Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Active travel, HC 1487
Wednesday 1 May 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 May 2019.
Members present: Lilian Greenwood (Chair); Ruth Cadbury; Ronnie Cowan; Huw Merriman; Daniel Zeichner.
Questions 266 - 357
Witnesses
I: Mike Wilson, Chief Highways Engineer, Highways England; and Richard Leonard, Head of Road Safety, Highways England.
II: Jesse Norman MP, Minister of State, Department for Transport; Guy Boulby, Head of Cycling and Walking, Department for Transport; and Kevin Golding-Williams, Head of Cycling and Walking Policy, Department for Transport.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Highways England (ATR 0084)
- Department for Transport (ATR 0034); Correspondence from Jesse Norman MP
Witnesses: Mike Wilson and Richard Leonard.
Q266 Chair: Welcome, and thank you for coming along today. Would you introduce yourselves for the record of our proceedings?
Mike Wilson: My name is Mike Wilson. I am the chief highways engineer at Highways England.
Richard Leonard: My name is Richard Leonard. I am the head of road safety but also responsible for the integrated sustainable transport unit at Highways England.
Q267 Chair: I start by wishing everybody a happy national walking month, as today is the first day of it. Most of your work is not about walking, is it? The vast majority of the strategic road network is not suitable for walking and cycling. What role does Highways England have when it comes to those active travel modes?
Mike Wilson: You are right. The 4,300 miles of the strategic road network are designed primarily for lorries and cars. It creates challenges for active travel—for cyclists and pedestrians—particularly in relation to safety and severance of communities.
It also creates opportunities. It creates better connectivity between places. We invest in three specific areas: maintenance, scheme delivery and, through designated funds, to improve safety, reduce severance and improve connectivity.
Q268 Chair: What targets do you have as an organisation for improving provision for cyclists and pedestrians who are moving near or across the strategic road network? How has the Government’s cycling and walking investment strategy informed your work in the area?
Mike Wilson: We have a target for delivering a number of schemes. We have a target for delivering 150 schemes in the first road investment period between 2015 and 2020. We had a target to deliver 150 cycling schemes. Our part in the wider Government strategy is to provide a link between national, regional and local, but fundamentally we are aligned with the Government’s strategy on cycling and walking.
Q269 Chair: If the target was 150 cycling schemes, how many have you delivered?
Mike Wilson: We have delivered 101 cycling schemes to the end of March, which is the last financial year. We have a target, as I say, of 150, and we are confident that we will deliver that programme over the course of the next 11 months.
Q270 Chair: Are there any targets for walking, or schemes to help and assist pedestrians?
Mike Wilson: Not specifically for walking, but a lot of the facilities we provide are compatible with both cycling and walking. We have targets around safety, and clearly pedestrians are a vulnerable group. We are keen to improve their safety as well as that of every other user of the strategic road network.
Richard Leonard: The wider point is how we support local authorities and other partners like the National Cycle Network and Sustrans in delivering their LCWIPs and an integrated transport system. It is our role, and part of the network is providing for our communities to make sure that active travel is seen as important, and delivers improvements in partnership and collaboration. That is really key for us.
Q271 Chair: Coming back to the question about your targets, the overall target is 150. You have got to 101, and you think you are going to get to 150 by the end of the period.
Mike Wilson: We will get to 150 by the end of the period.
Q272 Chair: That suggests that it has been building up rather than delivering at a very even pace. That is perhaps not surprising. How has it felt over that period? Do you think you are getting better at doing cycling schemes, or was there already that expertise? Do you have staff who work specifically on cycling or walking? Is it something you have had to develop?
Mike Wilson: The profile is in line with the spend profile. The designated fund, particularly where the £100 million of investment specifically lies, was always back-end loaded towards the end of the RIS period. We are in line with that, but, yes, we have developed our capability over the course of the five-year period. Richard has a specific team associated with that, but we have people in our regions liaising specifically at regional and local level in the development of LCWIPs, and developing local schemes to ensure integration between local plans and the strategic road network.
Richard Leonard: We have a strategic pedestrian, cycling and equestrian forum that has members from Sustrans, Living Streets and Ramblers who advise on our policies and procedures and how we are developing our standards. It informs scheme designs for more complicated schemes. We also have a designated funds advisory panel that includes a wider forum of experts, which could be National Trust or Natural England environment groups, advising on our strategic approach. What is important is the strategic regional and local approach and making sure that we have good solid, collaborative relationships at local level to deliver schemes for communities as well as being informed on our overall approach.
Our cycling and accessibility strategy sets out our vision and our objectives for how we are going to deliver that integrated network. I think that sets the tone, alongside the targets, about where we are going as an organisation. What is also important is that, through this RIS period and through the longer-term strategic planning cycles, we have schemes in development ready for delivery for the next RIS period, so we are already ready for the next period of delivery and we are certainly in a construction phase at the moment.
Q273 Chair: We will come to funding in a minute. Are the 101 schemes, and the others you have in development, spread across the country? Do you have strong collaborative relationships in every region and area, or are there areas that you need to improve?
Richard Leonard: Our programme is across the country. We have schemes in Cornwall. I think you heard from Cornwall Council, where we are investing £17 million on 30 kilometres of route. We have schemes in Bristol on the M49 Avonmouth link to Avonmouth port. There are schemes across the network. There are schemes around Manchester, in particular, looking at severance. We have schemes across the network.
We work with partners. We have worked with authorities who have more progressive LCWIPs. We have also worked with partners like Sustrans, where we are investing £3 million in the national cycle network. We also invest with the National Trust. We invest across the network. There are always things we could do with other LCWIPs, and we are certainly open to discussions and collaboration with any partner who wants to work with us to deliver infrastructure improvements.
Chair: You made reference to ring-fenced funding. I will hand over to Huw.
Q274 Huw Merriman: You have a ring-fenced funding pool for cycling, safety and integration. How much does Highways England actually spend on provision for pedestrians and cyclists?
Mike Wilson: The total fund for cycling, safety and integration is £175 million over the five-year period, £100 million of which is associated with cycling provision. As I said earlier, for the most part that includes cycling and pedestrian provision.
Q275 Huw Merriman: That is £175 million over a five-year period.
Mike Wilson: Yes.
Q276 Huw Merriman: What is your total budget over a five-year period, just to give us an example of what the proportion is?
Mike Wilson: The budget for Highways England is about £15 billion over that five-year period.
Q277 Huw Merriman: How has that figure changed over the previous five-year block, in terms of the actual ring-fencing for cycling and pedestrians?
Mike Wilson: There are a couple of points before I answer your question. The first one is that we do not just fund cycling provision out of the designated fund of £175 million. There are really great examples on the A14 and on the A21 that spring to mind, where we are delivering cycling through the delivery of specific schemes.
It is not just through the designated fund that we deliver cycling improvement. We deliver it through our improvement programme more generally. The benefit of the designated fund is that it allows us to go beyond the actual scheme investment and deliver more, and take opportunities for improving connectivity between the investment that happens within schemes and the local networks.
I cannot specifically remember the numbers previously on cycling. I don’t know whether you can, Richard.
Richard Leonard: No.
Mike Wilson: The designated fund was a new investment in the RIS period. Previously, our investment would have been associated with maintenance and improvement schemes. The designated fund has given us the opportunity to spend beyond our schemes, working with local authorities to deliver greater connectivity, and more than we are actually doing.
A good example was on the A21 at Tonbridge where we delivered, as part of the improvement scheme, a new bridleway for the length of the scheme, where there was no cycling or pedestrian provision before, and then worked with Kent County Council to deliver £3.1 million-worth of improvements, which was beyond the scope of the scheme, and connected to the town centre and to the hospital. It was able to go beyond what the scheme investment was for.
Q278 Huw Merriman: Funnily enough, I was going to ask you for examples of whether, when you develop new roads, you always look to deliver a solution such as the one you have described. The A21 is just north of my constituency, so I am aware of that project. Is that the type of thing you always look to do, or was it a one-off in that particular scheme?
Mike Wilson: Designated funding has given us the opportunity to do more than—we would always be looking, as part of our development of schemes, to liaise with local authorities and local partners on cycling and walking provision. The designated funds have enabled us to do more than we would otherwise have been able to do.
Richard Leonard: It is important when we do that to look at where it integrates with plans for those local authorities, where we are integrating into a network. We are always looking at opportunities to develop collaborative relationships. The Cornwall example is a great one because that was built from work we did around St Erth multi modal study, where we worked with Cornwall Council. That discussion led to wider thinking about the network in Cornwall and how we could support it.
