Transport Insights

It looks like there may be a row over the transport secretary’s plan to publish the third Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy tomorrow, when Parliament is not sitting, but ministers have already been briefing the contents to the friendly media.

Responding to an MP at transport questions this morning, Heidi Alexander advised him to look out for the strategy. The Speaker could clearly be heard to say:

Surely it will be coming to the House first.

His point was that this is a statutory document and needs to be put before Parliament before being published. It’s not clear what Alexander thinks she is playing at.

In the meantime, the Guardian has the spin:

Ministers are to launch a major push to get more children walking and cycling to school as part of a wider boost for “active travel” by the transport secretary Heidi Alexander.

In the first significant change to active travel policy since the Boris Johnson era, thousands of new safe routes and crossings will be built around schools in England, with a target of having at least 60% of all children walk, cycle or wheel to school by 2035.

Another pointless target that the government will make no attempt to meet and in any case Labour probably won’t be in office.

But I’m asking, it’s an investment strategy; what will the funding be? The Guardian refers to:

a promised total active travel spend of £4.5bn over five years

This looks like quite a lot of money, but leaves me asking, what will the funding actually be? Or rather what accounting tricks will ministers pull to make this look like it happens.

Just for an experiment, I asked Co-pilot. The short answer is:

They will almost certainly inflate the definition of “active travel” by counting every possible pot of money that can be loosely connected to walking or cycling, even if it is not actually spent on active travel infrastructure or behaviour‑change programmes.

This is a classic Treasury/DfT tactic, and it is exactly how previous governments have inflated the numbers.

The detail Co-pilot offered was:

1. They will include CRSTS money that is not ring‑fenced for active travel
2. They will include developer contributions (Section 106 / CIL)
3. They will include local authority capital spending that is not active travel
4. They will include National Highways spending that is not active travel
5. They will include school travel and behaviour change programmes
6. They will include “active travel elements” of wider regeneration schemes

But:

They will not increase the core Active Travel England budget to £900m/yr

We will see how accurate this prediction – based on previous behaviour – is.

Meanwhile, Transport Action Network reports that

newly issued government guidance on transport now allows councils to spend “dedicated funding” for active travel on road schemes, whereas roads funding cannot be moved the other way.

So even dedicated funding won’t be dedicated funding.