Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Active travel, HC 1487
Thursday 7 March 2019, Manchester
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 7 March 2019.
Members present: Lilian Greenwood (Chair); Ruth Cadbury; Huw Merriman; Graham Stringer; Daniel Zeichner.
Questions 125 - 193
Witnesses
I: Nadia Kerr, Delegate, Walk Ride GM, and Jonathan Fingland, Chair, Greater Manchester Cycling Campaign
II: Chris Boardman, Cycling and Walking Commissioner for Greater Manchester, and Angeliki Stogia, Executive Member for Environment and Skills, Manchester City Council
III: Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Examination of witnesses
Nadia Kerr and Jonathan Fingland
Q125 Chair: Can I say how delighted we are to be here in Greater Manchester? For me, as a Boltonian born and bred, it is nice to be back in the north-west. You even managed to sort familiar weather for us today as well. We are really grateful to Transport for Greater Manchester for hosting our meeting today. There are a few announcements before we start properly.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to come and watch today’s session. You know we have a question and answer straight afterwards. If you are planning to tweet about today’s meeting, which we would encourage you to do, I would ask you if you could tag us, as the Transport Committee, in your tweets. Our name is @CommonsTrans and if you can use the hashtag Transcomminmanchester, you can find all those by looking us up on Twitter.
We are not expecting there to be any alarms during the meeting, so if there is an alarm we have to assume it is real. Exit the room from the doors out the back or the one at the side and proceed to the emergency stairwell at the far end of the floor, which apparently is that way. Transport for Greater Manchester’s staff will be on hand to assist. If we get outside the building, we are going to assemble on the wide pavement on London Road opposite the building until we are allowed to return, but hopefully that will not happen. If you do need to leave during the session, please use the door and leave your bags and stuff behind so we can get out.
I think we are able to start our first evidence session. Welcome. Thank you both for coming along. For the record of our session, would you like to introduce yourselves?
Nadia Kerr: My name is Nadia Kerr and I represent WalkRideGM today. We are a campaign group that launched in Greater Manchester in December, so we are just three months old. We are campaigning for nicer, safer, healthier streets for people to walk, to scoot, to cycle, particularly children on their way to school. We want to help to make walking and cycling natural choices for those everyday short journeys across Greater Manchester. We want Greater Manchester to be the standout place that is quoted across the world as, “Wow, look what they have done there”.
Jonathan Fingland: Hello. My name is Jonathan Fingland and I am here representing Greater Manchester Cycling Campaign. I have been campaigning for possibly getting on a decade now and it does feel like we have made a lot of progress, although there is still room for improvement and more to be done. I should also mention that I am involved with Trafford Cycle Forum, which used to be entirely run by the local authority but now we have a group of four residents who do the admin and chairing of the cycle forum and we have good engagement with the local authority there as well.
Q126 Chair: As you have both worked out, you have to press your mics on and off to make them work. We will probably forget that on occasion, but we will do our best.
A nice easy opening question to both of you, so you will have to argue about who goes first: why is it important to increase levels of walking and cycling in Greater Manchester?
Nadia Kerr: The case is well established that walking and cycling helps to ease congestion on the roads. We simply do not take up so much space if we are out of a vehicle. It enables exercise to be built into short journeys, typically a commute or a trip to the shops, which then supports both physical and psychological health issues. Importantly, it reduces air pollution—they are clean things to do—and it is also well established that it boosts the local economy. Of the seven cities that feature in the “Bike Life” report, Greater Manchester has the biggest benefit to take for the economy if targets are hit for walking and cycling. It is a well-established case.
Q127 Chair: Jonathan, is there anything you want to add or anything that the members of your cycling campaign want to say?
Jonathan Fingland: I would echo all those points and add a couple of points. It is not just air pollution. With climate change, we need to be very mindful that walking and cycling are the lowest carbon transport options. There is no question about the health aspect. People often say they drive because they are busy, but if you can incorporate the exercise into your day-to-day life you do not need to take a gym membership, which I have no interest in. It is not just health; people can save time often walking and cycling and they do not realise that.
There are two separate points that I would like to make. One is about personal freedom. There are all sorts of equity issues about walking and cycling and there are a lot of people who want to walk, and cycle more than they currently do. Road environments often dissuade people from doing the walking and cycling that they already feel encouraged to do. I think that there is a personal freedom issue there.
The last point, just to wrap up on that, is to say that we should encourage it is as a really effective form of local transport. It is not just a leisure thing. The sport thing is separate, so although that is also a benefit of cycling, I think the focus on it being an effective form of local transport is what we should be considering today.
Q128 Chair: What are the key things that your organisations would like to see Government do, whether that is national Government or local government, to make walking and cycling easier and more attractive? What are the enablers for people to choose to walk and cycle rather than use their car, if indeed they have a choice, because, of course, lots of people do not have access to a car?
Nadia Kerr: Road safety is a key issue here. We have planned very effectively in a car-centric way for years and years and years and that is a real issue. In my daytime, I am a cycling accident solicitor and my team is currently expanding. That is not a good sign. We do not want to be dealing with these incidents. We have to plan infrastructure to address those issues and make the place safer and have a perception of safety, particularly for parents to encourage their children to walk and to cycle. That then ticks all the boxes that we have already mentioned about why it is important.
What we need to do that is a long-term strategy and long-term funding, both capital and revenue, so that we can maintain what is created. But the long-term aspect of that is so important because over the years we have seen under-funding and sporadic funding, which I think has caused local authorities and councils to perhaps be disinclined to start on a journey to make some change, because they do not know if they are able to continue with it. Where would the priority sit in their difficult decisions over funding?
I also want to stress today the importance of public information cascades about why this is important. I think sometimes the message is lost when we just talk about walking and cycling. What we should be highlighting is quality of life as a headline and quality of life means all the things that sit under it that we are trying to address with walking and cycling. That is congestion, air quality, climate change; it is all those things. Who wants to sit in a traffic jam when they could be at home with the children or in the park with the children? Perhaps we should consider quality of life as a headline rather than walk and cycle. There are people out there who just do not like cyclists and see cyclists as the problem and not part of the solution, so we need to think about the public information message behind what it is that we are striving for.
Q129 Chair: Great. Thanks, Nadia. Jonathan, we have heard we want strategy, we want funding, we want infrastructure, we want information and education. Are there other things or different things that you want? Maybe it is the distinction between what national Government should be doing and what you want local government to be doing to make cycling and walking easier and more attractive.
Jonathan Fingland: I would prefer to focus on the national Government, if that is okay. I will touch on the local one: even in Greater Manchester, with 10 local authorities, we have different local authorities at different stages of the curve, different levels of ambition. There can be blockers of all sorts of types at all sorts of levels.
To go back to the national stuff, I would summarise it to say that we need bold leadership and that is across Departments. Things like planning are relevant and at the moment developers can often say, “It would not be economically viable/profitable unless we do not do this, that and the other”. That can include not providing local authorities with the section 106 type moneys that is used to fund things. On the investment, I back that up and I would even like to add figures to that, because I think we should be looking at 5% of all transport spending on walking and cycling immediately and incremental rises to get up to 10% as soon as possible. Edinburgh has been able to do this, so I think these are the sorts of things that should be done nationally.
With regard to Greater Manchester, we are quite fortunate now in the sense that we have longer-term planning and strategy, but it is still not as long term as certainly I would like. I get the impression with local authorities—and I expect Chris Boardman will reinforce the point about investment—that even with the boldness that we have from our city mayor and the investment that we have on the table, it is not going to last that long. Local authorities need to plan for several years in advance for staffing and training people, so the short termism has been a real problem.
The investment needs to be bold and long term, but then as far as leadership, it needs to be across Departments, not just one person in the Transport Department who says, “I am a cycle champion”. We want the Health Department and the judiciary and everyone to say, “We are going to back this. This is normal”, to back up Nadia’s point about getting rid of some of the vitriol that is often put towards cyclists.
Q130 Chair: You have both talked about some of the things that we want, rightly, at an organisational or institutional level and what you would like to see different. I want to come back down to look at the individual obstacles to people walking and cycling. We know that 40% of short journeys in Manchester are made by car. What is stopping individuals from deciding to walk or cycle, whether it is to work or to school or the shops? What are the key obstacles?
Nadia Kerr: The key obstacles, as far as I have been able to identify, are road safety and confidence levels. It is the point I have already made, that parents think it is unsafe. There is a perception that is unsafe, so why would you? The car-centric planning means that the roads are not necessarily the best for walking and cycling, so we have to address that. We have been planning in a car-centric way and there is inevitably a habit that has formed of, “I am going out. I will pick up my car keys. The car is right outside, I will get in it”. Children expect to be dropped off and picked up in the car, so there is no questioning by the parents of any other mode of transport.
There is also a thing about it is just not normal, it is not the norm. We might see lots of people cycling within the city centre in Manchester, but the majority still do not do that and it is not seen as the norm. Quite frankly, what are the alternatives for people who are trying to get about in their daily lives when we have a public transport system as we currently have? If trains are not turning up, trains are being cancelled, buses are late and dirty and slow and stuck in congestion because of the motorised vehicles on the roads, what alternatives have people really had over the years? We need to address those issues.
On the point that Jonathan made about elected officials making bold and brave decisions to do things that might irritate car drivers, perhaps there has not been the appetite to make those potentially difficult decisions, but we need to do something. We cannot just sit and do nothing, so there has to be some bravery from elected officials.
Q131 Chair: Jonathan, are there any other thoughts you are hearing about why individual members of the public say, “I would walk, but—” or, “I would like to cycle, but—”?
Jonathan Fingland: Hostile roads is the phrase I would use, to summarise. I would also like to introduce the concept of comfort rather than just safety. I know enough about maths and statistics to know that it is safer for me to walk or cycle on the road than it is to sit on a sofa and do nothing or walk up and down stairs and risk a fall, but that absolute safety is not the same as comfort. I think that is the thing to address with the hostile roads. The normality of things, agreed, driving has been prioritised too much for decades now and it is worth noting that although we are very both very keen on active travel, it is more about low-car lifestyles and about choice and option. Many people still have a car but choose to walk or cycle. For some, that can become many of their journeys.
One thing I am conscious of is the perceived war on the motorist that has been recited numerous times and I think that has led to a reduction in options for people. Not everyone wants to be a motorist, myself included. I was a motorist who used to drive a lot, and it is only afterwards that I can look back and realise how I was car dependent. It is hard from the inside and people are fearful of change, I understand. However, I think a package of choices about low-car choices, of which walking, and cycling are a big part, does need the public transport and other things. It needs to be comfortable and normal.
Q132 Daniel Zeichner: I am Daniel Zeichner and I come from Cambridge, which is very much a cycling city, but in our city one of the obstacles is when people get to their destination, it is often hard to find somewhere to leave their bike safely and quickly. Is that an issue in Manchester?
Jonathan Fingland: Not as much yet. We hope that there are more and more people using bikes and we hope to have the problem that you have in time, but it can be fixed. I do not have the numbers off the top of my head, but we have so many car-parking spaces in Manchester city centre. Where there is a will, there is a way. I suspect you are the same in Cambridge. You do have the CyclePoint, which I believe is the largest cycle parking facility in the UK. Yes, it can be improved security-wise, yes, you could do with another one, but I think where there is a will, there is a way. You are right, parking at the destination is needed.
Also, in an urban area for us—and I know Cambridge well enough to know you have streets like this as well—we need to convert some on-street car-parking spaces to on-street cycle-parking spaces. I know you have this in Cambridge, and they are not covered. In some of the areas of Greater Manchester, we may be able to do what they have in London, where they have these covered things, so you have some security overnight as well. But it is cycle parking as well—yes, please.