Q279 Ruth Cadbury: Obviously, your main business is to ensure the free flow of motor traffic, but where there is a strong case or a strong campaign from local authorities to improve cycling and walking are you ever prepared to compromise your core aim if, by improving cycling and walking, it might put in a slowing down of traffic, by crossings and so on?
Mike Wilson: We introduce new crossings. Through this five-year investment period, we have delivered 120 new crossings and upgraded 286 existing crossings. In that context, yes, sometimes we do, but we try to achieve both. We look at delivering both for cyclists and walkers and for motorised users, delivering for all of our customers. That is our primary aim. Sometimes there has to be some compromise, but we look to deliver for all our customers.
Q280 Ruth Cadbury: But sometimes you prioritise cycling and walking over vehicular traffic in some schemes.
Mike Wilson: Sometimes we introduce new crossings that will delay motorised users, to allow for the safe crossing of the strategic road network.
Q281 Ruth Cadbury: Or constraint of carriageway.
Mike Wilson: Yes.
Richard Leonard: A fundamental part of the work we have done in “Designing for Cycle Traffic”, which we published, was about providing segregated and safe provision. Our key design principle is that we would like to separate traffic from vulnerable road users and make sure the provision is segregated, wherever possible. That drives a lot of our design decisions, but there are points, as you say, where you are going under a junction severance where there is a balanced decision to be made.
Q282 Ruth Cadbury: It would be crossings or constraining the vehicular carriageway to create segregated cycling and walking.
Mike Wilson: We would look to how we could use the road space effectively. As Richard says, we look to segregate where possible. It is safer and healthier for cyclists and pedestrians to be segregated, and more pleasant to cycle in a segregated environment. That is our aim. We look at it on a scheme-by-scheme basis to try to deliver for all our customers.
Q283 Chair: Do you have any interesting or innovative ways to do that, where it enhances the environment? I am thinking about some of the strategic roads in my own patch. The way pedestrians are segregated is by sending them on underpasses under the road. Frankly, some of them are horrible; there are no two ways about it. People would not want to use them, and people do not use them because they feel unsafe. Is that a concern you have about your network?
Richard Leonard: Our design standards talk about perceptions of safety and journey experience and ambience. We look at those sorts of measures. We also do customer satisfaction surveys. We have been working with Transport Focus looking at what pedestrians and cyclists tell us they want. They want a direct, coherent route, but they also want an environment that feels safe, secure and pleasant. That is ingrained in our design standards, and in how we evaluate and think about those schemes as well. It is important to us, because the experience is as important as the physical infrastructure.
Q284 Chair: It links with maintenance as well. If you are going through an underpass and, for example, some of the lights are out or it is dirty or flooded—there are a number of issues—that deters pedestrians.
Mike Wilson: Absolutely. In the past, perhaps we have designed provision that does not provide those sorts of routes. On the A14 around Kettering, where cyclists are allowed, we ask them to dismount at slip roads, cross the slip road and then continue their journey. From a highway engineering perspective, it works, but, from a cyclist’s perspective, do the cyclists do that? No is the answer. The question for us is how we can deliver services to cyclists that deliver for them what they want. That is why we are doing the work with Sustrans, looking at alternative routes and how people can make their journeys without having interaction with the strategic road network.
Q285 Daniel Zeichner: Historically, on the major strategic routes the priority has been traffic, and what we are hearing from you this morning is very welcome. Can you tell us how you go about diverting from your core business to create good facilities for pedestrians and cyclists to cross strategic routes?
Mike Wilson: There are some practical and cultural things that we are doing to change that perception. As Richard said, we have published new standards in conjunction with the national cycling community—Sustrans and other cycling organisations—so that we create a provision and a standard. All our schemes are designed to standards contained in the design manual for roads and bridges.
There is also a wider, cultural aspect. I was talking about highway engineers earlier. We have introduced training and an e-learning package for highway engineers to help them design good facilities for cyclists. That is one aspect. Then there is how we organise ourselves within the organisation. We have regional champions for cycling who meet nationally and serve to share best practice.
Through designated funds there is the ability to describe what more can be done. We have published fund plans that set out what the opportunities might be for funding. We are not there, but there is a growing capability and understanding of the organisation. The ability to tell good stories about what we have done and the impact of those things is starting to shift people’s perceptions about the strategic road network for cyclists and pedestrians, as well as changing the culture in the organisation about what good looks like in terms of that provision.
Q286 Daniel Zeichner: Thinking back to 2014, when the DFT was specifying RIS1, it asked you to look at establishing some metrics to see how successful or not it had been. What progress have you made on that?
Richard Leonard: The original metrics in our RIS1 are around the number of crossings. We are moving towards looking at outcomes and how that promotes an increase in the number of active travel trips. We are also looking at how it reflects on satisfaction and meets customers’ needs. We do a strategic assessment of investment that marries the value-for-money and benefit-cost ratio. It looks at how it aligns to an LCWIP, how it delivers an outcome and identifies provision that is in line with our vision for safe vehicular traffic.
We are doing a whole mix of things to improve our understanding of cycling and walking on our network, and our understanding of the benefits. We are doing an evaluation of the cycling, safety and integration programme currently. We are doing a meta-analysis, looking at how that is performed. It is something we are developing, and it is an important point about how we can tell the story of what we have done. We can tell the story about how that supports the LCWIP and wider uptake in active travel, delivering the Government’s ambition.
Q287 Daniel Zeichner: You say it is something you are developing. What has been published so far?
Richard Leonard: We have not published anything formally so far in terms of our approach, but we are doing work in the background. We have worked with the Department looking at how we analyse, monitor and evaluate various schemes. We have POPE analysis, the project evaluation reports—there are too many acronyms in Highways England; it is one of our faults. That analysis assesses the schemes, but we are looking to build on that.
Mike Wilson: It is about safety and satisfaction. Those are the areas where we are working with the Department to look at metrics.
Q288 Daniel Zeichner: Forgive me, they are all very good aspirations, warm words, and so on, but I am not actually hearing about anything that is being measured so far that would allow us to have confidence that anything has changed, or that there are any targets for what you would expect to change in the next period.
Mike Wilson: Confidence is around delivering the targets that we were set in terms of delivery for cyclists. Confidence is around the way that we are organising ourselves and changing our approach to cycling and walking. The work we are doing with Transport Focus is looking at satisfaction with cycling provision so that we target our activity better. We are working to develop a series of metrics that perhaps go beyond just delivery to satisfaction and what that means for cyclists and pedestrians.
Q289 Daniel Zeichner: Would you be able to write to us to tell us where you have got on that?
Mike Wilson: Yes.
Q290 Daniel Zeichner: I have one further question, which is about air quality on strategic routes. What work has been done on that, and what could be done in the future?
Mike Wilson: There are two specific areas where we are looking at air quality. We are talking specifically about NO2 rather than carbon dioxide. Clearly, there are advantages of moving vehicular traffic journeys into cycling journeys from a carbon perspective, but particularly from an NO2 perspective. All new development has to comply with Government policy. We are not allowed, through that development, to create new exceedances, where people experience levels of air quality in exceedance of EU thresholds.
For the existing network, we are working with the Department to identify locations where there are current exceedances. That includes 15 metres beyond the edge of the road. It would cover cycling and walking provision within that area. We are looking at where those locations are and what measures we might introduce to bring them into compliance as soon as possible. The key bit for us comes back to segregation. The further we can move cyclists and pedestrians away from traffic, the better from an air quality and a safety perspective. There is good alignment between health and safety, and that is what we do.
Q291 Daniel Zeichner: Do you do that monitoring and checking, or do you rely on local authorities to do it?
Mike Wilson: No, we have our own. There is a Government-wide network, but we also have our own monitoring network, which would cover cycling and pedestrian facilities adjacent to the strategic road network.
Q292 Chair: Do you publish that data? I am thinking about my own constituency where there is a brand new road. Someone said, “Oh, now there is all that traffic and it is polluting.” I thought no, because the traffic is moving now, whereas before it was standing still. Where would someone find the information that would enable them actually to make a comparison, before the road was upgraded and afterwards?
Mike Wilson: I do not know is the answer to that question. It does exist, but I do not know where. I am happy to drop you a line about where specifically the public information is on that. DEFRA’s pollution control model identifies locations where those exceedances exist. You are right; if you can move traffic away from receptors—houses, schools and hospitals, pedestrians and cyclists—that is a good thing. It is also a good thing when traffic moves rather than stop-starting. From an air quality perspective, there are a number of things. Improving the flow of traffic and segregating cyclists can work for both communities.
Q293 Ruth Cadbury: You mentioned NO2 in air quality targets. Are particulates also part of your targets for air quality?
