see the benefits of the stats that we gave you earlier, about high-quality infrastructure design and delivery, and so on. That will take longer to feed into the statistics that we are seeing at the moment, because we are looking only at 2023 stats.

We will get clarity on the Government’s ambition this year, with the new cycling and walking investment strategy 3. It is due this year, with a report to Parliament in March, I think. We are already starting to work on that, when we will get clarity on the new ambition of this Government, and, obviously, the spending review and the resources available.

Thank you. Chris, you said earlier that the 50% target was challenging. To push you a little further on that, is it still feasible?

The reason I hesitated to give you a yes or no answer was that it depends on how much money you want to throw at it, and how highly you want to prioritise it over everything. To be dramatic again, if you turned off traffic, as we effectively did during covid, you are there; you get it. That is obviously way too extreme a solution to be palatable, so it depends on what resource and prioritisation the Government want to put on it. It is extremely challenging without significant change.

I will come back to funding, Chair, but to pick up Graham’s point on the statistics, according to the national travel survey, compared with 10 years ago the number of walking journeys per head has increased, but the number of cycling journeys per head has fallen. You may feel that this question has been answered, because you talked about some of the changes in attitude towards cycling but, to ask the direct question, why do you think we have seen a difference for walking compared with cycling?

I will just do a headline there. There is a caveat. Where infrastructure has been made available consistently, cycling is increasing. London has had a 10-year commitment to infrastructure, and consistent funding and policy. It has seen year-on-year increase, every year. The rest of the country has not had that year-to-year funding, so local areas cannot employ officers and design to a large scale, because they do not know what is coming the year after. More important than resource, consistency is what we need to get back into the system, so that everybody can trust that it is there, and we will plan and build accordingly. It has been there, as in Waltham Forest. I visited a school last year in Kesgrave just outside Ipswich, where 63% of kids ride every day, which I thought was a mistake, because it is more than in Holland. That is 800 to 900 kids, because they have the space. When you zoom out to the whole country, that change is happening in small places at the moment but we don’t have the large-scale commitment, so we don’t have large-scale change.

I would compare it with almost 9 billion more miles being driven in the same period. I don’t have the statistics, but it is interesting to think on the implications of this. When somebody gets a car, they have to be earning a pretty significant amount of money to afford to own, insure a car and then decide not to use it. We need to think about access as opposed to ownership. A lot of industries in this country have changed model away from ownership to access to things. People do it a lot now with leisure time, but we have not necessarily moved to that in the context of certain mobility choices. As I say, coming from a metropolitan area in the north-east, you have to have a reasonable amount of money to be able to afford a car and then decide not to use it; and not everybody does. That will influence the choices that people make.

Can I add one data-gathering point that the Committee might be interested in? We have realised that where we measure cycling levels at the moment, the camera systems that we are using are often in places where you would not want to do it—on major roads. That observation has now been made, and it needs to be translated to looking in the right place. An extraordinary thing that we need to change is how we actually gather the data.

Do questions about walking and cycling come into the national travel survey?

I think the most recent national travel survey was about 14,000 returns. It looked at 2023 data, as opposed to 2024. The point was that walking has increased and cycling has come down over 10 years. The national travel survey is a great piece of work.

That is a key data point for you. In order to achieve the 50% of journeys by walking and cycling, what changes would be needed to make it achievable that are not already in place?

There is a menu. Lowering and enforcing speed limits would be very effective. That is one tool that could be used. Changes to streetscapes could be used, but in essence it is about making safe space, where people feel safe, and then activating it, giving them a reason to try something different. The behaviour change tools are really helpful if used in the right way, to get people to try travelling differently. The £2 bus fare, for example, got talked about, and people thought, “Oh, I’ll try that.” To go slightly sideways, but it is very relevant, in France there were some regional schemes to get people to try travelling actively, particularly on uptake of e-bikes. They found that time limiting made a big difference as well. It wasn’t a case of “Oh, that’s quite interesting, I’ll carry on.” “Oh, that finishes on Thursday, I’ll go and try it.” There was a suite of measures, but it comes down to safety.

