Transport Insights

Yesterday I asked Co-pilot to predict what accounting tricks the government might pull to get to a spend of £4.5bn on active travel over five years and today I asked it to look at the newly published third cycling and walking investment strategy (CWIS3) to see what they have actually done.

The CWIS3 document sets out a projected sum but then transport secretary Heidi Alexander treats that in her foreword as if it will actually happen:

backed by £4.5 billion of investment, we will empower local authorities across England to embed active travel into their local transport systems, so the benefits can be felt by everyone

But is this sum just wishful thinking? According to Co-pilot:

The funding projections in CWIS3 are structurally optimistic and in several places internally inconsistent with the scale of outcomes the strategy claims to deliver. They are not outright fictitious, but they rely on assumptions that are significantly more ambitious than the underlying funding mechanisms, historic delivery rates, or local authority capacity would justify.

And the more detailed answer is that only £1.107bn is direct Active Travel England (ATE) funding. The remainder is:

Estimated proportions of wider transport funds
Non-ringfenced local transport budgets
Contributions from planning, health, and regeneration programmes
Assumed local match funding

This means the headline figure is not a guaranteed pot, but a composite of:

Money that may be spent on active travel
Money that could be spent on something else
Money that depends on future Spending Reviews
Money that depends on local political choices

Another major criticism is that the projections rely on non‑ringfenced funding behaving like ringfenced funding, with a large share of the £4.5bn is made up of:

Local Transport Fund allocations
Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) contributions
Levelling Up Fund and regeneration schemes
Planning gain (Section 106 / CIL)
Health and wellbeing budgets

Highways magazine has a good take on it:

The remainder of the cash is in the form of ‘a proportion of funding from a range of funding streams within the DfT and other government departments’. These include:

• Transport for City Regions
• Highways maintenance
• City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements
• Pride in Place programme
• National Highways
• Local Transport Grant/Integrated Transport Block

When questioned on whether the DfT could guarantee any of the remaining £3.4bn CWIS 3 headline investment, a DfT spokesperson highlighted that the cash was a projection, as it had been for CWIS1 and 2. The difference now is that the transport funding to local authorities is part of a wider devolved settlement.