Mike Wilson: Not specifically. I am not an air quality specialist. Let me check. I know that we have specific targets around NO2 and the thresholds there. I will drop you a line specifically about particulates.
Q294 Ruth Cadbury: That would be useful, because, if the fuel mix shifts, NO2 will come down, but not necessarily particulates, and that is still an issue.
Mike Wilson: They are a health challenge. I will clarify specifically our targets for particulates.
Q295 Ruth Cadbury: Any one road of yours will pass through a number of local authorities, so I want to look at how you work with local authorities, particularly in delivering pedestrian and cycling route improvements. How easy is it for local authorities to engage with Highways England on schemes that might impact on them? Are you confident that Highways England does that well?
Mike Wilson: There are two specific areas. We have talked about scheme developments. There is a requirement as schemes are developed to engage with local communities and local cycling forums, as well as local authorities, to understand the challenges and opportunities there might be with a development of the strategic road network. There is a requirement for us to do that. It is written into our procedures. It is a requirement that they have to do that.
Then there is the ongoing management of the network. Our focus there is around our regional teams that are aligned with delivering in particular locations, and, as part of that, we have cycling and pedestrian focal points. It is their job to go and engage. We engage in a number of ways, both through the development of the LCWIPs and looking for opportunities in day-to-day engagement with the local authorities.
Could it be improved? Yes, I think it could be improved. Does it differ around the country? It does, but we are open to conversations around improving cycling and pedestrian activity. Through the regional focal points, we hope not only that we are improving liaison and taking up options for improved delivery at local level, but that, because those regional focal points come together in a group, we are sharing good practice around the country about what happens in Cambridgeshire, Kent or whatever, and are able to tell those stories. We share that good practice within our regions and then in the local authorities.
Richard Leonard: One key point to note is that we provide funding to Transport for Greater Manchester to develop schemes on our behalf. For example, we look with Transport for Greater Manchester at what we can do with them collaboratively. It is about working with them to develop the best schemes possible. Also they do delivery for us. We are comfortable about that. It is about collaboration on projects. Mike’s point about telling good stories and making sure that people understand best practice is really key.
Q296 Ruth Cadbury: Even in Greater Manchester, we have had mixed views about the local authority relationship with you. We have had a couple of very contrasting examples from the south-west. In Exeter on the M5, the junction 29 bridge over the motorway for walkers and people on bikes has been well received, but there is a scheme in Taunton where people on bikes and on foot found that there were multiple crossing points and it was very tricky to cross. Even in one region, there is a mixed picture. I do not know whether you know the detail of those, so I am probably being a bit unfair to you.
Mike Wilson: I do not know the detail.
Richard Leonard: I know the Tithebarn link, but I cannot picture where you are on that.
Q297 Ruth Cadbury: You mentioned learning from good practice. Obviously the local authority may not be very engaged, but other stakeholders may be engaged on walking and cycling.
Mike Wilson: It is important to stress that opportunities for designated funding can come from anywhere. We publish the fund plans, as I mentioned earlier. It does not have to come from local authorities. It can come from local groups or from organisations that have identified particular opportunities to invest. It is not just about Highways England investment or local authority investment. We look for opportunities from whoever has a good idea.
Q298 Ruth Cadbury: My final question—if that smell of burning is nothing too serious—is this. When you are working with local authorities on walking and cycling improvements, how do you decide who pays what?
Mike Wilson: There isn’t a one size fits all. We like partnership funding for obvious reasons. It makes the designated funds go further, and, more importantly, it demonstrates a commitment by the local authority that it is an important thing and they are willing to invest their money. There is no set formula. We look for partnership funding wherever we can, but there are examples where we have invested and local authorities have jointly invested. There is no fixed approach. From our perspective, an approach that comes with money, even a small amount of money, is something that demonstrates commitment by the local authority that it is something of value to them.
Chair: Thank you very much for giving evidence this morning. That concludes our questions to the first panel of witnesses.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Jesse Norman, Guy Boulby and Kevin Golding-Williams.
Q299 Chair: Welcome, and thank you for coming along today. The building isn’t burning down and we are still here. For our record, Minister and colleagues, would you introduce yourselves?
Jesse Norman: I am Jesse Norman, Minister of State at the Department for Transport, specifically responsible in this case for cycling, walking, horse riding and active travel.
Guy Boulby: I am Guy Boulby. I am head of cycling and walking in the Department for Transport.
Kevin Golding-Williams: I am Dr Kevin Golding-Williams. I am head of cycling and walking policy at the Department for Transport.
Q300 Chair: This is an easy first question. We obviously welcome the cycling and walking investment strategy, but what progress have the Government made towards achieving the targets that were set out in the CWIS?
Jesse Norman: Thank you Chair. Let me start with a couple of prefatory remarks. I notice that you are somewhat diminished in numbers. I hope it is not the Norman effect kicking in. For those who are here, I salute their courage and indefatigability.
Let me say one thing before we get into the details of CWIS. I think there now is consensus across all informed opinion, certainly in my Department and in the Government, about the importance of cycling, walking and active travel. It is really important to say that. It is quite interesting to look at how the evidence is stacking up as to the benefits of it, and I hope we are going to discuss it in a moment. I applaud the evidence that you have taken. It is incredibly helpful and a really useful way of gathering together the information and different viewpoints.
The kinds of things that I want to put right up front in the public record are that physical inactivity is costing the NHS £1 billion a year directly, with about £8 billion indirect costs. For mental health, 20 minutes of cycling, walking or active travel cuts the risk of depression by 31%. There are huge effects and economic benefits for air quality. Absenteeism falls by a third in at least one of the studies we have looked at. It is massively beneficial.
The cycling and walking investment strategy, as you will recall, was introduced a couple of years ago in 2017. It was intended to be an inclusive look at all the sources of pots of money available for cycling and walking. There is of course money made available through my Department, but there is a lot of money made available across Government in different ways. We found ourselves having to think more structurally and coherently about what the envelope of funding is, even when we do not supply it ourselves.
We touched on that with local roads funding. We do not supply by any means the plurality of local roads funding, but we need to have an eye to the whole. The same is true for cycling, walking, active travel and the rest of it. I absolutely include horse riders, as I said earlier, and running. I notice that Chris Boardman, or Andy Burnham, mentioned running; that is good as well.
What has happened? There are two or three things. First of all, the amount of money contemplated in CWIS when it was launched was about £1.2 billion. I have brought these guys, and they can correct me if I say anything egregiously stupid, or possibly factually inaccurate; I hope they will.
The number is now going up. Things like the transforming cities fund are increasing the amount of money going into cycling and walking in a way that I think is beneficial. We are now at something like £2 billion, running into 2020-21. We can talk about what we need to do as we think about the spending review, and the next stage of taking the change forward.
In terms of results, it is fair to say that there has been real progress in some areas and not in others. On the walking side, we know the walking stages level was too low. We have already hit that. We would like to find a way of increasing it and strengthening the accountability of the system.
In the case of the cycling stages, we have done somewhat better than we reported in the safety review. We thought we were about a third ahead, but we are now half ahead at 1.2 million stages—
Guy Boulby: Just under 1 million.
Jesse Norman: It will get to 1.2 million on current projections by 2021, but that is short of the target. The target was to double, so we have to think very hard about what is required. I know you have already looked at what is going to be required to raise that, and others have opined on that. There is some progress but not enough on cycling in terms of stages.
The other thing, of course, is a very mixed picture, but quite a lot of encouraging results in key areas of interventions. The classic example would be the cycle ambition cities, which in some cases, in fact across the board, have seen quite high take-ups by measured journeys on key routes. That is good.
The other thing that is not so obvious and perhaps has not come through quite as strongly in the testimony you have had so far is a massive improvement in the quality of data. We feel much stronger now about the investment models than we might have done three or four years ago. Again, correct me, boys, if I am wrong, but the effect of that is that we think we can make a much tougher, stronger pitch to Government for the benefits of investing, based on all that extra evidence. I take my hat off to the work that Lynn Sloman and others have done on the investment model.
Q301 Chair: I want to follow up on a couple of things you said. It is very welcome that you are setting out at the start that this is not just a transport issue; it is essential to hitting a whole number of Government targets around health, both physical and mental. You talked about how progress is going, and wanting to have a cross-departmental approach and thinking about the spending review. Why have you not yet published some of the data that you have collated? Why isn’t there a progress report? If you published that ahead of the spending review, it might help to drive some of those behaviours and ensure that you get buy-in. How much buy-in have you got from other Departments, including the all-important Treasury?