That was useful.

Thanks. I am glad you mentioned speed limits. It is really important, actually. It is time to have a serious conversation about that. Do you have the right targets? You started by talking about the importance of people driving less and walking and cycling more for their health, but shifting people out of cars on to bikes and walking is not one of your targets explicitly, is it?

Sorry, I didn’t quite hear the question.

Do you have the right targets? If your focus is people driving less and walking and cycling more, that’s not actually one of your targets, is it?

To get people to drive less?

To get them out of their cars and walk and cycle more. That is not a target, is it?

I suppose our focus is to increase one thing, which will automatically decrease the other. Somewhere buried in my notes there is a statistic on, if we get that shift, what the impact will be on reducing congestion because we got people to move. It might be just a question of how it is described. It is really important that we’re not stopping it; we are making something else as attractive or giving you a reason to travel in a different way that benefits our communities. The choice thing is the way it has been polarised in the media. It has been framed as stopping me doing the things I want, when in essence we have been stopped having more choice because we have saturated with one mode. It is a really important piece of framing to make sure that people understand that this is about increasing transport choice, which is something where I connected very well with Mark Harper, my previous Secretary of State.

People want the freedom to be stuck in traffic jams in cars. That is the challenge. I worry that some of the growth in walking and cycling might come from people just switching from public transport to cycling rather than moving from cars, and that would be a concern. In terms of your targets, in our briefing, there is a relatively high level. Do you break them down into gender and ethnic minority, to see where it is growing and where there are opportunities? There is geography as well. In Edinburgh we recognise gender as an issue. We have a fantastic group called InfraSisters that encourages women to cycle, safe cycling in the evenings, and that kind of thing. Do you break the data down to that kind of level, and do you have sub-targets?

Not at the moment. It comes back to the point on the development of the cycling and walking investment strategy. They are exactly the kinds of questions that colleagues at DFT are asking themselves based on guidance from Ministers around what they might want to see.

There is some intersectionality—I don’t often use big words. If we target areas of most need like bigger health problems, there is intersectionality of communities, ethnicity and financial positions. You probably hit a lot of that. If you target your resource in areas that need it most, to boil it down to a simple phrase, you will probably get there anyway. With transport, it is about making it easy for everybody, and then everybody uses it.

You have to target a little bit. People from deprived communities stand to benefit the most, as a generalisation, from more walking and cycling, so we have to target a little bit through things like bike hire schemes, and giving them easier access. That is a possibility. Regarding the third version of the cycling and walking infrastructure plan, you described the targets earlier. It was not clear to me whether the Government are setting the targets or you guys are setting the targets or if it is a discussion. Are they handed down on tablets of stone to you, or do you hand them up on tablets of stone?

This is all very live at the moment. Devolution is a strong agenda with a lot of potential to give areas control. I have experience of that. One of the success stories when Greater Manchester started the journey was that we gave people the pen figuratively and literally, as well as the choice to do nothing. You have to own the consequences of doing nothing, and the regions changed and chose to change. Right now, the relationship with regions is very good with us and good with Government. They have told us, as we mentioned earlier, that collectively we want to produce 15,000 to 20,000 miles of safe space to enable the school run and the local shops to be done actively by cycling and walking if people choose. That is a national mission being designed locally, and it is a really exciting proposition, because people want the same outcomes for their communities. If it is locally driven, it is much more likely to stick. National Government can empower and aid local government to deliver it. That is the kind of discussion we are part of at the moment, and it has real potential.

The Department sets the targets. They talk to us about what is deliverable. In context, whenever you are designing or delivering something, and from the perspective of somebody who used to have to deliver civil engineering schemes, if you set somebody a target that isn’t achievable, what is the point of the target? Ultimately, what DFT are doing at the moment is making sure that they discuss with us, regions and others what is deliverable in the context of the different scenarios, and the targets will have to flow from there.

Their target of increasing public transport use is explicitly going to help you, isn’t it? It won’t cost you any money, but it is really going to help you.

It is about whether or not those targets sit alongside each other.

They are underfunded as well.

