Transport Insights

With Labour cutting funding for active travel and being coy about whether its forthcoming cycling and walking investment strategy (CWIS3) will include meaningful targets, transport minister Lilian Greenwood has gone in for the diversionary tactic of reheating the culture wars.

On Sunday The Guardian reported pressure from campaigners for CWIS3 to include targets beyond the feeble – and clearly unmeasurable – aspiration to make walking, wheeling and cycling “easy, safe, and accessible for everyone” by 2035.

On Wednesday, Greenwood answered – or rather failed to answer – a question from shadow transport secretary Richard Holden on:

whether it ceased to be her department’s policy that 50% of journeys in towns and cities should be walked or cycled by 2030 when the second Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy ended in March 2025.

She merely said:

Decisions on future active travel targets will be confirmed in the third Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy when it is published next year.

She also failed to clarify the issue in an interview with the Guardian, published today, but did manage to criticise Conservative policies that pitted drivers against cyclists, which she said risked making the roads less safe by inflaming tensions, and promise that the era of transport culture wars is over.

Now, Transport Action Network says the funding of £160m a year for the next three years for English local authorities represents a 36% fall in real terms from 2021/22.

It says spending by the Conservatives in 2021/22 under Active Travel Fund 3 was £200.9m, which equates to £251.1m in today’s prices using the Bank of England inflation calculator.

Meanwhile, Greenwood also said that it is “quite shameful” that the last government “didn’t have a proper road safety strategy”.

“Shameful” is quite rich from a government that has been suppressing safety data on 14 smart motorway schemes.