Jesse Norman: When we published CWIS, I was not the Minister at the time, but I think the undertaking was to report from time to time, periodically. We have had two years. We expect to publish a report on progress over the summer. From that point of view, the timing will be good. That will be an important benchmark and baseline from which to make a further argument to Government.
I think support across Government has been good, particularly at what you might call Parliamentary Under-Secretary and junior ministerial level. It is seeping into the Cabinet. It would be nice to see more, but I have been very pleased by the level of buy-in we have had at working ministerial level from the Department of Health, MHCLG, DCMS and others. I feel pretty good about that. Again, I would say it falls short of the full mind change that I would like to see.
Q302 Ronnie Cowan: The Government have said that they want to reverse the decline in walking and double the levels of cycling. Almost all the witnesses we have spoken to said that the Government’s target for walking is unambitious. Living Streets stated that we have met the target for 15 out of 16 years since 2002. Are the targets correct, and how did you select them?
Jesse Norman: Because they are not likely to get a look-in, I will give Guy and Kevin a chance to come in, but let me just say this. We have already hit the target. It was perfectly clear that the target was not strong enough originally. It may not have been clear at the time, but it is clear in retrospect that it was not strong enough when it was set. About 20 of the 340-odd stages are the result of statistical change, but there is no doubt in my mind that that target needs to be raised. We need to go through a process of thinking about what would be a suitably demanding rate to raise it to as we think through the next stage of CWIS.
Do you want to come in, boys? Is there anything else or have I covered it magisterially?
Guy Boulby: Largely. Back in 2016, when we were looking at the range of aims and targets to underpin the cycling and walking investment strategy, we had to look at the current basis for projections of increases for cycling and walking. In many ways, that was easier for cycling. We could look at the impact of earlier intervention schemes and the projected investment from central Government and from local authorities to look at the rates increasing.
On that basis, we created a fairly ambitious aim to double cycling by 2025. It was more difficult for walking because we have been dealing with a gradual decline in walking since 2002. It was a little less clear from the evidence about the effect of interventions that could increase that, and what the cost would be. In retrospect, the aim of increasing walking stages to 300 per person per year looked a little on the low side. As the Minister said, we are definitely looking at this as part of our approach to the spending review. A lot of investment in walking interventions is very cost-effective, and therefore would increase the benefits overall of a walking and cycling package for the next SR.
Kevin Golding-Williams: At the time of developing the CWIS, we had a conversation about their use. The Infrastructure Act refers to objectives. We developed that further by focusing on aims and targets. While the doubling of cycling was in the manifesto of the Administration at the time, the walking one was not. However, when we took it out to consultation, there was strong support not only for a general walking target but for a walk-to-school target. Further work is needed, but probably on the basis of the evidence that we had at the time the right thing was in there. You then look forward to build on further evidence, which, as the Minister mentioned, has already come in during the two years since we published.
Jesse Norman: Let me pick up on a couple of things. We have not talked about walk to school yet. That is a good target and it is a very important thing. I imagine we will come to it in due course.
Thematically—I think you will have heard this—it is really important to think of cycling and walking, but, of course, there is quite a lot of overlap. One of the reasons we expanded the safety review last year to include walking was the amount of feedback we had from experts. There is so much overlap in general that it makes sense to think of these things, infrastructurally at least, as complementary.
Q303 Ronnie Cowan: Do you think the balance is right between cycling and walking? Is there more emphasis on cycling?
Jesse Norman: You get a lot of benefit for walking from well-structured cycling interventions. It is hard to measure exactly what the balance would be between the two, but we are absolutely up for further discussion of it. If there is more we can do, we will.
As you know, to take a classic example, we have just been able to put some extra money into the national cycle network. It is not a national investment in cycling; it is a specific network. I think a few people misunderstood that. That was through Sustrans. It is mostly used by walkers, but it is a nice intervention and a great set of schemes.
Q304 Ronnie Cowan: We have been told that the Government will miss their targets to double levels of cycling and increase the number of children walking to school. Do you disagree with that?
Jesse Norman: That we are going to miss the targets?
Ronnie Cowan: Yes.
Jesse Norman: I think we are going to hit the target for the number of children walking to school, with tweaks to current policy. Cycling stages will require major further intervention if we are going to get there. I am perfectly persuaded that we can hit it, and I am very resolute that we should do whatever we can to hit it, but it will require very significant intervention.
Let us remind ourselves where we are. Of course, it is important to be aware that funding is a crucial component. There can be no demurral from that. We do not control the funding by any means, for reasons I have described, within Government. Outside Government of course there is additional money that is sometimes made available for cycling and walking schemes. On the cycling side, the investment has roughly been £2.50 a head in 2010. It was £3.50 in 2015 and it is now a little over £7. We are going to need significantly and dramatically potentially to double or more that rate of intervention if we are to hit that target.
Q305 Ronnie Cowan: Isn’t it £15 in the Netherlands?
Jesse Norman: We can argue about the exact level. As a result of my last visit to your Committee, ladies and gentlemen, I am probably in enough trouble with the Treasury as it is, but my ambition is right up in those levels, yes. We have to get very serious about it. That is why I was talking about the importance of embedding consensus across Government.
To take a recent example, you have had a session with Chris Boardman, and what he is doing in Manchester is very welcome too. We can talk about that in detail. By the way, there is great work going on in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester and lots of other places. The transforming cities fund was not on the agenda a relatively small number of years ago. We are now at 2.5 billion quid. That is not a trivial amount of money.
Q306 Ronnie Cowan: You said you were going to increase the threshold for cycle to work from £1,000. Is there a date for that yet? When is the threshold going to be increased?
Jesse Norman: That is still in progress. Why don’t I let the boys talk about that?
Kevin Golding-Williams: The cycle to work guidance needed a fairly radical overhaul. For anyone who read it, it was a fairly impenetrable document if you were not an expert on tax or finance. We have been working with our friends over in the Financial Conduct Authority, HMRC and Treasury to try to make that guidance much clearer. We are also exploring new routes for funding in the marketplace, particularly through FCA authorisations, which is quite a seismic change that has taken place over the last 10 years. We will be bringing that guidance forward in due course, but we have been working with the industry, the Bicycle Association and all the key players to try to make sure that it is as clear as possible, to encourage more people to use the guidance.
Q307 Ronnie Cowan: Companies that support the scheme and utilise the scheme have come to me and said, “We need to know a date if we are going to plan for this eventuality.” Are we any closer to a date?
Kevin Golding-Williams: I imagine it would be very—
Jesse Norman: I think we said over the summer. I am not sure that we can do better than that, Ronnie. There are workarounds in the system as it is at present. It is fiendishly complex and we would like to roll it out a lot more. There are obviously leadership organisations that have taken positions on this. We have a roundtable coming up with them. I deal with some of the key corporates to try to move consciousness and engagement up another level. It is a great scheme; we just need to do a lot more with it.
Q308 Ronnie Cowan: Last November, you said that you were going to appoint a new cycling and walking champion. Has it happened?
Jesse Norman: No, it has not yet. I am slightly to blame for that. I am very demanding about what I want the cycling and walking champion to be. I am personally looking for someone who can combine an almost impossible set of criteria. I want them to be publicly vociferous and already, if possible, well known. I want them to care about cycling and walking. I want them to be available to nag not just incompetent Ministers but local authorities that may not be doing a good job, and I am finding it a little difficult to find someone who is really going to hit that group.
I am thinking in my own mind about whether we change the criteria or the approach slightly. What is interesting is the way cycling and walking commissioners have now started to be picked up, in major cities in particular, which is very encouraging. We have Chris Boardman in Manchester. We have one in Birmingham and others in Yorkshire. There has been a real recognition of the possibility that individuals can make a difference and push campaigning. The sense of higher accountability is there at local level as well. It is rather encouraging.
Q309 Ronnie Cowan: So you are actively recruiting.
Jesse Norman: Certainly actively recruiting, but we are also thinking about whether we have got the balance quite right.
Q310 Chair: I want to push you a little further on the question about walking. When Brook Lyndhurst produced their report for the Department back in October 2016, they noted that there was considerably more discussion about how you increase the level of cycling than there is of walking. You will have seen today that Living Streets suggested that improving the state of pavements would make a massive improvement to the likelihood of people walking. Noting that there was not much evidence back in 2016, what evidence do you now have about what works when you want to encourage more people to walk?
Kevin Golding-Williams: On walking, it goes back to the earlier question about the difference between cycling and walking and the balance of the CWIS. I recall that when it was published there was a strong push-back to make sure that it was a cycling and walking investment strategy, which was a departure from previous approaches that had been adopted.