Q133 Huw Merriman: I want to ask you to comment on the obstacles that local authorities and Government face in prioritising walking and cycling. In so doing, some of it will be the system, but also you touched on why people do not walk/cycle. The National Travel Survey has shown that road safety concerns are 18%, too much traffic 12%, so there is 30% there. I bear the scars and I have the false teeth from that issue myself. But the rest of the percentage is: bike broken; don’t own a bike; easier/quicker to go by car; lack of time, too busy; got a car; lack of interest. Some of the obstacles have to be getting people to change, to be more motivated to do it. Could you comment on that and also what the other obstacles are for both Government and local authorities?
Nadia Kerr: I have already touched upon the habit point, that people are just so used to getting in the car, that is what everybody does. In time, as more cyclists are seen out there and more people are walking and people talk about those things, there can be a cultural shift in relation to that. For me, the biggest factor that the campaign groups face—and it is the same for governments—is getting the message across to people who do not currently travel in the way that we would like them to. We are aware in Greater Manchester of schemes being released for brand-new infrastructure and what we want to see is car drivers seeing that new infrastructure and people using it and dashing past them on the way to where they are going and saying, “Why don’t I try that?” That cultural shift over time will gather momentum and keep going.
To touch specifically on your local government point, the short-term funding that we have seen over the years has impacted on the recruitment of the right staff to do the jobs that are needed on a long-term basis. Perhaps we have local authorities that do not have the leadership or the will currently and, importantly, the correctly qualified and experienced person in the planning or in the design job that we need to even put a bid forward for schemes such as this. That also needs to be addressed. We have to have the right people in those local authorities doing the right jobs properly and doing them well.
Jonathan Fingland: To pick up on the point you mentioned about once someone has invested in a car and the year’s insurance, it is a type of commitment and it then becomes harder to say, “I will just leave the car sat there”. You have paid for quite a bit of the overheads for that next car journey, so you may be less incentivised to use a bike, but there is a combination of younger people and people living in denser areas who are not necessarily younger, so people moving to the city centre where maybe car parking and car usage is not as easy as it is in areas where there is more space. We need to be mindful that there is a whole group of people coming through where the car is not the first choice. They may still have one but maybe a bit reluctantly.
A lot of people I know have gone from being a two-car family to a one-car family, which is a lot easier than going from being a one-car person to a no-car person, this business of being able to use a car as and when needed. I have used car hire quite a bit. I would love to have a car club, a car share system near me. Even though we are advocates for walking and cycling, and people sometimes think we are supposed to be just anti-car all the time, it may be that we need to engage with car share and that it is part of a package that enables people to be more flexible with their choices so that it is not 100% car, which is the default position for the majority of people.
It is tough to crack, but I believe there will need to be some stick with this. I can imagine that politically it is awkward to say, “How do we do this?” but with activities like the clean air charging, as long as the costs of that are guaranteed to be used for the public good, especially addressing the transport issues and the air pollution issues, you can take the edge off the stick being seen as a bad thing.
Q134 Huw Merriman: I was going to ask you how the obstacles can be overcome, but you have both done that, so instead I will go back to where you have just finished, Jonathan. If one of the obstacles is a lack of congestion charging in Manchester, how do you overcome that obstacle being perhaps public opinion?
Jonathan Fingland: You do not say that you want a congestion charge in Manchester. That is the starter for 10, after it was so roundly voted down by the people several years ago. We have had some clean air proposals come out recently, and I must admit that I am quite disappointed that there is not a workplace parking levy proposal or a business parking levy in there. I know that has been quite successful in Nottingham. If it is not seen as a tax on the individual but as a tax on the provider of the parking space, it can be seen as a business cost rather than an individual personal burden. Motoring does not pay its way, that is absolute, and yet politicians, I think maybe because of this perceived war on the motorist—or the fake news of war on the motorist—are reluctant to increase charges for motoring.
But I think it would be fairer if there were increased charges, especially if that enabled the funding of alternatives. I think there are a lot of people who want alternatives. I am not sure you have to do too much encouragement in the hearts and minds department. It is about facilitating these choices. I do not know if the regulations need to change to enable more car club places or more on-street cycle parking, but all of these things add up and it is about making it easy and choosable. People are ready to choose it if it were there.
Nadia Kerr: I see the importance of employers taking an initiative here. We are talking about a lot of short everyday journeys being trips to work. In my mind, employers have a real responsibility. There are a lot of them around and about and it could be done for parking spaces for bikes. I know it is a difficult thing to say to a member of staff, “You are losing your car-parking space, but we are creating space for a number of bikes” but it is the same as the political landscape. Some of these decisions need to be bold and brave. I think that the workplace parking levy needs to happen. There needs to be some impact felt by employers. They have to take their part in this. It is a problem that we all need to address, but I think that employers as a group have a critical role in it.
Q135 Ruth Cadbury: What do you think of the Manchester vision for cycling and walking led by the mayor and Transport for Greater Manchester?
Nadia Kerr: It is ambitious. I think it could be more ambitious. We have already said there is a big problem to solve here and it is not going away. In Manchester we have an ambition and we have some funds. The £160 million that has been allocated to this sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money only when we look back and see what we have had in the past, but when we see the level of funding that is going into motorways and major roads, it is small fry. We need to be agitating and pushing for more funding on a long-term basis. That will give us what we need in Greater Manchester, which is a much more ambitious plan.
But in what we have seen and the changes that we are seeing there is absolutely momentum, public will and public enthusiasm for change and we are seeing some good schemes starting to be delivered. We are awaiting the announcement at the end of March of the next tranche of schemes that will be approved and that is mobilising even more support for the changes that we need. It is ambitious, but we need to aim higher still.
Jonathan Fingland: I do not question the ambition, to be honest. I think that it is a framework and we are in the process of fleshing out the details. There is still learning going on at all levels, at GM and at the local authority levels. One thing that has been really good is the way that the network planning has to be prioritised as a crucial first step. That is something that could be rolled out nationally maybe, but to highlight where we have come from, it is ultimately going to take approximately a year to go from the first draft to the second draft of the network plan. This is to do with the limited resources that local authorities have in experienced staff. For me, the ambition is there. I totally agree that it does need more money. Chris Boardman has talked about £1.5 billion over 10 years to enable this vision and at the moment we have less than a tenth of that committed. Whether it comes locally or nationally, one way or another it is needed.
Another aspect of this—and I do not know if we will come to it—is that there are certain elements of Government policy and regulation that risk suppressing some of Greater Manchester’s ambition. I am not concerned about the level of ambition. To be honest, I think it is great, where we have come from, and I hope that the level of ambition increases, but we have had a dramatic increase over the last 12 or 18 months already.
Q136 Ruth Cadbury: We are coming on to Government vision, but can I just pick this up? As you probably know, I am a London MP and was a London councillor for a long time, and there are times when you get the cyclists versus the rest or versus the politicians or versus the cab drivers. Do you think the way things have been approached in Greater Manchester have been different and to what extent has that sort of politics with a small “p” played out here?
Jonathan Fingland: I think some of backlash is yet to come in Manchester. There has been some backlash with the first big scheme that has gone to consultation since the Made to Move project. It is worth noting that that scheme predates Made to Move and has been uplifted but is not an entirely Made to Move scheme. I will be honest, I think there is more to come. I hope we do a better job. One example that I think is great is a bid that has just gone in for Levenshulme that has not yet had its programme entry approved, but it will be considered and announced later this month. There is some material there that is worth sharing with you that shows the groups that the local community have engaged with ahead of starting the bid. They have not even defined exactly what is going to go where yet and they have already had lots of engagement with lots of local groups. I believe it is possible to do better than what has happened in the past, but I am still expecting some backlash in the future.
Nadia Kerr: The critical thing here relates to education and for people across their various modes of travel to appreciate that bigger question of quality of life. We need to make some changes and the only way to do that, I am afraid, is that we have disruption in the meantime. We are hopeful for segregated areas of roads, where possible, to design out conflict between different road user groups and maintenance budgets to make sure that we can continue to use smooth surfaces that are pothole-free that does not then put us back into conflict with different user groups again. I agree with Jonathan, I think there is more to come. As schemes are built there will be much more disruption, but we have to market the longer-term vision and the longer-term view. What else should we do if we do not do what we are planning? What else is the answer? I do not think there is another answer.
Q137 Chair: Where do you think the opposition comes from? Is it from motorists who feel like they are being asked to give up their road space to someone else? Is it from taxi drivers, for example? Where do you see the opposition at the moment in the public perceptions about this idea?
Nadia Kerr: I think a key one is parking spaces for cars and people who fear where they may park their car when they get to their ultimate destination, because they have not yet made the shift in their minds of making that journey by alternative means. We see that as a problem for an individual and I think we then see local traders concerned about the loss of business if parking spaces are lost. I think a lot of the hostility arises around car-parking spaces, but there are already great case studies for that not being the case and those need to be shared. That is again part of the public information around this. If we have seen schemes rolled out with exactly the same issues that were addressed in the consultation phases of, “We might lose some business here” and that has proved to be incorrect, we have to share that information now.
Jonathan Fingland: Yes, I would echo that again. Another point is that when people's convenience gets challenged it makes them react. On this business of cars being normal, they are also very large. There are some great videos from London that show hundreds of people going through a cycle lane that looks empty and 10 vehicles almost stationary in the road and it looks like there are more motor vehicles than cycles. There may be ways to address the perception thing.
Another part of conflict—and this is at the planning and design stage rather than after it is built—with motoring getting prioritised as it is and the amount of space that gets used in the centre of the carriageways and public highway for motoring, you end up being left with the bits at the edges where walking and cycling often has to argue over who can have what space. This is at the planning stage and later on you might end up with actual conflicts in real life. In Manchester even now, even with our bold ambition, there is still the perception that we have to maintain the current level of motor traffic and maybe that needs to be questioned. We need space. The battles are sometimes over space.
Chair: Thanks very much. I am going to hand over now and we are going to look at the national picture and national policy.
Q138 Daniel Zeichner: Jonathan, perhaps first we can just go back. You hinted a moment ago that there some elements of Government policy nationally that might be cutting in the wrong direction. I was wondering if you can amplify those before we go any further.
Jonathan Fingland: Yes. Specifically one thing that Greater Manchester has wanted to do is to highlight that pedestrians already have priority walking across a side road and by means of adding what is described as an “informal zebra”, and I know that there are discussions ongoing with the DfT about this. Another point—it is a bit technical, sorry about that—is that within junctions, if you are going to have signal heads in between different lanes of motor traffic, they have to be in islands that take a certain width. No one wants to be stood on these islands. Often the design is such that they are not anticipating or encouraging people to cross half the carriageway and wait before they cross another bit, but with all the space that these regulations take up, it squeezes it to even smaller spaces at the edges.
I do not know what the answer is. I know abroad they will often use gantry with just one traffic light per lane and you do not have these islands, which means that you have more space available at the sides. I do not know all the details, but unfortunately with many schemes that get put forward, we have to end up unpicking these regulations, the timing of the lights and the motor capacity and other things, to work out why walking and cycling are left arguing over the scraps at the edges. There is a vast range, but as a simple one, the turning the corner one at junctions would really simplify that, but then also the number of islands within a junction. One big island, if needed, where people need to cross in two stages is fine, but I am talking about when you have lots of small islands and it just has such an impact on the amount of space used.
Q139 Daniel Zeichner: Thanks, that is helpful. Previously witnesses in this inquiry have talked about the mini-zebras, so we are on to that.
Can I talk to both of you about the wider policy landscape? A couple of years ago the Government issued their Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy, which had been long-argued for. I think they published it on a bank holiday, which possibly told you how much publicity they were looking for, but I think it was broadly welcomed. Could you say a little about what your reaction to it was and how you think it has helped or not helped here?