I hope when that discussion has taken place, clarity is visible in outcome frameworks for devolution deals. It is important that areas are allowed to choose: “You choose. You understand how to do it, but we have agreed that this is what you are going to achieve.” I would be very supportive of that approach.

A thing that has come up quite a few times is the increase in the use of cars and the rise in vehicle kilometres. You have made that point a few times. In Scotland, we have a target of reducing vehicle kilometres by 20% by 2030. It is unfunded and there is no real strategy to deliver it, but the target is there. There is an aspiration. Do you think the Government should do something like that? It would be a big boost to your agenda, wouldn’t it?

There is an existing Act of Parliament that has not been enacted. It is called the road traffic reduction strategy, or something along those lines. It is from many years ago.

I would be much more in favour. Those are not decisions for us. This is very much an opinion on what we would support, but I would be very much in favour of increasing choice and making other things more attractive, or at least as attractive. That tallies with 80% of people telling us, “We want this,” and then that will happen as a result. It is not just to say, “We need to reduce car use,” and focus on it. If we want to meet our decarbonisation strategy, from regional figures that I used to see, but it seems to be consistent, we have to drive about a quarter less, and the only equitable way to make that happen is to give people a viable and attractive alternative. That is our focus.

The macro target is really useful, but it is the point that you made earlier, Chair; geography and local circumstances play into this so much, so they are the conversations we are having around CWIS. You mentioned the point about deprivation. More than 50% of the capital funding we have provided is being invested in routes that pass through areas in the highest IMD quintile for deprivation and where health outcomes are generally lowest. Only 6% of our investment has been targeted at the lowest quintile of deprivation.

Returning to funding, we heard a short while ago that the greatest barrier to achieving a 50% target is resourcing. What is the gap in terms of your current budget?

I will correct that slightly. We said we agreed it was safe space, and we talked about several different ways that you can achieve that. You can reduce speeds. You can restrict traffic from a particular area to make them feel safe. You can make lanes. There are lots of different ways you can do it. There is an international example. The city of Ghent only had €6 million, and they spent two years consulting, and then in one weekend they changed the circulation pattern for the whole area and achieved incredible results, which, sadly, I cannot immediately recall. There were dramatic changes for €6 million that were really welcomed after the fact. It depends on the levers for difficult, expensive routes to do it. Resource-wise, I don’t think the costs have changed dramatically in the road context that we have now since the previous session that we had two years ago.

I see. One thing that has changed perhaps is the budget cuts, which you spoke about. I noted that your last annual report said that operating expenditure had fallen from £258 million in ’22-23 to £146 million, with most of that funding reduction coming from the local authority grants. What were the practical effects of those grant reductions?

Our original budget gave us the ability to help to be a strong part of the conversation, because people want access to cash. The capability ratings—I cannot stress enough the impact of that—meant that we funded things that worked and got delivered really quickly. That has worked, but the less cash, the less of that we can do. Now we are moving to much more devolved settlements on transport for an area. You choose how you spend it. The outcome framework will be a really important aspect, in my belief, of how you make sure that you get the impacts that you want. We have been consulted and given input to the conversation on what should be in outcome frameworks, but it is not in our gift to choose how to do it. We are adapting quickly to a different funding landscape. I don’t think it is necessarily more money. It is choosing what is already out there, how it is spent, or rather defining very clearly what it must achieve. The outcome is the most important thing, what it must achieve, and letting regions do it. They will gravitate towards a lot of the same methodology because there is a lot of commonality. That is key. Consistency is more important than the quantum—the fact that it is here and it stays here and you can depend that it will be a priority for a decade or more. Then local authorities can build capacity and gear up to do that, exactly as London did, which is the only place in the country that has had multi-year funding.

I won’t speak for others, but I think we understand the importance of long-term certainty and funding. Returning to those in-year budget reductions for ’23-24, is it accurate to boil it down to saying that those projects not proceeding meant that fewer people are now cycling and the 50% target is harder to hit?