On cycling, one of the key areas of development is around the infrastructure. On the whole, you have footways. However, as you heard from Joe Irvin from Living Streets in previous evidence, that is not always the case in rural areas. Also, as you heard today in the report published by Living Streets, there are concerns around maintenance, although I know there is a separate inquiry that the Minister provided information for last week. I will not mention anything more about that.
On walking, it is much more around the behaviour change side, and using nudge techniques to try to encourage behaviours at key life stages. We have mentioned walk to school already. A good example is when children first join school, so it is about speaking with parents and carers to ask how they travel to school. When you look at the figures, approximately 20% of journeys under one mile to school are in the car.
Some of those journeys may be out of necessity. However, there are a number where there can be a conversation and we can do work in the school. The Department has funded the walk-to-school programme run by Living Streets for a number of years. Some of that is going in and running assemblies for children, but some of it is actually looking at the physical infrastructure locally and working with the local authority to identify where you can invest to make routes to school that are a concern safer and easier. Broadly speaking, it tends to be more of a behaviour focus on walking, but you need to remember the footway maintenance at all times.
Q311 Chair: Is that what the evidence shows, Kevin?
Kevin Golding-Williams: Yes.
Q312 Chair: Is there now more evidence that, if you can intervene when children start school, that is what makes the difference to increasing walking?
Kevin Golding-Williams: It is building the evidence base. Earlier, the Minister mentioned evidence from when we initially developed the CWIS. You mentioned the rapid evidence assessment carried out by Brook Lyndhurst. There has been further research carried out by Public Health England, which is extremely useful for making cross-departmental links and arguments.
We continue to commission further research. The LSTF evaluations were published. They are an excellent source of reference information that will inform our work moving forward. Equally, with the access fund that is being delivered at the moment, it is important that rigorous evaluation takes place because that will provide the basis of the next evidence for whatever moves forward in terms of CWIS.
Jesse Norman: Can I pick up a couple of things that are interesting? Chair, you touched on the importance of revenue funding. That is really important. It is very easy to get fixated on CapEx. The revenue funding side is really important, and I want you to understand that we in the Department understand that.
The second thing is that, of course, again it is interesting—to take another piece of recent evidence—that you had Rachel Aldred in front of the Committee. The mini-Hollands are a classic example. We have not seen much uptake in cycling with the mini-Holland schemes at Waltham Forest—there was a bit—but there has been a great impact on walking. That is the kind of interesting emerging evidence that we are having to track as we go forward, thinking about the interrelation between the two.
Q313 Daniel Zeichner: If you are going to promote walking, you also need places for people to sit. There has been widespread concern that with the commercialisation of some of our city centres and so on there are fewer places for people to sit, and there is concern about the upkeep of the public realm. What work does your Department do with other Departments to assess the state of things? What can you tell us, and what can you do about it?
Kevin Golding-Williams: In terms of other Departments, DEFRA has long worked with Keep Britain Tidy on how places look and feel, particularly in the public realm. On the actual use of benches and the like, one of the things we are undertaking at the moment is a refresh of the local transport note on cycle infrastructure design guidance.
I previously worked on the active travel design guidance in Wales with Phil Jones, who has given evidence previously. Benches are one of the key things for walking. There is the fact that streets are seen to be clean and that there is shade. There is a whole variety of features, even access to public toilets as well. These are key things that make a difference for walking in local places, particularly in terms of high-quality public realm.
Jesse Norman: The point you are making is absolutely right, Daniel. It is a local issue in many ways. When new building schemes are developed, we do not just want a corporate shiny thing where no one wants people who might be older, disabled or sitting down. They have to make it a proper public space that people can use. That is right. We should continue to think about whether there is some scope, possibly not through my Department but through MHCLG, for nudging local authorities towards the paths of righteousness when they are thinking about the planning guidance associated with that, which I think already covers some of it.
Q314 Daniel Zeichner: You said earlier that the data in general is better. Do you have data on this? Can you tell whether the situation is better or worse than it was five years ago in terms of seating?
Kevin Golding-Williams: In DFT, we do not collect those figures. I know historically that was something DEFRA collected through its work with Keep Britain Tidy.
Jesse Norman: We will make inquiries as between DEFRA, MHCLG and other Departments. If there is something, we will send it to you.
Q315 Chair: Are there gender differences? Kevin, when you were talking about things that matter such as shade and seating, I was thinking that women’s experience of walking is quite different from men’s, particularly in the evenings, and about how you feel safe. Do you think there is enough work being done to spot the gender differences when we are trying to encourage walking and cycling? If so, how are you doing that?
Jesse Norman: That is such an interesting question. You see it emerging in questions as to whether there are gender differences in, for example, cycling and road behaviour. You also see it with cars, and hats off to Caroline Criado Perez for showing how even design issues in cars are often tacitly gendered.
Kevin, do you want to comment on the question about women’s experience from a walking standpoint? Do we have any evidence on that?
Kevin Golding-Williams: The stats show that women tend to walk more than men. It is interesting, and to your point, and I accept that it is around how you design. It goes back to the point that was made earlier about the design of the public realm and how you make it inviting. Very quickly, you link back to the point I made earlier about the link to your inquiry on highways maintenance and street lighting. I know you have been discussing those things. They are important and they make a difference. On a dark winter’s night, safety concerns are something that you see in surveys about motivations to walk.
Jesse Norman: There is an important distinction between safety and security. Both have to be in place for people to feel comfortable walking. It appears that they can be different between the sexes.
Chair: We are going to look at guidance and advice in a few minutes. We now want to ask you more about local cycling and walking infrastructure plans.
Q316 Ruth Cadbury: Yes, we have some questions about the relationship between the DFT and local authorities. The Government have provided support for 46 local authorities to develop local cycling and walking infrastructure plans. How much have you spent on that support, and what evidence do you have about how useful the support has been?
Jesse Norman: Modest amounts of money—a couple of million—but it is important to point out that, as you will recall, a tender for expressions of interest was put out; 78-odd councils or authorities responded and 46 went through. There were others that then decided they were going to develop LCWIPs on their own behalf. We have tried to support them. Even if one was not in that original tender group, much of the information available is also available free of charge to people who were not in that initial group.
On effectiveness, do you want to pick that up Guy?
Guy Boulby: It is worth clarifying that the local cycling and walking infrastructure planning support process involved both technical and strategic support. It is not just about getting the routes right and understanding the potential for increasing cycling and walking in towns and cities, and prioritising those routes for investment. It is also about understanding how to land that message in the local authority and with local stakeholders and residents so that you get a buy-in to some of the projects that are investigated.
The LCWIP support covered an integrated package of both technical and strategic support that was delivered by a range of experts, not by the Department directly but by some of the individuals who spoke at earlier sessions of this inquiry, such as WSP, Phil Jones and some of the walking and cycling groups like Sustrans and Living Streets. We are starting to evaluate the impact of that. The LCWIP programme is a pilot programme at the moment. Those 46 authorities are the first tranche. Although they cover quite a large proportion of the population of England—about 40%—it is—
Q317 Ruth Cadbury: Forty per cent. of the population of England.
Guy Boulby: That is right. We are learning. This is the first time we have tried to roll out an integrated planning process where we are trying to look at the place for cycling and walking in delivering local plans, in economic regeneration and other transport infrastructure plans.
We are getting some feedback. It has largely been positive. It is certainly helping with understanding network planning and cross-modal integration between cycling and walking. Often cycling and walking are not the only modes of transport for your trip; it is part of a stage. It helps to have a more holistic and longer-term approach to investment; stop-start investment has always been a problem with small projects for cycling and walking.
We understand that we have to upskill local authority officers, particularly highways engineers and planners, to understand what the benefits of cycling and walking are in their own plans. Therefore, we are holding lots of stakeholder mapping work and highways engineer training and study tours, taking highways engineers and the leadership of local authorities to see good practice. They can then take it back to their local authority areas and see how to integrate it into their own plans.
If things have not worked out exactly as we planned, we are learning. Evaluation, monitoring and feedback are starting to show a few things, particularly stuff like how local authorities deal with limited resources and high staff turnover when they are trying to manage delivery of the plan, which takes—
Ruth Cadbury: I will come back to that.
Guy Boulby: It takes several years to produce. Often it is a single person who might have more than just cycling and walking in their policy remit. Do they understand the issues appropriately? They are generally not engineers themselves, although they have some technical or planning experience. Therefore, we need to make sure that our technical guidance is much easier to understand for an intelligent professional layman. We need to understand how to get some of the good practice across to those groups, so that when we expand the LCWIP programme, which is our intention in the next spending review period, we can have plans produced far more quickly, with far more buy-in from stakeholders, which will be far more likely to attract investment.