Nadia Kerr: It was the first long-term strategy document. It was well received by lobbying groups. I think that there were some generous targets in there, some that were just perhaps so easy to achieve that they were not really what you might describe as a target, particularly for walking. I think it was lacking ambition in walking circles. The cycling target, however, is proving to be a little bit more difficult and challenging. Perhaps I would still question whether that is a target as well. It feels so unachievable and I would question how there can be both extremes within one document. There is clearly a lot of work to do if there is any chance at all of hitting the cycling target, but it is a document that in principle was very much welcomed, as you have already mentioned.
Jonathan Fingland: I would echo that generally it was a great step forwards. My big thing with CWIS is that Government need to put the “I”—the investment—into CWIS. That is the thing that seems to be lacking.
Another point that I think is relevant at that level of policy is monitoring of walking and cycling and the modelling and estimating how much activity there is. It is something that historically has either been overlooked or has been challenging, so the quality of the data is not what we would wish for. I would hope that nowadays with all the CCTV analysis that can be done we can get much more accurate and widespread data so that we have a better picture of both where we are now and also the improvements that are made and then we can justify the benefit, so that the investment was worth spending on. Monitoring is something that I hope is a big part of the CWIS work.
Q140 Graham Stringer: You said earlier you would wish the Department for Transport to spend 5% or 10% of their budget on cycling and walking. Is there any basis for those target figures?
Jonathan Fingland: One basis could be to just compare it to the percentage of journeys that the Government targets want, especially if you realised where we are coming from, where there has been underinvestment in walking and cycling and potentially over-prioritisation of other modes. There is catch-up to be done. The 10% I believe would work out at between £30 and £35 per head per year. I think Greater Manchester’s ambition worked out at between £50 and £60 per head if we were to spend the full £1.5 billion over 10 years. As a campaign, we need to put forward a figure of at least 10% within five years. The fact that we are well under 5% highlights that we rapidly need to get some investment. I do think it needs to grow to 10% or more.
I believe that in the Netherlands it is nearer £40 per head, which would be 12% or 15% of our annual transport spend per person. Bear in mind that they are refining what they have and building on a lot of good work and most places are starting from scratch over here.
Q141 Graham Stringer: I understand that ambition. I was just wondering if it was related to any objective set of facts or statistics.
Jonathan Fingland: There are national organisations that have done more work on this than me. If it is something that you would like more information on, we will gladly get something that we can send through to you afterwards. The reason I mentioned rising at 1% a year up to 10% or above is because Edinburgh has done this, and I believe it is now spending 12% of its local budget. But it is worth noting that it is hard to split what comes out of a national budget and what comes out of a local budget, so in a way the reason for aiming for a percentage is just to say—whether it is some from national, some from local—as a country, if we are spending this much on transport, we should be spending at least 10% of that amount on walking and cycling.
Q142 Graham Stringer: What are the top three priorities that would make cycling and walking more attractive to people in Greater Manchester?
Nadia Kerr: The infrastructure. If we can create some attractive infrastructure with some segregated cycleways where people feel safe, and where it is not possible to segregate—because that is a very expensive way of creating good infrastructure—we lower speed limits and we have a big behavioural campaign as well so that we do not have this conflict between different road users. It is certainly the infrastructure.
I think it is the public information message that I have already mentioned, that we have to do something here and it is cross-policy. This is not just about active travel; it goes across all sorts of different policies of air pollution and climate change. We have to tick the box somewhere: what else would that look like? Those are my two.
Q143 Graham Stringer: Number 3?
Jonathan Fingland: It touches on what you said about segregated lanes. I prefer the word “protection” and protection can come in different forms, through the infrastructure or if people could be reassured that the justice system was there for them and that drivers were cautious. Not all drivers, but some drivers can be cocky and think that there is no chance of a comeuppance for them. I was probably like that when I drove.
One point that was not mentioned there is a connected network. The network needs to not have gaps in it. That has been a problem in the past. There have been short bits of infrastructure but then there has been a part of the route that can just be a deal breaker and that can stop people using the route. It does need to be a connected network as well.
Q144 Graham Stringer: You have both been very positive about Andy Burnham and TfGM and the big initiatives they are taking. What have they got wrong?
Chris Boardman: It is quite hard when I am sitting behind you.
Jonathan Fingland: I didn’t know you were that close.
Nadia Kerr: I have one that relates to the clean air plan and the exemption for private vehicles being charged, which was only last week: 285,000 private vehicles are the ones that are causing the biggest issue, yet they are expected to be exempt from the pollution charge. I think that is a big mistake.
Jonathan Fingland: I have thought of one that I think I can get away with. There could have been more technology to do with engagement on the network planning. I am sure that it is to do with the fact that we have started from nothing and wanted to get on with things quickly, but I wish that it had taken less than a year and I wish that there were more stages of iteration and people could engage more readily. One of the benefits of this tack is not just so that Chris’s team could put something out to the whole public, but it can be used internally so that you can engage with councillors and get them on board at the early stages of schemes. The easier it is to do this engagement the more of it that will happen, and I think that that would be useful.
Q145 Graham Stringer: For my final question, I was cycling along King’s Road a good few years ago. A car turned left in front of me and knocked me off the bike. The driver got out and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you”. I thought, well, if this had been a lorry, I would have been dead. I would have been under it. I sold my bike and other than on holiday I have not cycled since. What would you say to either the me of several years ago or to the equivalent now who had that accident?
Nadia Kerr: I have this conversation day after day after day from my clients who are injured in cycling accidents. One of the things that we can do is organise therapy. Another thing is that we can go back to the very beginning of bike learning and bike confidence sessions to help somebody get over the lack of confidence that has arisen. Then, looking forward, we can look to better infrastructure, which is what we are after. Jonathan has already mentioned that cycling and walking are not dangerous things in themselves. It is the conflict with traffic that causes it and we need to design out of the new schemes across Greater Manchester the conflict that we are currently seeing. I would say stick in there, get everything ready now and you will see the better infrastructure coming and get back on your bike, please.
Jonathan Fingland: Unfortunately, what you describe is not unusual. I wish it were. There isn’t an easy answer, I don’t think. When a person has experienced that directly and feared for their life, it is really hard to then turn that around and to say, “No, I am going to go out and do this”. I expect that if you were reassured that that scenario was far less likely to happen in future you might be willing to give it a go. It gets a bit technical, but the radius of the kerb so that people have to drive slower at corners, junctions, which are a big problem, side roads, left hooks, right hooks and the speed at which drivers can turn into a side road is a big part of this. The informal zebra is the cheapest and arguably maybe least effective. You could have a raised crossing there. I do not know which junction it was. It sounds like it was a bigger road with a bigger junction.
I think that people want to know that things are changing, so maybe the driver should have had some comeuppance or maybe the police should have taken an interest in it and said, “We want to take action here so that this sort of stuff does not happen again”. Then maybe, like West Midlands Police have done so well, there should have been some marketing to say, “This person received points” or, “This person got a ban” rather than kept their licence with 12 points.
There are so many things that add up that stop people from being reassured so they all need tackling. Sorry that there is not just one, there are lots of things that need tackling to reassure someone like you that it is getting better, and you can do it.
Q146 Ruth Cadbury: Jonathan, you mentioned earlier the Turning the Corner strategy. I am sorry to answer a witness’s question, but I think that we are one of only two countries in the world that does not have a ban on—vehicles have to give way to pedestrians and cyclists going across that line and we have an ambiguity in the “Highway Code”.
Anyway, my question was: a lot of what we have discussed today, in fact almost all of what we have discussed today so far, has been about hardware. Does the strategy and the vision do enough to support revenue initiatives such as bikeability, cycle training, confidence building, driver swaps, that sort of thing?
Jonathan Fingland: I will get my response out of the way first. I do focus on the technical and the built environment and “build it and they will come”. The only point I would like to make on that is that I gather that there has been research that highlights that the value that comes from the supporting measures is only really realised if they are done at the same time or just after some of these works have been done. I will be honest, I have not paid that much attention to that stuff and it is because I think that we need to get some uplift on the built environment before we do variables.
Nadia Kerr: I can’t answer the specific statistics in relation to it, but I would absolutely call out for the public information. We had the Oxford Road/Wilmslow Road infrastructure rolled out and there was a video that was on YouTube and tweeted on how to use that. My concern has always been who sees that. Is that people who cycle and may or may not walk? It needs to reach the drivers and it is the same group of people that we are trying to attract as well to change their mode of transport. Are the drivers seeing how to use that infrastructure? It is new and we do not want ambiguities at junctions. We need to be absolutely clear who has right of way and for that then to be respected. If there currently is not enough investment in that aspect of it, I think that is a great oversight and we have to correct it.
Chair: That is great. Thank you very much for giving evidence today. That concludes our questions to the first panel, so if I can ask you to vacate the seats we can have our next witnesses come forward.
Examination of witnesses
Chris Boardman and Angeliki Stogia
Q147 Chair: Welcome and thanks for coming along today. I hope that the criticisms from the earlier panel are seen in a constructive way. For the purpose of our records, can you introduce yourselves, please?
Councillor Stogia: Welcome to Manchester. I am Councillor Angeliki Stogia and I am the Executive Member for Environment, Planning and Transport for Manchester City Council.
Chris Boardman: Chris Boardman, Cycling and Walking Commissioner for Greater Manchester.
Q148 Chair: I am going to start with you, Chris. You were appointed the Cycling and Walking Commissioner in 2017. What difference do you think your appointment has made and what have you achieved in those first not quite two years?
Chris Boardman: That is probably a question best answered by others. It is in transport terms very early days; we have been going a little over a year. I think what I have brought is a fascination with a form of transport that I have been involved in promoting for several years and complete ignorance of how that works at this level, which has led perhaps to some different questions. I am very outcome focused, so I am always interested in “and what will happen as a result of” not “what will happen”. I have found that very useful in the last year. There has been an awful lot of activity and we had not thought about, “And the outcome is?”
Independence: I am in a political environment, but I am not party political. I am pragmatic, I hope, as well because I understand the position and a lot of the problems that I have heard talked about here as the result of a system where it is on a very short cycle to get things done, which are short term or popular but take considerable time to do. I have to find solutions for that, so I hope that has led to some pointed questions. I think it has.
Without wishing to go too much further, we have focused on the horrible rather pernicious term, the art of the possible. Obviously, if it is not possible we can’t do it, but we have looked at the art of the necessary. If this is the outcome we want, significant modal shift, what are the absolutes we must do, or I would rather go and do something else? That has been my focus. What is absolutely necessary, our must-dos? Then it does not matter whether it is easy, or you do not think it is possible. If we do not do them, we may as well give the money to the NHS. I think that approach has really helped and some other things that we will get into that that approach led to.
Q149 Chair: What do you think have been the main challenges? You mentioned one of them there, which is trying to operate in a political world that can be very short term and driven by electoral cycles. What are those key challenges and how have you sought to overcome them?
Chris Boardman: On a positive note, I think that we have overcome immediately some of the harder ones. First of all, leadership, which we have heard said many times, political leadership, and not just the mayor but all 10 leaders in the districts and senior officers, the political establishment here. I suppose I was almost surprised when everyone said, “Yes, we have to do it. We have to change”. That was really helpful to start with. We started with a, “We need to do this. How do we do it?” rather than, “Can we do it? No, we can’t”. That has been huge.
Finance was found. You heard mention of the allocation of £160 million from the Transforming Cities Fund ring-fenced to this, which was part of our leadership to say, “This is serious, this money can be spent only on these topics”. That really helped everybody focus and it has made an enormous difference. After that, it is implementation where it starts to get slightly more tricky. But we have started off really well and I think that has made a difference.
Q150 Chair: Angeliki, I suppose it is answering the question that Chris did not want to answer, which is: what difference has he made? How have you seen the priority given to active travel? How did that change in your time as a councillor in Manchester?