Yes, it has made it extremely hard to hit those targets, and there would have to be some significant changes in policy or funding to be able to meet it by 2030. We still have a massive pipeline of schemes with local authorities. They still have their network plans. We have just slowed right down on the delivery without the commitment to deliver it—the commitment in consistency and the funding itself.

A final question because I am conscious that colleagues may want to come in on this topic. In your role as a statutory consultee, how stretched are you on all the planning applications and other topics you may be asked to take a view on?

The team of caseworkers that we have in the planning team has only nine people, which compares to National Highways’s 50 or more, and we don’t have a consultancy spend associated with it either. Despite that, in the first year of operation, our team responded to 99% of planning consultations within statutory timescales. The thing to note about the approach that we took to the planning system is that we were given a role in development management such that the proposals that people are coming forward with are very much set in terms of, “This is what we are coming forward with.” As such, if we had entered the system and tried to say, “You need to redo absolutely everything,” we would have lost all credibility with the development industry because they would say, “We’ve been working on this for three years, and you’ve literally just turned up and are telling us to do it differently.” There has been an element of building both credibility with the development industry and local authorities, making small adjustments, making sure that things like cycle parking are in appropriate locations, or even included at all, and the kinds of things that play to what the development industry have been saying they want to achieve anyway. We have done what we can in the context of where we are at. We had a one-year review of our performance in the planning system, which was independently done by a planning consultancy called Lichfields. That made recommendations both about our current performance and about the extension of our role into pre-application, which is a much better place in the planning system for us to be able to work with developers to deliver the right things. That has been supported by those who took part in the one-year review. We have been stretched, certainly, in terms of resource. We do not have the same amount of resource as some of the other statutory consultees in the system, but despite that we have responded on time to more than 99% of our consultations.

It is 10% of an unknown figure at the moment. I said the last time we were here that it would cost over a period of time £8 billion to address it in a focused way, doing the majority of your work in densely populated urban areas. That still roughly holds true. We have avoided talking about the actual quantum, but there is money in the system. It is regional. It is for integrated transport and providing more choice for people. The money is there. It is more a case of how it is spent. You said a percentage of the budget, but that budget is now devolved, so regions will have to agree what their priorities are. Some people already have what they need. They may need to spend less, and more on trams and buses and trains to connect, whereas other areas do not have a big infrastructure, and that is where the majority should go. There needs to be some balancing throughout the system, regionally driven and negotiated.

To return to planning, earlier you talked about how you were training staff in local authorities. There are two parts to this question. Does that include planners? I am sure it does. As well as commenting on planning applications, are you trying to inform the development of planning policy both nationally and within local authorities? Stronger planning policy would mean there would be less need for you to intervene, in theory.

To your latter point, we did a pilot project on local plans to determine how strong different local plans were and what approaches could be taken to a new round of local planning to ensure that active travel was embedded. We have produced a guidance document that we have provided to local authorities on that. That is the point. That is where we feel that we would add the most benefit in supporting the planning system and supporting the ambitions for housing and growth and so on. It is to get in at the earliest location. That is not just our view; it is the view of the development industry, which we have talked to a lot about this. One of the other points that they often make is about consistency, not necessarily on funding but of expectations for standards of highway design as well. Because of the fact that local highways authorities are responsible for what they determine to be adoptable standards, they can vary from one side of the road to another, and that is not as efficient as it could be for the development industry. We were given a task and we focused on delivering it to the best of our ability, while also making the case for how that task could extend in scope, or change in focus, to deliver better outcomes.

On training for planners, do you have the capacity to do that?

We have done that. Before we started, we went around the country and we did 10 roadshows, and we invited members of planning from every local authority in the country so that we could introduce them to what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We followed it up about nine to 12 months later across the country again to make sure that we were providing training in the latest toolkit that we had done. Our original toolkit that we released had 32 different criteria. It was incredibly thorough, but it was not as pragmatic or practical as it could have been for local authorities. Listening to their feedback and the feedback of the development industry, we made changes within a year, reissued our toolkit, and it is now being used up and down the country. It only has 10 criteria, and we have trained them in how to use it.

When we talk about planning, you don’t just mean town planners. Does this include engineering on the grand scheme design?