Q318 Ruth Cadbury: I want to link that to the Chair’s earlier question about who is walking or cycling more or less. I wondered if you were monitoring, or encouraging the monitoring, of cycling. You covered walking in answer to my question.
On cycling, there are improvements outside this building, and most of the cyclists are middling aged and probably in reasonably well-paid jobs, quite fit and cycling long distances. A lot of schemes, including this one, seek to increase the number of children cycling to school, and the number of women and older people cycling. In countries with high rates of cycling, the statistics are completely different from what they are in the UK, particularly in London. Are you monitoring who is cycling and walking more or less when you monitor the CWIPs and the schemes?
Guy Boulby: We have a range of statistics that we look at on a national scale. You see big differences between different groups. For instance, white British people are likely to cycle at least twice as often as black or south Asian people. Men cycle far more than women. At local level, it is far more difficult to get some of that data. We can get some of it from the Active Lives Survey. The high level statistics were published a few weeks ago. That gives us some regional variations.
We work closely with local authorities to make sure that their own evaluation of their investment schemes gives us an indication of increases for various groups, not just the usual suspects. It is fair to say that the evidence coming back is mixed. Looking at some of the superhighways and quiet ways in London, we see that on some schemes the level of activity by women has increased. On some of the superhighways, it has gone from about 38% to about 44%, but there have not been the spectacular increases that you would expect if they were being attracted to those safer and more direct routes with more segregation.
There is definitely more for us to do to understand what the barriers are and how that leads into infrastructure design in a way that will attract them. Also, what does it mean for our behaviour change schemes? It is not just about putting in cycle lanes. How do we get the training and the messages out there and reach out to wider groups?
There are some good examples we are learning from, such as the big bike giveaway in Birmingham. That is giving away about 5,000 bikes to those who live on council estates and are in the lower socioeconomic groups, and has enabled them to look at cycling as an option. It has to go alongside a bit of training and understanding of where the groups are, but we are not collecting data consistently across all the groups. We expect to have some of that as part of an evaluation of the cycle ambition cities, an interim report of which is due for publication later this year.
Q319 Ruth Cadbury: That sounds like, yes, you are monitoring the implementation and who is cycling or walking more.
Guy Boulby: Yes.
Jesse Norman: In aggregate, what officials struggle with is to know within a particular LCWIP what the breakdown is or how it changes over time.
Q320 Ruth Cadbury: Can I move on to the 32 local authorities who missed out on DFT funding? What engagement is the Department having with local authorities that did not receive it, and how do you intend to support more local authorities to deliver the plans?
Jesse Norman: I have touched on that, but why don’t you give more detail, Guy?
Guy Boulby: In the pilot for the LCWIP process, although we would have liked to support more authorities with the funding, we were unable to. We also wanted to make sure that we understood the best way to deliver a range of technical and strategic support. It was right that we started with a relatively small number of local authorities that had the leadership and motivation to invest in walking and cycling plans.
However, we did not want to leave behind the others that were interested. There were 78 expressions of interest, but we could only support 46. We have had a wider group of local authorities that have been able to benefit from the good practice and information sharing. That largely revolves around an online best practice forum called Basecamp, which is where all the local authorities upload examples of their projects, design work and feedback, and some of the statistics on use and lessons learned. It enables them to share information.
Often it is used by those who are outside the LCWIP process to understand their own plans. In fact, we have seen a couple of local authorities using that resource to publish their own local cycling and walking infrastructure plans without having direct support through our consortium. Of course, we are very keen to go on and support more local authorities. That, indeed, is the intention for the next spending review period.
Jesse Norman: Picking up the conversation we had earlier about revenue and inclusiveness, this is a classic example of where we would like to do more once we have understood the lessons of the LCWIP process and how that works. Of course, it is not just about our money. It is also about other forms of Government money and private sector money within a coherent local investment programme. It was designed to build longevity into the system.
The other thing on the revenue side is that when we are thinking about the harder to reach groups—groups that cycle and walk less—a lot of that is going to be about schemes like Bikeability, which at the moment tend to be the preserve of, if not better-off kids, the groups above the least well off and the most marginalised. It is really important to get those out to those folks so that they have a proper feeling of—
Q321 Ruth Cadbury: There have been calls for much better support for level 2 and level 3 Bikeability, which are the levels that get young people of secondary school age cycling on a day-to-day basis. The first stage, in year 5 and year 6, deals with basic cycle skills. Do you have any targets for that? Are you prepared to fund any of it?
Jesse Norman: It is something we are looking at closely. It was mentioned in the cycling and walking safety review. We do about 400,000 kids a year at the moment.
Q322 Ruth Cadbury: But that is mainly level 1.
Jesse Norman: Absolutely. There is a question about whether you go further with level 1 and try to get some of the harder to reach groups into some understanding of it, making it feel like it is available as a possibility in one’s life, versus reinforcing a habit. There is a general problem in cycling and walking, and indeed in many aspects of transport policy, and you have touched on it in previous hearings; it is between wanting to give as much emphasis and energy to successful schemes that can recruit rapidly and be exemplars to others, and wanting to reach out to harder areas, not-spots or cool spots, to bring them forward and roll them out. It is the same problem with Bikeability.
Q323 Ruth Cadbury: You are effectively saying that there needs to be more revenue funding to do both of those elements.
Jesse Norman: I am flagging the importance of the issue and saying that there needs to be, as part of our wider consideration of Bikeability and others, a wider view of how revenue funding can be used to support them.
Q324 Ruth Cadbury: Daniel may come back to some of the elements in funding in a minute.
A number of authorities have called for additional powers to enable them to prioritise and increase levels of active travel. What discussions have you had with local authorities who want to try new things or gain powers to give cyclists and pedestrians greater priority? Examples include the left turn initiative, zebra crossings over side roads and other things where a lot of local authorities feel that DFT rules restrict them in doing what they want to do to encourage active travel.
Jesse Norman: The classic example that was raised when you were in Manchester is the question about Beelines and how that is managed. You will recall that basically Chris Boardman and Brian Deegan came to us and said, “We can’t do this.” We had a session with our traffic sign people, and there is a genuine problem under law. We are working around it through the Transport Research Laboratory, but it is an example of a wider problem.
When you have something that is well understood and works, the slippery slope of moving from derogations to that can tail off into ways that actually undermine the original process. You have to have some custodian of standards. The question is, how do you get sensible experimentation if you cannot change because the standard is already in place? That is what we are trying to do with them.
There are other problems for local authorities where we are trying to help them. A classic example in that area would be things like traffic regulation orders—TROs—playing out on streets, and things like that. We are working quite actively and thinking about that.
Q325 Ruth Cadbury: There is the example of turning into side roads and the contradiction in the highway code about who gets priority. I understand that we are one of the few countries in the world that has that contradiction. Do you look at what works in other countries in traffic regulation and whether Governments or local authorities are responsible in terms of best practice?
Jesse Norman: Very much. I would not want to suggest that all derogations are impossible. A classic example is that TfL now has these things where, when you have a bus stop and a bike lane, there is a kind of slightly unusual-looking zebra crossing. We have all used them and they seem to work very well. That is a derogation that seems to have worked quite well.
Kevin Golding-Williams: There have been all sorts of interesting examples over the years. One of the most interesting is just outside the door here with the low-level cycle signals. In a similar way to what was just mentioned, it has been tested and you can read the original reports that were produced by the TRL. There are others available to do that research for you. There was a test approach to see how it works, which also ties into the future mobility urban strategy and some of the regulatory reviews around that.
In terms of international experience, in the development of the CWIS itself, we looked at the work that had been undertaken in Wales on the active travel Act and the way the design guidance was used there. There was also the roll-out of the support, which informed the development of the LCWIP programme. It was a slightly different approach because they are very different places, in some respects, but we are learning those lessons.
We continue to learn lessons from things that are rolled out in Copenhagen, where there are new forms of cycle superhighways, similar to London. Already they are seeing huge increases of between 30% and 50% on certain routes.
Q326 Ruth Cadbury: I was thinking more of the law and regulations.
Kevin Golding-Williams: As part of the CWIS safety review, we received 13,000 responses, I believe, and a number of them flagged some of those things: “This is what is happening in other countries. Please can you consider how it could work in an England and UK context where it was appropriate?”
Q327 Chair: Before we move on to the very important issue of funding, I want to clarify one question. How have you been monitoring the implementation of the LCWIPs? What is the DFT doing to monitor their implementation? How are you collating that information?
Guy Boulby: The LCWIPs themselves are just plans. They are really important plans because they have used the best available local evidence to understand where people want to go and where routes need to be more direct and high quality to attract them from other modes.