Councillor Stogia: I think that it is a game changer. It is a real privilege that we have Chris, we have provision, we have the drive, we have the ambition and we also have a plan. We have money; not enough but we do. It is also a genuine partnership between the 10 local authorities, Transport for Greater Manchester and Chris and his team. He has pushed the boundaries in terms of I know that it is the art of the possible for you, but in our world it has increased very much on the agenda. I think that he has been a catalyst for cycling and walking to go much higher on the agenda. He has also inspired people and he has verbalised what people wanted to tell us for a long time. We cannot continue travelling in the same way that we do. Manchester is a growing city. Greater Manchester is a growing city region. We have very big challenges in how we move around the city.
The other thing that I think Chris brought, and which should come out of this conversation, is he brought us all together to talk about how people move rather than the conflict between people in cars versus people on bikes versus people wearing Lycra on bikes versus people who are walking. Now the conversation is changing towards we are all people going from A to B, we just choose different modes. This is something that is so refreshing, the way to see how a city moves. It is a living organism and people want to go here, they want to go there, but at the end of the day it is people making choices about the way they will travel.
A person who walks is also a driver. A person who walks is also a cyclist and someone who uses public transport. It is more now a question and I think that this is all about behaviour change. It is hopefully enabling behaviour change in the longer term and starting the conversation as to how we move around the city, how we prioritise space and what the city is that we want to see in the future.
Chair: Thanks very much. We want to look now in a bit more detail at the things that you have done to increase the levels of active travel.
Q151 Graham Stringer: Chris, what are the key priorities and what has been your approach to establishing those key priorities?
Chris Boardman: It touches on a lot of this. The first three months I did what most people do when they are in a new job. You go around and listen and talk to as many people as possible. It very much popped out of that in that the language is so important. Every time I speak publicly it makes me nervous because I know that choice of words is very critical to what people hear. We do not talk about bikes. We are talking about an alternative to using the car, enabling you to not have to drive. Like most parents, I would rather not drive. That is really important because everybody agrees on the end result.
Off the back of that conversation and everything you have heard already today is “comfort”. It is a great word that Jonathan used. That is how we make choices. It is not evidence. We are drowning in evidence, we know that. We have discussed it. We all agree on the destination, so why aren’t we doing it? The focus is space, really. That is what makes people feel comfortable. When you told your story before, I would have turned that straight back around and said, “What would make you feel comfortable?” The things you list are the things that we need to do, and it ultimately amounts to space.
The priority for us, the first thing that we really need to do, is create a safe space, a joined-up space. Again it is communication; we needed a language that people understood and could relate to. They are going to get bored after 10 seconds; how can we get it across? It must be usable by a competent 12 year-old. For somebody walking, it must be usable and want to be used by a parent pushing a double buggy. They are really simple but quite scary standards that govern everything.
That is very quickly how we set our framework. If these people cannot use this, we are not paying for it. We set some really good rules that everybody understood and then we set about designing a network. I am probably pre-empting stuff that is going to come later, but that is the foundation on which everything else is built, behaviour change and everything else you want to do, is create space.
How did we do that? We went to each of the 10 districts, gave them the pen, asked them where they want to go, drew that on the map, asked all the people in the room—each district chose who was in the room— “Where can’t you do that now? Where would you need to get across major roads?” because severance is a bigger issue for them, and within an hour and a half we had a draft. Then we took that draft—and all the leaders okayed this—and said that rather than working right through it here, we will put it online and let everybody tell us what they think. We got 4,000 comments. We closed down the map for a short time and all those comments have now been analysed and amendments to the map have been made. Effectively, in just over four months and for about £100,000 we designed a small road network for all of Greater Manchester and we did not touch a penny. That is probably the thing that I am most proud of, that all of the city regions designed their own infrastructure, which is fantastic.
That is still at draft stage. It is really important that it has to be right and we hope that this summer it will be ratified, and we know what we are trying to build. Then we can come to Government and ask for funding. We can show how it is going to be phased. Getting that in place was the most important.
There are several other ingredients that we will probably get to, but gaining local ownership is very important. The way our funding works is we do not apply it equally. It is not the same amount for each district. We will fund whoever has the ambition and will meet those standards. We create local competition for the best reason. In fact, it is not even a competition, it is an ongoing programme. If you design something that is good, we will fund it if it fits this network and if it is not good we will work with you until it is good. It is a healthy way of doing business and so far I think that it is working.
Q152 Graham Stringer: Within local priorities, as you say yourself, some of Angeliki’s colleagues on Manchester City Council have been critical of where the money is being spent, that it is being spent in more affluent south Manchester and not in the less affluent north Manchester. What is your response to that?
Chris Boardman: We have had that challenge by the Manchester Evening News, and I was delighted to take that phone call. We just said, “Great, if you want to design something somewhere else, we will build it. There is no conflict”. But these plans, as you heard earlier, were already in the pipeline and they were not of a standard we wanted. Credit to Manchester, they took a £3.5 million scheme to a £30.5 million scheme because they dealt with all the junctions properly so that a 12 year-old could use it. It is great. There is no blocker. Wherever we want to do it, where people want to build it, we will.
Q153 Graham Stringer: Part of the criticism—and you had spectacular success in the velodrome when it was first built—is that there are not decent cycleways along the canals from the velodrome. That was very specific criticism, that they were not asking for much money, but the potholes had not even been filled in. I do not know if the question is to Angeliki or to you, but what is your response to that?
Councillor Stogia: With regards to the balance between the north and the south, we already had funding from CCAG for a scheme that we wanted to put in in Chorlton. We had that agreed about six years ago. We had the consultation with people, and we came up with a scheme, but it would be a missed opportunity if we did not benefit off the offer to upgrade the scheme. It was really good timing for that scheme to be upgraded. However, for the second round of funding it is a challenge that we really need to touch on, and the key message that I would like to give you on this is capacity in the local authorities in order to design these schemes. We had a scheme, it was already in place. We were challenged on it before we delivered it. We cannot have a flagship scheme that does not meet the double buggy standard and does not ensure that there are links between the key junctions, so that was the opportunity.
However, in order to design that scheme, did you ever consider how many people we have at Manchester City Council after eight years of austerity and also people who have the technical skills in order to sit down and carry that problem? Has anyone considered how much time and effort we have put into taking the councils with us and dealing with whether we take the parking out or leave it in before we go to consultation, but also having the discussions on how we can design that better, how we can take the streets-for-all approach and then how we design the consultation? There is a lot of effort that is going in the bidding stage and then after the bidding stage to come to a point where the local authority is ready to go out to consultation.
Revenue funding is very important, and we have built some capacity at the combined authority level, at TfGM, but we need to look at how the districts work and also share in that learning. Chris has been really good at that. We have looked at it and there is a training programme for local authority officers as well as members increasingly getting involved in understanding what the Bee Network is, “How do I get my neighbourhood considered? How do I put it in the frame? How do I have the local conversations in terms of bringing together a scheme?”
There are two ways to do that. We have done the Chorlton upgrade. It is something that we discussed with the residents of Chorlton quite some time ago. Levenshulme, for example, has gone about this in a different way, “Right, there is an opportunity here. Let’s get all of the members of the community together under the leadership of the councillors and let’s design something”. We have worked together with them—less resource intensive, I have to say—in order to put in a bid, and we are waiting for the results.
Q154 Graham Stringer: Are there going to be cycle pathways down Rochdale Canal? I thought it was a realistic question.
Councillor Stogia: Well, the answer is that there has been a bid for that, so hopefully. Keep your eyes peeled.
Chris Boardman: Yes, on the canal. It is fascinating because this whole region is connected by canals. It is very interesting. I use them. I use one up there regularly to walk between here and the mayor’s office. They are very narrow and if you put any amount of traffic down there you have a conflict between cyclists and walkers. It is desperately tantalising. They are also owned by several different bodies and some of them aren’t particularly interested in doing anything different.
To make them work as transport corridors we would have to go out over the water and there is not a desire to do that. Plus would I send a 12 year-old down there? I am not sure. Our focus has been on where people want to go and what the quickest route is for them to get there; that is where we need to be building. They tell us where they want to go. I do like the canal network. It is very limited in terms of what we can do with it and we are not about leisure.
Q155 Graham Stringer: That is a really interesting answer. The final question from me is you have been quoted as saying, particularly about the Chorlton scheme, that the traffic will have to wait at the junctions round there. Is that not true?
Chris Boardman: No, it is not.
Q156 Graham Stringer: The question I was going to ask is—and if it is not true, tell me it is not true—when traffic waits in situations like that, it is going to put out more NOX, more sulphur dioxide. What is your response to creating extra pollution in those situations? If it is not true, tell us.
Chris Boardman: All the modelling that was done showed there was nearly no impact on traffic movement on the corridor. I think that one in particular—Martin, correct me if I get any details wrong—we had to take out some right turns, for example, at one of the busiest junctions, and at the peak time we affected 96 cars over two hours, about 4% of traffic, so it was negligible. That was all modelled.
Having said that, at some point it is a financial matter for every space: you have to choose how you are going to use it. We know we need to start doing that, but we do not want to affect that while we do it, but you can’t. In Chorlton it has been extremely well managed. It is actually the parking situation as well with the queuing traffic that is causing any significant change.
Councillor Stogia: To add to that, the question with Chorlton is how fast we can achieve the modal shift. Chorlton is very well served with public transport. It has a Metrolink station right in the heart of it. It has really good public bus services. However, in Chorlton, let’s face it, car ownership is high. The question there is: how do you hand hold the communities from the consultation point to looking at these junctions and what has come back? Some people feel very strongly against the bans there, so this is a conversation that we are going to have with the residents, taking them to this really nice vision of people walking and cycling in Chorlton, but before you do that there will be disruption and a modal shift needs to happen.
The key again in terms of resources is the time that needs to be spent so that you can explain to businesses and you can also show them what has been done elsewhere and give them ownership and share the vision and support them to make it their own, to alleviate their concerns not just around parking but also what the impact of this is on their schools, which are near the cycleway, and what impact this is going to have on familiar routes. These are questions that we need to have answers for and that we need to find answers for together with the residents because this is the best way that we can make a scheme successful.
Q157 Daniel Zeichner: Chris, I was very taken with Jonathan’s and your use of the word “comfort” in terms of trying to get this shift. I use an electric bike in Cambridge. We have seen in other European countries a huge lift. Is that part of your strategy?
Chris Boardman: Yes. In that initial consultation, the three-month period that I had, it was very clear that, “We don’t make decisions on evidence. We will do the easy thing, the easiest thing for me, and if it is not easy and it is not attractive, why would I get out of the car?” because that is our audience. It is one of the ingredients, and it was in Andy’s manifesto, that we will have an iconic bike hire scheme. I think that was how it was worded. That is in the works now and it is an enormous scheme. It could end up potentially being the largest in the country, so we are taking our time over getting it right.
Technology has changed hugely. I think that electric will almost certainly be part of the mix. How big a part I am not sure yet, but ultimately everybody else has the same reaction: it is fun. It is not necessarily what they need: for between 200 million and 250 million car journeys a year of less than 1 kilometre, you don’t need an electric bike, but people want it and that is more important. Yes, it is likely to be on the agenda.
Q158 Daniel Zeichner: Thank you. You heard me ask the previous witnesses about the national Government’s Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy. It is a question to both of you. How useful was that to you? Was it any use? What could Government do to help you and are they doing things that are unhelpful?
Councillor Stogia: I will talk about the lack of revenue funding, and this is a point that I wanted to come across very strongly. The general lack of dedicated long-term funding is a very big challenge. We have the network, we have the ideas, we have the ambition, we have someone to support us to deliver it, but there is no consistent long-term funding of it. Therefore, local authorities cannot plan, and it is becoming increasingly difficult. We focus on flagship schemes and when we do they do work, but people do not live only alongside Upper Chorlton Road and Manchester Road or on Oxford Road, they live everywhere. Therefore, we need something for everyone and all of these people behind me want this to happen. In the City Centre Transport Strategy where we held a consultation with people, they said that they want more space for cycling and walking. They said that they do primarily travel in town by either public transport or cars but in any case they always have a second alternative. The question is how it can help us to deliver that strategy.