Yes. What we have been trying to do is—

Are there sufficient skills in that? There was a lot of skills development when Cycling England was around for the five years until it was abolished in 2010. To an extent that skillset disappeared, but there was nevertheless quite a strong body of knowledge in cycle design. Now, unlike Cycling England, your role is cycling, wheeling and walking. Is there a similar level of skills in highway design for the other two areas?

I am trying to choose words carefully because it is an entire industry and all the people we work with. You get generational differences as well, as different industries move through it. A lot of people working in the industry want to see the same outcomes. They want to deliver integrated transport that is accessible, inclusive and designed to the best of their abilities. I have encountered very few who don’t, working 15 years in the industry. We have been trying to make sure that we train people. We have seen a rise from eight to 38 local authority-led training programmes from what we have been doing, and 7,500 people in authorities are being trained through our webinars and roadshows. More than 1,000 local authorities have received bespoke design and planning training, and we have done 10 guidance notes and toolkits. That said, we want to do more. Back to the point about the corporate plan, one of the things that we have been working on is a three-year training and education programme that, subject to budget and resource requirements, we would love to take forward in the next three years to make sure that we are taking the best of what people do across the country and enabling everybody else to do it as quickly as possible.

On the back of what you said about the percentage of funding that you have compared to Highways England, do you think there would be value in an equivalent of National Highways for cycling so that there is almost an equal footing?

Don’t look at me.

To a degree, the way the industry has responded is that Active Travel England is that. It is not the size and scale of National Highways. We only have 90 people in comparison to the many thousands who work in National Highways.

We have essentially piloted. We have had a two-year set-up, a new agency with a new way of working. This is a very welcome opportunity that forced us to go, “And what’s it done? Did it work?” You heard today that the results are quite remarkable. We know what more we could do now. Going down into pre-application work, everybody in the planning and building industry wants to know in advance how to pass the homework question. We want to do more of that. In terms of quantum from what we have learnt, the Government’s ambition will be laid out in CWIS3 and through the spending review. We know that the potential to do more is huge.

There is one other core difference, which is that National Highways has an asset that they own on behalf of the country and they manage, maintain and improve it. That is what they do. To a degree, one of the things that we do slightly differently is that we do not have the same asset, in that the national cycle network is not part of ATE. We act to convene local highway authority practitioners who have their responsibility for their network; 98% of the highway network in England is local authority and 2% is National Highways. Our role is not necessarily to be exactly the same as National Highways; it is to operate slightly differently by making sure that we can convene and co-ordinate and help local authorities deliver the best things they possibly can.

That then leads me really well into the question that I was supposed to ask. How have capability ratings for local authorities influenced ATE’s decision making? What are you doing to assist local authorities with low ratings?

I missed the first part of that, sorry.

How have capability ratings for local authorities influenced your decision making?

They have influenced our decision making dramatically. It was a system born out of working in local authorities. It was seen as a very bold thing to introduce that system. Essentially, it rates everybody. Very quickly, the trust was there. It was, “We want to help you deliver things that you can win at, and we will help you get better.” It has driven all our decision making. If you look at how much delivery has been speeded up and the quality of schemes, we have the evidence that it very clearly works. It is a new culture for local authorities to understand. It also helps local politicians drive their organisations to produce quality. Having the evidence base now to show that by doing it this way you will deliver twice as fast and you will win, and you will get better at it, has been welcomed, hence taking the same approach is now being considered more widely for wider transport. I don’t mind saying that I am considering it in working with DCMS for an approach in a wholly different sphere. Matching of capability and training is the way to go.

Where you have local authorities that have lower ratings, what do you do specifically to help them improve?

We speak to them in the first instance. We speak to them about what their problems are—the problems might be different depending on the political or the practitioner level—and then we develop a tailored programme of support for them and go in and deliver that. We had nine authorities that were considered capability-rated zero. After a year, when we had gone in and done work, eight authorities moved up in the capability ratings and only one moved down last year. We develop tailored programmes of work, and we make sure that we take our planners, designers and so on, and help deliver training and support them with the development of their package of schemes and things like that.