They do not come with their own dedicated funding pot. One of the priorities under the LCWIP programme was to ensure that the outputs of the planning enabled them to put the case for investment in cycling and walking from other forms of funding. In particular, we have seen success with the transforming cities fund and through using LEP funding from local growth funds to enable investment in some cycling and walking schemes. We have a new tranche of cross-Government infrastructure funds that cover a range of infrastructure and regeneration issues, such as the housing infrastructure fund, the future high streets fund and the stronger towns fund. We expect there to be lots of potential for cycling and walking schemes to be funded through them.
Things we would like to look at, going forward, are how we can start to recognise that, if a local authority has done an LCWIP, it actually means that the evidence base has been extremely secure and QA’d, and it is appropriate that the cycling and walking schemes that are recommended are built. When we look at, and support, wider investment schemes, we ensure that there is some recognition for LCWIPs. It shows that there are appropriate projects that can be supported. That means they are more likely to get funded because they can demonstrate that they have the evidence base to increase active travel rates.
Jesse Norman: In some respects, it is a carry-over from the conversation we were having about local transport. Local authorities are semi-sovereign parts of government in their own right. They have elected authority and they should be held to account by their local electors.
We, as central Government, very much have a role, but it tends to be in rewarding good behaviour, best practice and consistent investment according to the scheme, rather than, as it were, in any more punitive process. One of the things coming out of the LCWIP thing, sitting behind what Guy was saying, is the need for a more rigorous framework of assessment of how LCWIPs are actually being implemented. It is still early days. They are in the development stage in many cases, but that is the natural corollary. You have a five or 10-year investment plan. Are you hitting the target? How did you use the money? Did it fit the bill? Was it a success?
Q328 Chair: That is all very interesting, and we want to come on to the question about the funds and the various places where you might get the money to implement your LCWIP, but I come back to this question: is the Department monitoring whether the LCWIPs, which, as you say, are plans, are being implemented? As the DFT, are you actually monitoring whether they are being implemented?
Guy Boulby: Yes. Implementation involves a few steps in the process. The first thing is that the local authority needs to agree the plan with development stakeholders and take it to the executive committees for sign-off to ensure that the wider planning and highways authorities and regeneration groups in local authorities take account of what is in the plan. Then it is published.
Once it is published, of course, it becomes a document that can be used to help guide planning and investment decisions. I guess the point of publication is the point at which an LCWIP becomes something that has some teeth and starts to influence things. We are starting to see them being published. The first one was published last month in Gloucester, and we expect the remaining 46 to be published by the end of the year.
Q329 Chair: Are you asking those local authorities to tell you what is happening?
Guy Boulby: Yes.
Q330 Chair: Publication sounds like the start of the process, but you need to understand whether they are then being implemented, particularly where they have measures. Are you asking the local authority to send you back information? Is there going to be an annual, “Where are we up to with it?”, or is it as and when? How is the process going to happen?
Guy Boulby: There are two elements. First, there is a QA process to make sure that the document is appropriate for publication, which the consortium supports.
Jesse Norman: You had better say more about the consortium, Guy, because it is not just DFT officials.
Guy Boulby: No, it is not. The consortium is made up of experts—highway engineer groups such as WSP and Phil Jones. It also has Living Streets, Sustrans and Cycling UK on it. It has good cross-cutting expertise on how to integrate cycling and walking into a wider highways policy.
Jesse Norman: A lot of insight and a lot of expertise are being deployed, even at that earlier stage, and a lot of expectations are raised about where a published plan would go, among those stakeholder and expert groups.
Guy Boulby: That is right. We have just kicked off the evaluation for the programme. That will look at two things: the process and the impact of LCWIPs. The process is obviously, what have we learned and what can be proved later, and are they actually being published? As you say, that is just an output. The impact is how they are being used. The evaluation report will be published next year because the LCWIPs themselves will complete this year. We will be able to understand the impact of those next year. We will be seeking to monitor how local authorities are using them to take decisions. That will help us understand how to improve the LCWIP process for the next period.
Jesse Norman: By next year, you mean 2020-21.
Guy Boulby: Yes.
Chair: That is really helpful, thank you. I will hand over to Daniel to kick us off on the question of funding.
Q331 Daniel Zeichner: Minister, inevitably in your answers already, and in your very full introduction, you have touched on some of the funding issues. I do not think it is unfair to say that when the CWIS was published initially there was praise for some of the ambition, but criticism was made at the time that the investment side did not feel so strong. I think that has been echoed in some of the evidence we have had from people talking about local CWIPs. Guy has just talked about the various funds that can be bid into to try to deliver those things. Is it fair to say that no money comes attached to the CWIPs in themselves? They are a process for bidding. Is that a fair characterisation?
Jesse Norman: Yes. I think that is true. You have three things going on. One is that the CWIS itself was an attempt to articulate an overarching framework for investment in cycling and walking, and of course related money. There is then, coming out of that, a process for guiding local investment, which is the local cycling and walking investment plan. There is also increased expectation that different pots of money will be cycling and walking attuned, potentially designated specifically for that.
What you have seen is an emergence in transport policy generally—not by any means just related to the DFT—of less of a modal investment programme and more of a place-based investment programme than we had in the past. That is profoundly helpful. In a sense, it is unfortunate because it diminishes the amount of direct accountability that DFT has over the spending of cycling and walking money, but it is profoundly good, because, when local authorities are given the opportunity to make investments, many of them make investments in cycling and walking schemes. I do not know what the current levels are. Of the current investment going into the transforming cities fund—this is a question for Guy and Kevin—what percentage of the current tranche of investment is going into cycling and walking schemes?
Guy Boulby: Our known funding through the transforming cities fund is that around a third of the schemes have active travel content, remembering that it is a staged fund where content in the bids is developed over time; it is a co-development process so we do not know exactly all the content. For the tranche one announcement a few months ago, which is the non-mayoral authorities, more than 50% of the funding was going towards active travel schemes.
Jesse Norman: If you think of the way the pots work, historically you had Bikeability, the access fund and cycle city ambition money coming through DFT. Now you are thinking about a much wider spectrum of pots of money that are available. That includes the transforming cities fund, the local growth fund and obviously the designated funds of Highways England that you have just been hearing about. When you go more widely, there is clean air money, the housing infrastructure fund and the rest of it.
There is a criticism to be made, and it has been made in the Committee, that this pot-based system might sometimes lead you to more of a start-stop approach. The whole reason for having LCWIPs is to try to iron that out and prevent it, to give more continuity and consistency to local government spending. What I want to see, and what we are already starting to see, is the extension of that place-based investment approach going out beyond major cities—the transforming cities fund is now 12 cities—to smaller cities and towns. That is what the stronger high streets fund and the stronger towns fund is about. They are two separate pots of money. One is £635-odd million and the other well over £1 billion—£1.5 billion. I would like to think that both will be heavily targeted in part on cycling and walking schemes. We think there is potential for a significant increase, within the framework of announced funding at the moment.
Q332 Daniel Zeichner: But that is where some of the confusion begins to stem from. These are funds that can be bid into; it does not necessarily mean either that they are successful or that you get the outcomes you are looking for, given the financially straitened circumstances many local authorities find themselves in. When the Committee asked how much money was spent on active travel, there was mention of £2 billion. Actually, if you wanted to spend £2 billion on active travel, wouldn’t it be better to allocate it directly to local authorities and allow them to get on with it?
When one looks at the handy chart provided by DFT on spending, a huge amount is going on rail, which is not used by everybody, whereas everybody uses their local road. However, it barely appears on that chart. I admire your optimism, but, as a ring-fenced amount, we are told there is only £341 million. There is a gap.
Jesse Norman: I think you are slightly mischaracterising, if I may say so. Take, for example, the transforming cities fund. A large chunk of that money is allocated directly. Chris Boardman and Andy Burnham get that money as a wodge from central Government. They can then decide how they want to use it. We know in advance in many cases how the money is going to be spent, or we have a good idea. That is how that money gets allocated. That is not bid for; it is just allocated.
Of course, where money is bid for, the amounts involved are often quite large. Therefore, the worries about bidder fatigue tend to become less because the amount raised is that much higher. You get bidder fatigue with smaller amounts of money where you are constantly being kept, as it were. That is a serious problem. As you will see, in local roads funding we try to avoid bidder fatigue whenever we can.
The real point is that we are trying to hit multiple objectives. We are trying to support rapid changes in productivity and in city growth. We are trying to hit air quality targets, which tend to be focused on cities. We are trying to increase social equity by covering other parts of the country, which may be towns or villages. There is a whole balance of objectives, and of course there is a desire not to spend money where it is not actually needed and therefore to spend it in response to local objectives. It is those tensions that are working themselves through the process.