The other thing is the transfer of power in terms of moving traffic offences. We know that more people want to walk but we have cars that park on pavements inconsiderately. We need to be able to tackle that. We have had significant cuts in the police. Our GMP traffic police has been reduced by 60% since 2010. Therefore, there are no powers there, so behaviours like the one that has affected you have been going unpunished and unreported, and that needs to change.
Chris Boardman: I will try not to repeat too much, but the impact that started our funding—and it is one of the things I noticed when I came in—is that everybody is used to grabbing funds, “What can we do with it? What do we already have on the books? It has to be spent quickly”, so it disables long-term planning and commitment. Part of long-term planning is training staff to be capable of delivering high quality so that is available.
The CWIS itself is definitely welcome. That is now a line that has to be answered for and I think that that was a real landmark. There is not a lot of “I”, absolutely; £1.2 billion is what was claimed; £800 million of that is up to local authorities to how they spend it. It could be spent on cycling, but at the moment with so many hard decisions to make a lot of councils just won’t because they have so many other fires to fight. I think it is rather disingenuous to just roll up all the numbers that could be spent on cycling.
Revenue funding I am bumping into now. That is only going to get worse. If we build infrastructure, we will need to activate it and that, as you have heard before, is where all of those supporting activities—even just letting people know it is there, advertising and promotion, we do not have the funds to do that. I had said this programme would cost an estimated £1.5 billion. We are on track for spending that allocation in just over a year, which is in line with that projection, but allocating that funding in just over a year. Do we expect councillors to keep going and planning something that there may or may not be money to do? We don’t do other transport modes like that, so in the short term it needs funding that is dedicated and ring-fenced for this type of thing. In 10 years we would hope it is just how we do streets, but right now we need dedicated, targeted funding for culture change and that needs to be recognised.
Q159 Huw Merriman: I particularly liked the 15 steps. I think that was really bold. I wanted to applaud your step 8 in attacking the issues at schools and getting more young people walking and cycling but also on the safety part. I asked at Prime Minister’s Questions for the Prime Minister to designate a fund and also a new law so that we have 20-mile-an-hour zones, no parking in front of schools and also walking buses there as well, so we will try to help you on that one. How many of your 15 steps have you achieved so far and how are you monitoring progress on all the steps?
Chris Boardman: So as not to take up too much time now, it is probably best that we send you that. We have just written for our own purposes for the mayor where we are at one year on. There has been action on the majority of those. We have prioritised, so the infrastructure is really important. Some of them are beyond my gift. We wanted to have a taskforce to look at crime on the streets, which is much bigger. That has not been implemented yet, but we are working on that. That is really necessary for a sense of safety when you are not enclosed in a metal box with the doors locked. If we want people to get out, they have to feel safe. I think that we are making very good progress on the majority.
Q160 Huw Merriman: I think that you and I could probably both give an example each, but where is it the case that you do not yet have the powers that your councils would need to implement the steps?
Chris Boardman: I would like to mirror pretty much everything that London has, such as moving traffic offences at box junctions, pavement parking. We would like to be able to have the power to deal with these things for ourselves. I don’t know how the mechanisms are implemented, but I would like to be able to use things like cameras to enforce 20-mile-an-hour zones and that money goes back into that street, into that area, so the local residents are not being penalised. We are penalising bad behaviour to help them, and we do not have the means to do that now. I think it would help everybody if we got those powers.
Q161 Huw Merriman: You are very forward looking and have gone on to my next question. I was going to ask: what specific changes would make it easier for you and the individual councils to improve transport for cyclists and walkers?
Chris Boardman: That is quite a broad question.
Huw Merriman: It is very broad.
Chris Boardman: In terms of enforcement and danger reduction, that conversation would involve all the ingredients that I just said. We have the political will; we need consistent funding to be able to do it. I think everything else we are on top of, frankly.
From the Department for Transport we probably attach the funding. The potential to waste a lot of money is massive and we have seen that in the past, “Here is the money for cycling” and it is a white line, so it does not do anything, and it is a lot of wasted funds. I would encourage Government to have a robust set of required outcomes. We are building our own streets-for-all design guide, which is a huge task, for how you make streets that people want to be on and for different types of streets. It is a huge piece of work. It would be great if the Department for Transport got behind that.
You heard mention of the zebras, which is a very hot topic of mine. I have travelled all around Europe. Normally at a side road there is a crossing and I know that the car is likely to stop, and I can cross. We do not have that. We are one of the very few countries in Europe that does not do it. We wanted to do that here. It is a big part of our strategy. There are many small things on a micro level: a pensioner or somebody with kids going to school, with several side roads to cross. It is rush hour and there are people rushing about. You are not going to let the kids go on their own, “I’m going to run you round”. But if you have the crossing then it is, “Okay, you can go but make sure you wait until the traffic stops”. It is that subtle difference.
The Department for Transport actively discouraged us from doing that. It is not recognised. We went to meet them and said, “We would like to do a trial”. They did not want to support a trial, so we are going to do it anyway. We are going to run our own trial and we are going to get all our evidence in a responsible way and then we will present that to the Department for Transport, and we hope they will follow suit, assuming it shows that crossings are safer than no crossings. We want to do that because we can do that for £300 a junction instead of a raised junction, which is £30,000 a junction. It is practical things where we would like Government, the Department for Transport in particular, to help us to do some good work. Some things like that are quite frustrating.
Q162 Huw Merriman: Angeliki, would you like to comment on that?
Councillor Stogia: Yes. I have two asks on top of the consistent funding. We would very much welcome a holistic approach between the different Government Departments so that they work together better. For example, let’s talk about a recent fund that has come from the Government, the NP fund. It is not looking at holistic aspects, holistically a solution. It is just looking at building the roads or upgrading the junctions. That does not mean pedestrians or cyclists. We would like all of that to be looked at together. Let’s not forget that every time you see a cyclist riding past you, that means that our health bills are coming down, our air is clearer, and that cyclist is saving on our tax bill.
The other thing is a centre for excellence. Greater Manchester has the ambition, the learning, the flagship schemes, but if we had a centre of excellence over here, we would work in a way that we would learn from other cities. For example, in Amsterdam they are doing great but there is a bit of conflict there between cycling and walking. We would love to learn from them. We would love to see how with all of this resource that hopefully will be coming our way we can avoid the mistakes that others have done and learn from that and support other cities and other areas across the UK to build their ambitions and follow in our footsteps.
Q163 Ruth Cadbury: I have a couple of questions about lessons the rest of us and the rest of the country can learn from the Greater Manchester experience on the walking and cycling strategy. One is on political buy-in from community organisations across the board but also from local councillors. Have you done things differently and, if so, how? Secondly, we have not mentioned integration with public transport. As you know, we are doing the bus inquiry, and I think that Greater Manchester has contributed towards that, but there is the ease or difficulty of linking a walking and cycling strategy with a public transport strategy, particularly in a deregulated bus environment.
Chris Boardman: The integration is not desirable, it is critical. It is the first and last part of a journey. It is how networks allow you to start and finish at transport hubs. The bike hire scheme, however that is formulated, is going to start and finish at those places so it joins everything together. It is absolutely critical. Plus we cannot put pressure on people to get out of the car until we give them an alternative. I came here today by car. I don’t want to come here by car. At 6.30 in the morning I am in a traffic jam and that is still my least worst option. For many months I came here by train and going home I don’t even mind standing up, but I might not get on a train. It is likely to be late and there is a very good chance it won’t even turn up. That is so stressful that sitting in a traffic jam is my preferred alternative. The public transport part of this is huge because if we do not fix that, we cannot maximise this, so it has to be integrated.
As far as lessons learned, we are only in early days, certainly from my perspective, not from Angeliki’s. Things that I think have been really successful were the consultation processes. I think it is going through a bit of culture change when you say anybody can come and have a look at this. The first time around I do not think people realised in the districts that this is important. We did get a bit of, “But I wasn’t involved”, “Well, actually, it was an open invitation to anybody”, “But I didn’t realise it was important”. We have gone through that process, but it was great to just say, “Here’s the pen. We will ask you the questions, you write on the map and you show us”, then go away and say, “Is this what you meant?” That was absolutely fantastic, and we could move so quickly because it was owned by them. We did it for probably a fifth to a tenth of the cost and probably five times faster doing it that way round, and the local communities owned it. That process I would say is scalable nationally.
The elsewhere process is very useful. It sits alongside local cycling and walking investment, so that was useful. It was a directive from Government, “Go and show us where everything should be. We will fund it”. It was very directed and that was useful, but it did not give community ownership as well. The two things work together, so I think there is room for that particular process to be enhanced because of the experiences in Manchester.
Councillor Stogia: It is the way that we work across Greater Manchester. It is constructive where there is consultation but there is also genuine partnership between the local authority, TfGM and other organisations that want to make it happen. For example, the mayor’s transport board contains representatives from the health and social care partnership. Therefore, we can truly embed health outcomes in every transport decision that we make. This is a challenge that I would like to throw back to you so that the Government perhaps can follow in Greater Manchester’s footsteps.
The other thing is giving the time that it needs for a scheme to be successful and to work. We started Chorlton six years ago. We have yet to appoint contractors. We are just reflecting on the back of the consultation. Going from the conception of an idea to actually delivering a scheme takes a large number of steps and it is very hard work. We are there. Of course, we can always do better to listen but given the resources and given the task—and now we are going to have hopefully, if we get more schemes. We have an increasing number of schemes, so we need to think in a different way of how do we hand hold the people to go through the process. Taking people with us is very important and it is something that we have always sought to do.
The other thing is listening to what people want. With the City Centre Transport Strategy, people are coming back and telling us there is not enough space for pedestrians and they want more space for people. We are going to listen to that, and we are going to try to deliver on that.
Chris Boardman: Can I add a small point to that, which is an addendum to the whole network piece? The other thing that is just as important is that it gives a tangible goal: here is a thing that belongs to Greater Manchester or any region. I understand it. I can see it and it is desirable because I can see what it is doing for me, and then it aligns all of the actions that come out of it. It is not, “We can do a piece of bike lane here. We can do something for that school”. You can see where it fits in a bigger plan and you can see how to roll it out. You can see how you can phase it. You can trust it and it gives a tangible thing for people to get behind. We haven’t approached cycling and walking infrastructure in that way anywhere in the country to my knowledge. It is done in little pieces. It is not thought of strategically and that is probably the biggest link to that.
Q164 Ruth Cadbury: One tricky issue that is not unique to Greater Manchester is where there is sometimes conflict between people on bikes and people walking, particularly sight-impaired people. I know you have had an issue here, and I am aware of it in London as well, particularly with the bus stops. How are you approaching that, because it does seem to be a real issue here?
Chris Boardman: Absolutely. It is macro and micro. I agree on the bus stops and the design has been changed. The design that we have is not how we designed it. We have the design reference group that we work with closely and they have been shown work that we have been doing. There is often competing demands in that group, which can be quite challenging, so what is great for one type of disability is not for another. I met with a large contingent last year and pretty much listened for two hours on just how hard it is. It gave me a real sense of this is really hard. Ultimately, we will not be able to keep everybody happy, but I think that with this one we can do that.
The Disability Reference Group has seen the work that we are doing and has been in agreement with it, so we are quite happy about that, and we will continue to consult with them on all the schemes that we do.