It is also up to them. Local ownership is really important. If you do not want to do it, that’s up to you, but we make it visible that that is the choice, which helps, and then local decisions are based on that. Visibility is really important.

The practitioners we work with have said that they are incredibly important; people aspire not only to not be seen lower in the ratings, but to get up into the realms of a 3 and to be seen on the same level as Transport for Greater Manchester and Transport for West Midlands.

It is like a competition as well, yes.

What is your role in ensuring that individual local authorities take opportunities to develop and deliver sufficient schemes to increase active travel in their area? I suppose you can flip it on its head. How can they best get what they need to do what they want to deliver in their local area through you?

Again, it depends on the area. One of the things that there is some concern about is that, with the move towards devolution, some of the smaller schemes might be left behind. We are working with those areas to make sure that we identify where they think that there might be barriers or issues, and we produce things that work for them. One of the things we talk about is that in the context of devolution in any combined authority area they will be bidding for money. Our perspective would be: why don’t we help you create one business case that illustrates the value of the types of local measures that you are talking about that you can all use, as opposed to each of you individually commissioning consultants or others to do the same work across various geographies? We try to find ways to help them with making the case efficiently as well.

What will happen before devolution happens? We had this conversation last week. It could be three or four years before CLAs exist in certain areas. Do people just carry on regardless, as if nothing has changed until it changes as far as what they are doing with you is concerned?

There is a transition period, clearly. For the funding that we allocate and dedicate, what we will do is the same thing that we have been doing previously, which is looking at the quality of the designs that they bring in and not funding anything that does not meet the quality criteria. For other areas, as they move through that transition, we will step in with different things. With established combined authority areas, we have things called design review panels where we meet with them and go through both their pipeline of programmes and the schemes or issues that they have on the ground with our designers to help them unpick issues. We already have a two-year programme looking forward and understanding when different authorities might be coming on, and therefore when we would have to resource up to make sure that we can fulfil the same kind of support that has been developed in-house by one of our principal engineers.

If you want a good example, I would be very happy to welcome you to my constituency, because we have been working for years on trying to get everyone joined up. We have some good examples of what needs to change and what has worked well.

That is a useful offer, Rebecca. Thank you.

Sticking with the devolution theme, generically, we would all be interested in what impact you think the additional devolution is going to have potentially on cycling and walking. You alluded to the fact that highways and local transport powers are split when there is an MCA at the moment, with them residing still in local councils. You also appeared to say, to some extent, that it had been a bit of a barrier, which is why in Greater Manchester you came up with the capability ratings. It strikes me that with the local government reorganisation, the move to more strategic authorities, there are going to be further areas, which are at the moment either county councils or unitary authorities, where those powers are going to be split up again. Do you have any views, from your experience of working in an MCA, as to whether that is a barrier? You also alluded to Transport for Greater Manchester. The concept of having a passenger transport executive or equivalent is at the moment only in certain parts of the country, and there are others that do not have them. In the way that local government is changing, how do you think that those structural changes are going to impact on the work that you do?

There are a lot of potential pitfalls built into it. What I like about the relationship with national and local government is local empowerment, but we need to make sure that local accountability goes with it. The potential is to address some of what happens in the one side of the road and the other side of the road issues that we have discussed today. They are big cultural changes in local areas. “Why do you need 10 different authorities? My journey doesn’t stop when I get to the edge of this particular authority.” They are going to be quite difficult conversations. The efficiency potential in terms of pace and cost savings is huge. They are not in our remit to work out. We are set up to be very adaptable to work within the confines that we have. Devolution brings with it a lot of change, and quite a few risks. We are right in the middle of working through that now, in the White Papers going back and forth.

There are two points that I would like to bring out if I may. The devolution White Paper notes the fact that mayors can ask ATE to undertake a capability rating of their constituent authorities, which is an interesting approach. At the moment, the capability rating applies to the entire area as opposed to constituent areas of it. The White Paper explicitly makes reference to the fact that Mayors can do that so that they can understand their own patch in terms of delivery. The other thing it notes is that, while local highway standards will remain with local authorities, Mayors are encouraged or enabled to look to align them, which could help with the consistency point on design standards that I referenced earlier.

There is a wider efficiency that could be considered. There are an awful lot of local authorities producing their own guidance, when we could have a more explicit agreement or direction to use national guidance so that there is a consistent level of service for the public wherever you are in the country. Local authorities might welcome that. We see an awful lot of guidance, and it often contains the same stuff for people trying to create some consistency. That picture could be taken bigger. We would welcome that.

With this changed landscape, presumably you are working through how you as an organisation are going to have to work differently. Have you thought about whether you might need any additional resources and powers? Maybe you need fewer; I don’t know. What is your thinking on that at the moment?

We touched on a few things such as very simple measures like side road zebra crossing markings and things that would be really helpful. We also have a lot of powers that we are not using fully yet. A lot can be done with what we have if we use it more effectively in the system. More regulation and powers take time, and it is not always the answer. What do we have that we can dial up properly? The very obvious and simple one is controlling speed, which we know is a major cause of danger and a major cause of people feeling unsafe. Controlling speed effectively would have a massive impact without changing any powers.

Thank you. We are going to move on to wider policy influence.

Again, I would reflect that the Department for Transport is responsible for policy, so most of the engagement will have taken place between the Department for Transport and MHCLG. That said, in line with what we talked about on the cycling and walking investment strategy, our colleagues at DFT consulted and conferred with us as to what would help aid us in delivery and so on. The work that has taken place and the wording changes towards vision-led planning cannot be underestimated, and they lead towards a different way of doing things, potentially. One of the things that is interesting and important now is the framework within which local authorities and the development industry can move forward with certainty as to how to go about applying that. For people who are not as au fait with it, it is the idea that, instead of relying on a computer software package that tells you that this many vehicle trips will be created by this many homes, it says that if we build it in this way it will deliver that many, but if we build it in that way, perhaps around active travel and public transport integration, it will create fewer car trips, which will reduce the impact on surrounding junctions, reduce the costs associated with changing junctions and so on. We engage through the Department for Transport with MHCLG on this. The really important thing that we are thinking about is how we help deliver support in the training and education package to local authorities and the industry, to take what is in the NPPF and say, “Right, this is how it could work in practice.” That is the thing that we want to focus on.

To home in on something Graham said, we assume that planning and anybody who is involved in that system as a statutory consultee is a potential blocker and something we should remove. There is also potential. If you genuinely make an attractive alternative to driving and you have an integrated transport offer and you know it will be there and you build accordingly, you don’t have to build the big junction. There is a huge saving of costs that could be spent somewhere else or saved, and you speed up delivery. The potential is to speed up delivery and save costs if we use it in the right way. We need to be careful not to lose the potential as well as looking at the regulatory side of it.

The changes in the NPPF provide the opportunity to look at it in that way. If you are a developer looking at a site, you have the red line boundary that determines what happens in that site. You have to deliver on that, and then you have to connect with the surrounding infrastructure. The way that things work at the moment, and have done for a long time, is that a lot of the focus is on the amount of vehicular-borne traffic that will be created by the new development, and the language has been about mitigating the impact on the surrounding roads. Generally, the only way to do that is through the junction changes that Chris alluded to and things like that. A huge amount of cost then goes into doing things like moving utilities underneath road surfaces. Huge amounts of money are being spent on widening junctions for that. That money would not be going into it in that way if a framework existed that had been facilitated by the NPPF for them to look at different ways not only of designing their site but prioritising public transport connections to and from it, or other infrastructure. It is that balancing act. If you were to ask the development industry to do huge junction changes based on traffic generation and then all that other stuff, sites would quickly become unviable. If you can choose the vision of the site that you are trying to deliver and have a framework that people can operate and rely on, you are in a position to change the type of sites that you deliver. It is worth noting in this context that the RTPI released just before Christmas a report that indicated that for the past 15 years most of the developments that have been delivered in the country have been car-borne or car-oriented and car-dominated. The changes in the NPPF brought forward by MHCLG create the opportunity for us to step into a different way of doing things.