Q165 Ruth Cadbury: Is it just about design or is it about cycle behaviour? Do those of us who drive, and cycle have the same behaviour norms when we are cycling as when we are driving, particularly when it is looking at a zebra crossing in front of us?
Chris Boardman: Yes. I do not have any statistics to back it up, but I would suggest that we have people who behave well, people who behave badly and people who are inconsiderate, regardless of how they travel. People who ride bikes are not exempt in any way. It just happens that in a motor vehicle you can do the most damage. In terms of our priorities, we should work with those who can do the most harm and work backwards. That is a reasonably civilised way to approach things when you have a finite resource.
Ultimately I think we can design a lot of it out. We can slow people down. Depending on whatever vehicle they are using, we can slow them down and manage those interactions better, but we cannot find a perfect design that works for everybody and we need to be clear and practical about that. We cannot find a design that works perfectly for everybody.
Councillor Stogia: Overall, we need better street etiquette across the board, and everybody should take responsibility. It could be the design. It could be the way that people are travelling. It could just be that someone is rushing off because they have to go to the hospital or events, therefore, they just cross the street when they shouldn’t or cross behind the junction without realising that there is a blind person trying to walk there. I think that remains a culture for a better understanding of shared spaces. This is something that we can only work and aspire to, but, at the end of the day, everybody needs take responsibility for their own actions.
We are building infrastructure. We have the vision, but we want people to use it responsibly. There are only enough magic wands that you can use to stop people going in the bus lane or even the cycleway, but if they want to go into it they will find ways to go into it.
Chris Boardman: The whole danger reduction taskforce thing with enforcement is there being consequences for people and that is something that we really need. Behaviour is the key word that you used. Behaviour is the cause here. It is just how people behave.
Q166 Chair: How can we replicate what you have done in Greater Manchester and use that to spread good practice for other areas to copy? Greater Manchester districts have had a long history of working together on a variety of things, not just on transport. Maybe it is an obvious question, but did that help in trying to get the buy-in on active travel? Do you think it would have worked the same if you did not have that level of trust and confidence? Angeliki, you may be in a better position to comment, as someone who has been around in Greater Manchester for a long time.
Councillor Stogia: It has certainly helped working together. We have a level of trust between the local authorities and also we understand each other’s strengths and we support and nourish that to overcome our weaknesses.
The other thing that has been very important but sometimes underestimated is the long-term vision that we have for Greater Manchester but also the long-term vision and leadership that we have enjoyed for the city. We have had the same leadership for the last 20-odd years in Manchester. We know who we are, and we know what we want to do so, apart from the trust, about working together and that long history, it is also about an evidence-based way to go about and do things, to think outside the box, to be bold but also to listen and deliver on what people think are their priorities.
Q167 Chair: You said earlier, Chris, that you wanted the money to go where people had made the most ambitious bids for schemes from the districts. If they come up with something that is bold and ambitious you are going to fund it. There are two things I want to ask a bit more about. How do you ensure that they have the capacity to come up with the schemes? Angeliki, you quite rightly said that across local government it has been denuded of officers, and so that is an issue.
The other is about the social justice element of it. One of the reasons that people might choose to walk, or cycle is because they do not have much option because they cannot afford to run a car, and they might be isolated and stuck because they can’t afford to use public transport. Is there any conflict between funding great schemes and trying to enable walking and cycling as a social justice thing to give people opportunities to link with education or jobs or whatever, or do those things work together?
Chris Boardman: There are three bits there. One of the things that we have been able to do, because it is very collective, is the 10 leaders meet every month and they will hold each other to account, which is great. I will have a word with them and that is great, and I think that is very useful at this level. Whether it could be replicated I don't know. I don’t know whether London boroughs work that way, but it works.
I was quite surprised how effective the leadership structure is here, and it is like a family that squabbles, but it is still a family and they squabble, and they sort it out. We have learned a lot as we go along. Quality standards, ambition, yes, not to just do something outrageous but to meet a quality so that people will want to use it wherever that might be. We have run into because of resource—human resource and expertise to do things—we have solved problems really quickly as we have gone. We do not have resource to deliver this so, okay, we will find somebody to do it and in the meantime we will set up a training course.
People from all of the districts send somebody and we went on a five-day training course for how to deliver this from design all the way through. At the end of it, they had to create a scheme as part of the course and most of them just got submitted to the last tranche because we had submissions in support of the scheme. I think that is very helpful.
What we have noticed is some areas that could do something, and we have identified it and residents have identified it on the map: are you doing anything yet? We are now just starting to get proactive.
We filled that centre of excellence you have heard mentioned with resource to support but also to start to suggest, “We can do this in this area. Here is why we think it will work”. The propensity to cycle tool is one of the things that have been really useful. It has been a go-to tool, “There is something we can do here. Nobody has proposed a scheme”. We are starting to get proactive as well to fill in the gaps, the opportunities that you mention.
Councillor Stogia: On balance, this is the right approach because you want people to get enthused and you want people to want to do things and to aspire very high. This is how people who are not casually interested think, “There is a lot going on there. Why can’t I have that?” Especially in areas where there isn’t a strong social capital, you need to energise them and you need to go to them with, “This is what is the art of the possible. This is what is actually happening there”. They can see that happening in their own neighbourhood and then they want it.
This is what happened in the north of Manchester. We went with a scheme that was ready to go. Now we have north Manchester saying, “What about us?” and that is a great outcome, isn’t it?
Q168 Chair: I want to turn now to the issues around funding. I know that we have already touched on it slightly. The “Made to Move” report established a ring-fenced, 10-year, £1.5 billion infrastructure fund. Where is that money going to come from?
Chris Boardman: We ring-fenced 160 from the Transforming Cities Fund. We projected this will cost £1.5 billion, so we know what it costs. We have money from the Government. We are using it really well. We have our own standards. We want to be measured on outcomes, one of the 15 steps: you hold us to account and we said we would double the amount of cycling, if we can do better than that with specific schemes. We put all that in place.
How are our local authorities going to employ several officers capable of designing the scheme if it is going to run out in three years? That is stop-start funding, and we have been to the committee about that several times. How can we plan for the future? I would like to see a cross-party agreement on some of this stuff because surely some of it should be apolitical. It should be that we need to change as a society. Do we all agree? Yes. Get something that we can all plan for the future and that has to come from central government. There is only so much we can do locally.
Q169 Chair: Jonathan said it should be 5% to 10% of transport spending. Do you have in your mind an aspiration for what it should be at national level? I know it is something you talked about in the past.
Chris Boardman: Yes. It is breaking it down because it is the only way we can cope, so we know that—this was a 1990s German figure—£10 a head is the minimum that you can invest to expect to see any significant change. That is where the £1.5 billion came from and then it started to become a percentage of transport spend. I don’t care. It needs to be enough to do the job, and we could work out—probably in two hours—what is enough to do the job at a national level for a decent figure, certainly closer figures than HS2.
It would be based on evidence from around Europe to show you where those numbers came from and then we just start doing it. Doing it as a percentage of the transport spend seems a logical way to find some form of commitment to sustain funding for this particular area. We do it with major roads. Why can’t we do it with active travel?
Q170 Graham Stringer: You put out a press release, I think today, with the mayor saying that there should be equal status for cycling and walking with roads. What does that mean?
Chris Boardman: I would not even call it equal status. I would give it priority status myself to allow people to—
Graham Stringer: I am only quoting a press release.
Chris Boardman: Quite possibly; of course, possibly not. We are trying to instil culture change. Personally I don’t care if it is bicycles or walking. If you could show me another solution to the biggest problems we face in health and obesity and so on, great, let’s do that. This is the one thing that we all have to do, and yet we are devoting lumps of cash to it as and when we can find it and it is absolutely crazy. Whatever mechanism it is, it needs consistent prioritising and funding. Doing that as a proportion of spend just seems a logical way to do it.
Q171 Graham Stringer: You have been very clear about the objectives and your methodology today. How many people work for you or with you on this? What is the size of your unit?
Chris Boardman: I am afraid that is a bit difficult to answer because it depends how much of this building you include. There is a core team of a dozen people. I have a board of 12, somebody from health, and somebody from the police. We have engineers. We are representative and we meet every two weeks: how are we doing on this? Those 15 steps are our rallying point: how are we doing on this one? How are we doing on this one? Then they go away to their various organisations.
The biggest challenge to me has been scale and not being able to see all of it, and the speed because of that pace of change, and having to work with people who do not agree somewhere in the chain and are holding things up. It is quite complex, so it is a difficult question for me to answer. It is probably about a dozen core people.
Q172 Chair: Angeliki, can I ask you about ring-fencing? Obviously on the city council there will be huge pressures on your budgets, and we are seeing across the country councils having to take money away from things; they are not obliged to spend on health and social care just because those are statutory requirements. How much of the money should come from Transport for Greater Manchester? How much should come from individual councils? Where do you want that ring-fencing to be? Do you want national to have ring-fenced funding or do you want the allocation to local councils also to be ring-fenced even though that ties your hands a bit?
Councillor Stogia: Let’s start from Manchester City Council. We don’t have any money for this, period. The money that we have had and the exemplar schemes that we have, one of them that has a national transport award, we got from CCAG funding. The money that we have set aside is to sort out the bottles and the drains and so on, to keep maintaining our network.
I think that the bulk of the funding should stay within the combined authority. It is a much easier way for us to access this money but also they have a strategic view of what needs to happen across Greater Manchester. Therefore, they can see the network as a whole. They hold the transport strategy and they know what the ambitions are, the investment on other modes, on bus, on Metrolink, from now until 2030, so it does make sense that it is held over there. I am going to put the Manchester City Council ego on the side. I think this is the right thing to do.
I do think that the Government need to consider: how do we achieve a step change in the way that we travel both in the inner cities and in towns and across Britain? Especially for shorter, smaller trips we need to see how people can walk more and then for the longer trips how we can cycle more. In terms of the percentages, if we look at the costing plan that we have, I think £1.5 billion sounds like the right figure.
Chris Boardman: Yes, you would be right. That is what it takes to sustain. Just as a point of fact, 30% is match funded by the local authorities. Of the money that we have spent so far, about 30% is being matched by the local authorities, so there is a real contribution for everything they can afford locally. Where that comes from, in some cases it is previous grants pooled together, perhaps funds that could have been used on other things so there is a commitment.
At the moment you have strategic nodes that are out of control in this region. It is transport driven, so we cannot affect what they do, and that is quite frustrating at a regional level particularly when it has a very local impact, a major road that goes through a conurbation. We would like to have more say in that and I think that would make sense.
Q173 Chair: Highways England does have some ring-fenced funding to pay for cycling and walking improvements. Is it talking to you about the strategic roads within Greater Manchester, how they might spend that and how it might link up with your network ideas?
Chris Boardman: Not with me.
Councillor Stogia: Neither with me.
Jonathan Fingland: They have in Trafford. It is starting, the process is starting.
Chris Boardman: It is a conversation I would very much like to have, even if it is how we mitigate with its funds severance. Although it is seen as one of those, “Well, this is the road, so everyone goes on this”, I think a chunk of money should go into dealing with severance issues. One of the biggest problems that we have is the major roads have just chopped up our society and that is the biggest barrier we have between people going to school and the workplace.
I am all in favour of more localised funding, but I think it should come with standards. I have seen, not necessarily in this region but certainly where I live, the amount of money you can waste if they are not built to a standard. If you just say, “I am going to do something for cycling” but it is ineffective and does not deal with the bit that stops people at that junction, that road, you may as well not have spent it and I think that is missing.
Chair: Thank you very much for coming along today. That concludes our questions to the second panel of witnesses.
Examination of witness
Q174 Chair: Welcome. Thank you for making it here to address our Committee. You have the disadvantage of not having listened to what everybody else has said. For the record of our hearing today, please introduce yourself. You need to press the microphone to make it work.
Andy Burnham: I will. Thank you very much, Chair. I am Andy Burnham, since 2017 the Mayor of Greater Manchester. Can I thank all of you for making the effort to come today to hear about what we are doing? It is really appreciated to see the Committee here holding this full session and brilliant that so many people have turned out to see us as well, so thank you very much.
Q175 Chair: Great. Andy, a really easy question to start with: why has Greater Manchester made active travel a priority?
Andy Burnham: The simple answer, Chair, is that I believe that investment in active travel delivers bigger returns than any other form of transport investment because if you compare it to, let’s say, rail investment or road investment, you don’t just get the transport benefits, you get the health benefits. The health benefits are not just the clean air benefit but also the physical activity incentive that comes with cycling and walking.
As well as other benefits that you could quantify in terms of improvement to public rail, liveability—you could add a long list to that—more than any other form of transport investment, I believe cycling and walking delivers more returns in public benefit. I deliberately decided when I came in as mayor—but actually was advised by many people and many of the campaigns here in the city region—that the time had come to take it from the last item on the agenda, the thing that no one ever gets round to often in buildings like this around the country, and make it the first item on the agenda. That is what we are doing.
Q176 Chair: As well as making it the first item on the agenda, what other steps have you taken to achieve the sort of cycling and walking that is set out in the 2040 transport strategy? Tell us a bit about what the key things are that you have done.
Andy Burnham: The biggest is the decision that I took, supported by the council leaders of Greater Manchester, to make it far and away the priority for the Transforming Cities Fund. In autumn 2017, a few months after I was elected, the Government committed £243 million to Greater Manchester over four years, so that is from 2018-19. We are coming to the end of the first year and we have three more years of that funding coming after this year.
We decided to commit £160 million of that money to cycling and walking. If I am honest, that was a decision that was controversial and still is to some people. We do need extra capacity on our tram system. We do need to invest in other forms of public transport. There are lots of ways in which that money could have been spent and, as we all know, under all Governments we have had underfunding of transport outside of London. Never the less, it was a moment to say, “If we believe that there is more return than any other form of investment, this is the moment to say that is what we are going to do”.
It was informed as well, though, by our intention to create a cycling and walking champion who you have just heard from; the coming together of those two things, the decision to appoint Chris—and we could not be luckier to have Chris dedicating so much of his passion and energy to Greater Manchester—and the funding combined with somebody of that level of capability. I have worked with many people in my career, but I have to say Chris Boardman is one of the most impressive individuals I have ever come across in the way in which he takes a bit of policy vision but carries it right down to grassroots and gets people behind it.
I am not going to release him from here any time soon, but I would suggest to the Committee that he could have a much bigger role on the national stage doing some of what has been done here, showing it can work here and then taking it to a bigger stage. It was those two things: I would say it was the appointment of a figurehead combined with the prioritisation of the funding.
I am toying with—and I have not said this to him, and I probably should not say it in front of all of you before I have said to him—making him the cycling, running and walking commissioner. I am training for a marathon at the moment and I feel that runners are a bit left out of this discussion, because sometimes you have to go on to the road and they may need that space as well. When you are out on those narrow roads, it can be a bit hairy at times but maybe that is a discussion for another time. Active travel needs to be thought through on every level is what I am saying. Every runner, cyclist, walker needs their space and the ability to do what they want to do.
Q177 Chair: We just heard from Chris and I think everybody has been impressed, not only by the vision and the passion that he has but also the way in which he seeks to implement it. When you selected him as your commissioner, was it because he is well known as an Olympics cyclist or did you know exactly what he was going to bring to the job? What did you want him to bring to the job? It sounds like he might have exceeded expectations.
Andy Burnham: Definitely. He and I go back quite a bit before the conversation that we had in 2017. If you remember, I was Culture Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Government, so I was here when the world cycling championships were held in this city, the Commonwealth Games. I have been watching the story that was growing around cycling and public interest in cycling. My path had crossed with Chris’s a number of times at those kinds of things. He came to lobby me as Shadow Health Secretary, saying, “Where is this money coming from for active travel? If DfT aren’t doing it maybe Health has to step in and start changes”. Chris had lobbied me as a Front Bencher about that.
We had had discussions and the thing that I think Chris has brought to the cycling debate is a fundamental change that actually repositions it. We are learning a lot from London, so this is not in any way to say, “Aren’t we much better than them?” No, because they were the ones that have in many ways changed the debate and we all saw what happened in London over the last decade.
I noticed, living half of my time in London during that period, that there was still a bit of a clash between cyclists and motorists, and also cyclists and maybe some other members of the public in that it looked like—as Chris would say—the Lycra and the visors and it was all about a full-on cycling agenda. Chris has always spoken to every person, young people in their clothes, mums with buggies. For me, that is the thing that has changed the way the debate has been conducted here about everyone’s agenda, not pitting one against another and having a very fevered argument. There will still always be those tensions between different road users, obviously, but Chris did something fundamentally important when he said, “I want the Bee Network to be used by competent 12 year-olds without their parents supervising them, or a mum with a double buggy”. That was a big game changer in the cycling debate.
Q178 Graham Stringer: Andy, you said that there were bigger benefits from this approach to transport than from any other area. Can you back that up with figures?
Andy Burnham: I probably could, Graham, but to us—
Graham Stringer: If you can, can you give them to us?
Andy Burnham: I certainly will, absolutely. I believe the benefits of physical activity to health are understated. I used to have this argument when I was in the Department of Health. I left Culture and went to Health. I remember saying on day one in the Department of Health to the Secretary of State that the promotion of physical activity should be core business for the Department. They looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. Yet the evidence base has grown over the years and I will point you to just one thing. This is research that came out in the last 18 months or so about the effect of physical activity in relation to delaying the onset of dementia. There is now a very clear and established link between those two things. Everyone thinks about the physical health benefits of being active. What is often under-recognised is the mental-health benefit of regular physical activity. That is a big message that the Department of Health needs to start to work on.
Q179 Graham Stringer: I don’t think anybody would resile from that on both physical and mental health, Andy. What I was looking for, because it always helps debate, are figures for cash in and benefits out, as opposed to what are general statements. I think you would have to go a long way to find anybody to disagree with those general statements, but it helps in any argument to influence Government policy, as you know as well as anybody, if there are facts and figures underneath the argument and so I was asking which figures you were using.
Andy Burnham: There are plentiful figures that demonstrate the benefits of physical activity. To be honest with you, though, I am going to come back at you in a slightly different way in that I think that at times in public policy people use an evidence base as almost a barrier to making progress on something—“We’re not doing that unless you can—” I have known people in sport over the years who have to go through all these hoops to try to prove the benefit of what they do to please someone in the Treasury who says, “You’re still not good enough”.
Q180 Graham Stringer: Are you talking from personal experience?
Andy Burnham: You know me. I am an instinctive politician, really. I don’t get wrapped up in that. I know physical activity is good for people on every level and I think that we have to get on with investing in it and doing it and the evidence base will follow, in my view. People might choose to criticise that, but I am absolutely certain that if we get more people moving more on a daily basis, the benefits to society will be manifold.
Q181 Graham Stringer: No one disagrees with that, but I wonder if you can provide some evidence to support it. I certainly agree with that. Do you have sufficient powers, as the mayor and within TfGM, to bring this vision to completion?
Andy Burnham: No, is the answer to that question, Graham. I am hoping that the Committee might be able to help us on this.
If we look back to London in the late 1990s and the early part of the last decade when the first mayor of London came into position, the transport system there was possibly similar to what it is here now—fragmented, confusing at times, poorly maintained. It was not where it should be. What they have gone through in the last 20 years is a journey of change where extra funding, but also power, has allowed them to get a grip on the system and make it integrated. We need to go through the same journey. The simple tests I keep applying in my role are that if it is good enough for London it is good enough for Greater Manchester and on what basis might we not have something that London benefits from.
You made the argument, probably more than anybody else I can recall, around buses and the power to something different in running the bus system and London was the only part of England that did not suffer the effects of deregulation in the mid-1980s. The more fundamental lesson, however, is about the managing of the roads. London has civil enforcement powers, which we do not have, over the management of the road network. I am thinking specifically about, for instance, enforcement of yellow-box junctions.
In Manchester, it is only the police that can spot someone infringing and issue a ticket. You cannot have camera enforcement. In some ways it is a difficult thing to acknowledge publicly because maybe that would lead to more infringements, but it is the reality and there is no point in hiding from it. I believe that can put cyclists and pedestrians at risk because you often will see cars going into a queue, not clearing the way, then a cyclist will come up to a junction and have to go around the car and it is not safe. Those powers would be an example and also pavement parking.
Pavement parking is an issue that is routinely raised in all 10 of our boroughs. I am thinking here of older and disabled people or parents of young children. Pavement parking can have the effect of making them housebound because they cannot physically negotiate the way to the shops or to the park or whatever it might be. Again, that is a power that I think we should have, alongside powers around lane rental. The utility companies are charged in London if they overrun on roads, but they are not charged here. It shows, people can feel it. The road network is not managed as much here as it is in London because it can’t be, because we don’t have those powers. I feel we have hit tipping point in the last couple of years, as you will know, with the level of roadworks and the lack of co-ordination.
Then you go on to the issue with Highways England, Graham, because it does its own thing and it is not necessarily integrated with what the councils and TfGM are doing. Those basic powers over the running of the road network and the ability to come up with integrated, co-ordinated decisions with more devolution of the powers that Highways England controls is essential, and I beg the Committee to make recommendations in that space.
Q182 Graham Stringer: I am sure a very powerful and full case could be made. Are there any other powers? This is an opportunity to put things to the Committee. Those are three important points. Are there any others?
Andy Burnham: There are quite a few others I could mention, such as powers over regulation of our taxi fleet. At the moment, we cannot stop out-of-town taxis coming into the city, which affects cyclists and walkers because of the poor standards of some of those vehicles. That is something that I would absolutely want. You are tempting me to a broader transport front, if that is okay.
Q183 Graham Stringer: What would make Greater Manchester a better place for cyclists, walkers, everybody?
Andy Burnham: The power to integrate the system. At the moment, we have a transport system that is highly fragmented, where the road system is not regulated in the way that we would want it to be. The bus system is deregulated; we have Network Rail doing the rail side. How can you get all that together, integrate it and make it work properly? In many ways, these modes of transport compete with each other and conflict with each other as opposed to working as an integrated whole. We need power over all of it, so that we can integrate it into a coherent system and that means more power over the railways, the running of the roads, and the regulation of taxis.
As you know, we do have more power over the regulation of the buses, although it is an open question whether the Bus Services Act 2017 is good enough. Ruling out the public operator option, as that legislation does, might make it challenging because you always have to have a fall-back option, when you are looking at reform, and I wonder whether that is something that needs to be revisited.
I could give you a long list. You have the headlines there.
Q184 Chair: You are always welcome to write to us.
Andy Burnham: I will write to you.
Q185 Graham Stringer: Three members of this panel were on the Bill Committee that dealt with the legislation. I think I am right in remembering that when it came to the report stage, that was exactly the point we made.
Andy Burnham: You made it. I remember you making it. Can I add—I will not dwell on it too long, but it is important for me to say this—that I am in a somewhat unique position, although probably Andy Street of the West Midlands is in the same position, in that we have come in as individuals accountable to a large population and what that population thinks about first is transport. That is the thing that is palpably not working outside London. My experience, two years into this role, is that I am sitting there, people are rightly calling me because finally they have one person to complain to when things are not going right. Look at my Twitter feed in the morning and you will find out that they are using it. I get pictures of all kinds. I am glad people are using Twitter; they are right to use it.