An example of how it can work in our country—I mentioned it earlier—is Kesgrave School just outside Ipswich. It is not clever, it is not pretty and a lot of it is shared-use path, but it works and it is connected, and it has become part of the community. The school has lower than average body weight, higher attendance, after-school attendance, and that is 800 to 900 kids a day riding in. It is worth looking at how that is operating. There are a few examples like that around the country that are worth seeing. We can send the Committee a list.

That would be useful. When I was shadow planning Minister I saw an awful lot of really poor-quality new developments with no provision for walking and cycling, and built-in car dependency.

This is sort of the same question that Olly asked but about the Department’s integrated transport strategy. Just to do my little rant, as I trailed earlier, I remember in a previous life appealing to planners about a development where there were lots of different red line boundary settlements, 1,800 houses, the absolutely essential need to design the whole scheme around a wide avenue for active travel going from the heart of the scheme to the heart of the town and connecting to transport options. I just received a blank, dead-eyed stare and disbelief that I should suggest anything so ridiculous. With that in mind and with what you have already said in response to Olly, I am interested in what input you are having to the integrated transport strategy. What are your priorities for it? Maybe start there, please.

As I mentioned right at the start, quite a big influence is that the ATE CEO is looking at that strategy now. He is on secondment to DFT to go and look at it. A big change that the agency has made is being part of conversations, and this is a demonstrable impact that is being had. There is a true understanding of where the client base comes from for buses, trams and trains and how they get to them. That is the unspoken foundation of a functional public transport system. It is seen regionally. We have mentioned the Bee network in Manchester. Now that learning is being taken nationally. That integration is absolutely critical. Dr Arthur mentioned earlier that there is potential for a loss of bus journeys to cycling and walking. Yes, there is, but we generally benefit from that. For the longer journeys, we can make it a normal thing to do to park up right next to it. It is really easy. You tap on the bus and the fare is capped for the rest of the day. If we start to connect it up like that, that is the real potential. We don’t have to talk about active travel; it just becomes an integrated transport offer. I can mix and match as I choose. That is the exciting conversation that is happening at the moment to get out of silos into a transport offer. We are very much embedded in that.

I am very pleased to hear it. Thank you. You will be aware that the Public Accounts Committee recommended: “DfT and Active Travel England should, by April 2024, develop a clear and consistent approach for ensuring greater integration of active travel infrastructure with the public transport network.” The CEO is on secondment now as we speak. To what extent has that been achieved? When, if not last April, might we reach some visible conclusion of that process?

It is live. It is not our project. We are on the edge of it, and we are very much feeding into it. It is a live piece of work right now with consultation happening around the country.

Thank you. The last couple of questions are from me. I don’t think we saw your strategic priorities for ’25-26 and beyond. Do you have a quick summary of them, or could you send us them?

Yes, we can definitely send you them.

We can definitely send you them. We are taking them to the board next week.

Fine. That explains it.

You can have them when I have seen them.

Okay. Could you send them to us afterwards? Finally, the former Secretary of State promised “unprecedented” levels of funding for active travel. If you could have unprecedented levels of funding, what would you spend it on?

While Chris thinks, one of the first things that I would start with is a massive push towards bringing more people into the industry. If you are to have unprecedented levels of investment in the built environment—transport is in all aspects of the built environment—one of the starting points would be making sure that it is an attractive proposition to young people or people who want to change careers and develop what they can do, because you need a workforce to deliver it. That doesn’t just take into account planning and transport planning; it takes into account general workforce in terms of how you would go about delivering it.

I have finished thinking now. Going back to the capability ratings, that programme has been so successful that I would put consistency into the system based on capability. You need training. You need more cash to get on with it. That in turn would drive up quality. It would both give us a pipeline of quality and allow local authorities to employ and invest in the officer base to be able to deliver these schemes because they know it is coming. It would be consistently delivered using that methodology.

Thank you very much and thank you for your evidence today. Feel free to write to us if there is anything you feel you have not been able to cover in this session and any answers that you would like to say more on. We all found this session really valuable. That concludes today’s meeting.