They are demanding accountability from a system that does not work for them. At the moment, however, I do not have the levers to allow me to respond to the things that people are raising. I am not making excuses, because I will take responsibility for what we don’t do right, things we might get wrong, but I would rather be accountable while knowing that I can change the whole system. At the moment, I cannot do that, and I think that would also be true for Andy Street and Steve Rotheram in Liverpool. If you are going to create these roles, it follows that you need to give the mayors of West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region the same basic set of tools that they gave the mayor of London to integrate the system and make it work for people.
Chair: We have had very powerful evidence from your own Cycling and Walking Commissioner about how he does not use trains anymore because they are unreliable. Our Committee has investigated the problems that there have been since the introduction of the new timetables and we recognise that the solution is not within your gift.
Q186 Daniel Zeichner: Going back to the health benefits, Andy, my understanding is that your devolution deal, unlike the one in my area, has the added advantage of having health within it. Is that correct?
Andy Burnham: Correct.
Q187 Daniel Zeichner: Presumably, therefore, there are some possibilities of bringing some of those budgets together, which of course is a very difficult thing to do when you have health pressures. But is it possible? Given there are health benefits to be gained from transport changes, you can begin to see how there ought to be some synergy there.
Andy Burnham: It is absolutely possible. Here we are, patting ourselves on the back—your city is the original cycling city, is it not, and there is a lot for us all to learn from Cambridge. But I do think we are in a unique position here to finally break down the silos between the different departments. It is the unique position of Greater Manchester that we have the ability to put health into all policies, potentially. When I came into this role, I thought my main focus would be to integrate health and social care, and it is partly that, but what it has quickly become is to put health in all policy agendas. It is quite exciting when you start to think in those ways.
I will give you a different example. We are looking at rough sleeping. I have been making that a top priority and in many ways we devote more time to that than the things we are discussing. When you get the health service working properly with housing on an issue such as rough sleeping, you can start to move things forward in a much more serious way.
With regard to the issue we are discussing today, you could argue that the health service could invest capital funding in cycling infrastructure. There is an argument to be made for doing that. The Health Department is more likely, I think, to consider what you might call revenue funding. We are very taken by the idea of social prescribing. We need to build a health service where, when you go to see the GP, the default option is not antidepressants or other medication—that is not a 21st century system. In my view, the first port of call when you see a GP should be exercise referral and possibly, if we bring through a bike hire scheme to replace the one we had, as I hope we are about to, it might be that the health service helps people to use it for a month or two. Do you see what I am saying? I do feel that those sorts of things might be more achievable in the short term, where you help people to get a bike, to start using a bike, and to become physically active.
Going back to Graham Stringer’s point—and this is instinct again rather than evidence—I know that in my own life when I am more physically active, I feel more able to cope with things, to move forward with things. If I am not physically active, I often feel I cannot see the wood for the trees. I believe that the more physically active people are, the more they are helped to get on top of their own health. The thing about the evidence, if you pay for a smoking-cessation course for someone, or something that addresses diet or drinking, whatever it is, the chances of it being successful are less compared with if they are physically active and start to do something to address smoking, drinking or diet. The easier change to make in life, rather than deciding not to be a smoker, to learn to become a non-smoker, is to go from inactivity to activity and once you have made that change, it is a catalyst for other good changes in your life.
The health service used to resist the argument about physical activity—that is for DCMS or the Department for Education—but increasingly is not resisting the argument. The health service has now bought into the concept that the promotion of physical activity should be part of its core business.
Chair: I am conscious of time—although this is interesting, and being anti-silos is so important—and we are moving on to funding issues.
Q188 Ruth Cadbury: Chris Boardman’s strategy proposes establishing a ring-fenced 10-year, £1.5 billion infrastructure plan. Where will that money come from? How much of TfGM’s budget is allocated to the active travel work?
Andy Burnham: TfGM has been spending money on active travel, but it has been doing so at a much lower level and has been more initiative based and project based, which is how central government encouraged bodies like TfGM to bid for active-travel funding. When we took the decision to create a four-year fund through Transforming Cities, we were trying to establish the principle that it should become a regular, long-term funding stream that Government would repeat. We are in the position now where the Select Committee is holding this inquiry and we need you to make recommendations in that space because all we have had beyond the four years is a one-year allocation for Transforming Cities and we have had to use that to deal with some of our transport challenges around housing delivery and the spatial framework. Some of that funding could well be used for active travel, by the way, but it is also looking at park-and-ride and new Metrolink stops. We need an ongoing budget line outside of that other pressure.
My simple point is that cycling, and walking should be treated in the exactly the same way as road investment; it needs a long-term, national, significant funding stream. The total operating-costs budget for Greater Manchester is £186 million, 0.5% of TfGM’s budget before Transforming Cities. That tells you the level of funding. We are, therefore, calling on you, the Committee, to say there should be national investment over the 10-year period that Chris called for. That would make a big difference.
There is one other thing, Chair, something else that the Committee should think about. The mayor of Sheffield City Region, Dan Jarvis, spoke up at the end of the recent meeting of Transport for the North and said, “Why do we never get round to active travel?” and made the same point as I made earlier. We started to debate the TfN’s bigger-projects investment plan. Dan put forward the idea, which I was very much in agreement with, that we should have a principle agreed with Government that any major transport project, be it a new road, a new rail line, a new tram line, should have an active travel piece built into. TfGM funded something in my former constituency, a guided busway—a concrete busway along an old railway track—and put in what they called a bridleway, a cycle path, alongside it. It is unbelievable how well used it is. TfGM does have that as a principle, that if they are going to put in any infrastructure, an active-travel element should be part of it. If every national scheme—if HS2 had that—
Ruth Cadbury: It was going to. It was removed, wasn’t it?
Andy Burnham: That is why HS2 is struggling for public support, isn’t it? If it had things like that, maybe people would see more benefit.
Q189 Chair: We will have the chair of HS2 in front of our Committee next week.
Andy Burnham: I will read the minutes.
Q190 Huw Merriman: Good luck with the marathon. I did two, but the second one was an hour slower.
I want to ask about the competition—I know you did not use that word—between motor vehicles and cyclists, walkers and runners. It would undoubtedly free up more space for cyclists and walkers if there were fewer motor vehicles in Manchester city centre. Is congestion charging inevitable, not just for this issue perhaps but for you to hit your clean-air targets?
Andy Burnham: We had a debate 10 years ago on this very topic. We had a referendum and it went down heavily. Graham Stringer might be able to remind me—was it 90%?
Graham Stringer: I think 80%.
Andy Burnham: I had argued the other way in that referendum, by the way. There is a very good reason why it went down. Of the 3 million people who live in Greater Manchester, far too many, quite a large proportion, have no alternative to the car because of the poor coverage and quality of public transport. A congestion charge for those people is a straight tax that they cannot avoid because they have to use their cars.
In London it is different, with the Underground system, overland rail, buses. A bus journey, single ticket, costs £1.50 in London but it can be £4 here. Public transport is not as affordable as it is in London or as easy to use. Consequently the debate about congestion charging in the rest of the country has to understand that you are basically talking about a straight tax on people. That was not well enough understood when the debate was brought forward. I have ruled it out, because I do not see how I could do it in a way that would be socially fair and progressive. You would be hitting the poorest people the hardest, and I cannot see how that could be justified.
With regard to clean air, the Committee has heard today about our decision on the clean air zone that we intend to introduce. The evidence given to me by TfGM is that we would not have achieved clean air compliance any sooner than 2023 by including cars because by 2021, 80% of private cars will be compliant with the regulations. In the absence of a national scrappage scheme, recognising that not all but many of the 20% of non-compliant cars will be owned by those on the lowest incomes, could we introduce a penalty? The decision that I and the 10 leaders made was that it would not be fair, given that the evidence says that we would not have reached compliance any more quickly.
Q191 Huw Merriman: This is somewhat linked. As Graham Stringer mentioned, we are back doing another bus usage inquiry and one of the things we have looked at is whether it is time for regulation. There is a £2 billion public subsidy to buses but there is no regulation compared with the situation with rail. It might be unusual for me, as a Conservative representative, to be saying that but that is where I have come out. Do you think you will have enough power, via franchising, to dictate what should occur with regard to bus usage or do you feel that more regulation is needed to give you better powers to keep them under wraps?
Andy Burnham: It is an open question because we are going to be the first city region to use the powers in the Bus Services Act 2017. I am in the process of raising a precept this year that will be purely for this purpose of bus reform and no other purpose. We are moving, as quickly as we can, towards using the powers in the Act. It will be interesting to see whether or not it does have the required effect. There is a feeling here that it probably is okay, but the point that I mentioned before about ruling out a default public service operator if there is no private operator that meets the mark is a weakness. In the rail franchising system, that is an option, isn’t it, to have an operator of last resort, or a public operator, but the Bus Services Act 2017 does not.
In any negotiation—we won’t get on to Brexit; we are having a day off from Brexit, aren’t we—the point is, as I understand the Government’s position, you have to have other options if you are going into a negotiation. That is what they say, isn’t it? Surely if that is their logic about that, it should apply to transport where, if a private operator is not going to come forward with what you want for your bus system, you have to be able to pursue it by other means and walk away from the negotiation. I would much rather go into this process of reforming the bus system in Greater Manchester with that public service operator option very clearly there. At the moment it is not there, and I think that is a risk to the process as we move forward.
Huw Merriman: For what it is worth, I completely agree. We argued at the time that common sense was not put into that bit of legislation.
Q192 Chair: This is not about congestion charging but is about something that was mentioned earlier. You know that my city of Nottingham has a workplace parking levy, which not only provides a bit of an incentive for employers and, if they pass it on to their employees, to individuals, but also provides a fund that can support some of those public transport improvements that make it possible for people to make modal shifts. Is that something you have considered and ruled out? Is your mind open to it for the future? What is your view?
Andy Burnham: My mind is certainly open to it. In some ways it is the opposite end, isn’t it? The people who tend to have car-parking spaces in buildings in city centres are those at the higher end of the pay range in any company or organisation. I am interested in the Nottingham experience. The city council has looked at it before and there was an issue about the cost of administration versus what it would bring in. I don’t know whether that is different in Nottingham, because of the make-up of the city. I certainly would not rule it out for Manchester. I think it is an interesting possibility, but viability was the issue, how much it would cost to administer versus what it would raise, and that is why it did not proceed. Nottingham has managed to retain public ownership of buses and it has the workplace parking levy. There is a lot about your city for us to look at enviously.
Q193 Chair: Following that, what is the role of employers in this? Do you see employers as having any role in active travel and changing travel behaviour?
Andy Burnham: Certainly. Many employers do have a role. Is it called bikeability? No, that is the primary school scheme, isn’t it? Bike to work?
Chair: Cycle to work.
Andy Burnham: Cycle to work, yes. I remember funding that a decade ago when a few Departments came together, and we gave it quite a big boost. I know that many city-centre companies now have lockers and showers and I would encourage them all to do the same.
On a different basis, we are asking employers to consider variable start times for people, but we still have a traditional commute times here—7.30 to 9.00 am and then 5.00 to 6.30 pm. I have been saying to businesses, “Couldn’t you offer people a flexible start time so that we can spread the pressure?” For people who want to come in by bike, a bit of flexibility on start time might be helpful, might encourage more people to consider cycling as an option. If they could come in when the roads are bit quieter, it could be a more attractive thing to do. Business does definitely have a role and the Chamber of Commerce is supporting us in the campaign around flexible start times. I would not want to criticise the business community, because they are very active players in everything we are trying to do.
The city is on the cusp of change, and not just on the clean air debate or investment in the Bee Network. You can see that as you go around. The city is building up and growing up. Our big issue is that that success is asking questions of the transport system, which it cannot currently answer to anybody’s satisfaction, and it is creaking at the seams. That is why we appreciate you being here. Manchester needs what London had 20 years ago and we hope that you might take that message into other lines of inquiry that you are pursuing.
Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence today. That concludes our session.