Let us not forget that as a country we are simply not yet at the point where we think of cycling and walking in anything like the way they do in countries that have global or European best practice, where it is not just social consensus, but a programme of public investment that has been under way for, in some cases, 30 or 40 years.
Q333 Daniel Zeichner: Taking you back to the question of the bid culture, in a lot of evidence we have had to the Committee, the sense has come through that local authorities do not always have capacity. Sometimes, with short-term bids, it takes time to build it up and then you lose it because people are not sure that the funding will continue in the future. Are we not setting up a system where a huge amount is wasted on the process, rather than, as cities like my own have shown, having sustained work on these things? That is the way to get transformation. You are setting up a structure that is almost inevitably going to fail, it seems to me, because it is based on a bid-based culture.
Jesse Norman: I think Cambridge is a bad example, Daniel, because, as you will recall from previous evidence, there was cycling in Cambridge before there was infrastructure. The good news is that there is now safer cycling as a result of good infrastructure.
Q334 Daniel Zeichner: Indeed. There are better examples elsewhere, I agree.
Jesse Norman: I agree; I cannot help teasing you about that. Before I bring the boys in, let me respond to the question. Listen, we are very sensitive to issues of bidder fatigue. Local authorities, for reasons that Guy has already described, almost invariably have limited resources and do not yet, as a matter of fact, in every case, see this as the priority we think it should be. We do not want to overtax them.
Part of the point about LCWIPs should be that as local authorities develop more expertise in investing the money and, hopefully, as the money comes forward to meet some of the concerns, from whatever sources—private, public or others—they can develop a more resilient flow that justifies investment in more capacity, more ability and more staff locally. Also, they can develop a justified expectation that the Government in different pots will reward best practice and good behaviour in a way that reinforces that.
We are at the early stages of that problem. LCWIPs did not exist two years ago, so we are still at the very outset. What did Chris Boardman say? In transport terms, we are in the very early stages, and that is that a year has passed. That is the nature of the beast, in a way.
Q335 Daniel Zeichner: I am glad that you are conscious of the problems it is creating for local authorities. It is a serious question.
I want to move on to the relationship between revenue and capital funding. When the Committee made the pilgrimage to Walthamstow, one of the messages that came through was that it is not just the capital but that it is changing behaviour. Given that, it again goes back to the basic point that, if you are not providing sustainable sources of revenue funding, how can you expect this to work?
Jesse Norman: Let me respond more generally. It is an absolutely proper and good concern. I remind the Committee of the dark old days of even a few years ago, when we did not have anything like an understanding of the issue in the same way, either for cycling or walking or indeed the balance between revenue and capital.
I will give you a little example that has nothing to do with this but shows that we get the point. When RIS2 is announced, it will be clear that we are spending a fortune on the maintenance of roads because we have to protect and enfranchise the infrastructure, the asset that we already have. When people think about roads, they tend to think about enormous numbers and huge new road developments. They fixate on a few road developments. There are new road developments—that is true; the lower Thames crossing is one of them—but an awful lot of it is just making sure that the asset we have is operating effectively, well and productively.
That was the same ethos, if you recall, that we tried to bring to the idea, when we discussed local roads funding, of a five-year funding programme; we were trying to bring in a proper balance with revenue. Steve Berry, the Obi-Wan, was talking about the balance between the revenue funding and the importance of maintaining roads, gully clearance and all that stuff, so that you have an asset. The same is true of this.
Kevin Golding-Williams: To build on the point made by Steve Berry, or Obi-Wan, it is important to remember at all times that we are not just talking about carriageways. We are talking about lighting, which hits on the point made earlier about people feeling safe. It is about investment in footways and cycleways as well, and ensuring that they are well maintained. Only a few months ago, the footways and cycleways group published guidance on how to achieve best practice in maintaining footways and cycleways. It was one of the early versions of best practice around that, which shows that it is still a developing agenda.
Q336 Daniel Zeichner: I have one final point, looking ahead to the big vision and the amounts of money we might be trying to allocate. I think we all agree that there has been a transformation in attitudes. I was rather touched when you said you were bidding to Government, because I thought you were the Government, but obviously within Government—
Jesse Norman: You raise a very interesting point.
Q337 Daniel Zeichner: I do not want to start you off on that.
Jesse Norman: I will respond to that in a second.
Q338 Daniel Zeichner: Looking ahead to the spending review, obviously you will know that the organisations bidding are urging you to look for 10% of transport spending to be dedicated to active travel. What kind of levels are you going in for, and can you get the kind of shift that many of us would now like to see?
Jesse Norman: Let me make the general point. Of course, everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. One of them is politicians who like to pretend that all of these things are the unique result of their extraordinarily forceful personality or ability to take decisions. Certainly I do not make that mistake.
By the same token, there is the fond idea that somehow a Minister can make a decision and that is the end of it. Decisions are made across Government. We cannot make a serious major decision of any kind without a write-around, in which every single Department has to issue its accord.
Q339 Daniel Zeichner: But you can shift resources within your own Department.
Jesse Norman: Broadly speaking, we can in some cases, but we cannot make major modal shifts within the Department without agreement from a write-around because of the knock-on effects across the whole of Government.
If, for example, we wanted to take money out of a pot for roads and put it into rail or out of rail and into active travel, that conversation would have to be had across the whole of Government. Those big decisions are taken consensually by Government as a whole. Every three to five years, or one to three years, you have a spending review that digests the current state of affairs, and that is the moment when the next broad agenda is set across Government. Everyone has a very super-inflated idea of what individual Ministers can do. The real function of a Minister is to keep the tempo up and to persuade colleagues about the importance of an issue.
I now come to the point that you raise about levels of investment. I have talked about the flow; per capita it was £2.50 in 2010, £3.50 in 2015 and over £7.00 now. I have said that we aspire to maintain that kind of rate of growth. I certainly want to see us at double that kind of level. We need to hit double that kind of level if we are going to hit our cycling stages target. That is realistic and is something that Government ought to be committing to.
What will that do in terms of transport spend? At the moment, we spend about 1% of the total transport spend on active travel. It is massively distorted by major priorities of a kind I do not need to go into. We spend about 10% of our local transport spend on active travel. If we are taking it to those kinds of levels on a per capita basis, you can read across to the kind of implication there would be. I do not know what the overall spend for the Department for Transport will be. That is why I prefer to think of it in terms of levels per head. That is what gets you into comparability with best practice in the UK—TfL—and the historical levels of investment we see in other countries. Let us be clear: it is still some way short—in fact, it is a long way short—but it is a heck of a lot better than it would have been even three or five years ago.
Chair: I will bring Huw in because he has to leave.
Q340 Huw Merriman: I am on the Order Paper for 11.30; I am sorry to jump in to cover a different section.
Minister, I want to deal with guidance and good practice. You have always been very open with ideas and willing to open up, so I am hoping that this section may appeal to that philosophy.
Jesse Norman: And tempt me into further indiscretions.
Q341 Huw Merriman: It is a question as to whether the Department is perhaps still wedded to reducing vehicle congestion, and whether that may come at a cost for active travel such as walking and cycling, because anything that gets in the way of reducing congestion for cars may be seen by the Department as not a good thing.
Jesse Norman: I think active travel is a crucial part of reducing congestion. Getting mode shift and more people out of cars and into forms of active travel is a crucial component of congestion reduction over time. You will have seen that one of the things the cycling and walking safety review does is to insist repeatedly on the importance of the hierarchy of road users.
We are not accepting, in that sense, that from a vulnerability standpoint, a safety standpoint, which after all is an absolutely crucial factor in determining levels of active travel, road users are the same. We say there is a hierarchy. The most vulnerable have to come first. That is another reason for pursuing the strands of behaviour and the investment programme that we are discussing today.
I do not think there is a tension with congestion reduction. It has been repeatedly said to your Committee, rightly so, that by far the best way to increase the capacity of a road is to encourage active travel within and alongside it, and to use the road space. Obeying that is going to be more efficient. The question is, how can we do that? We have discussed all the different elements, from norm shift to infrastructural investment, but I think we are very much seized of the need to reduce congestion. In fact, I have said publicly—I said it again the other day—that if the effect of moving to different forms of technology, autonomous cars or electric cars were to replace between 37 million combustion engine cars with 37 million electric or autonomous vehicles, it would be a colossal policy failure; I think it would be.
Q342 Huw Merriman: Has there been such a culture shift within the Department that, for example, as we see on the Embankment, the car is required to give over space to cyclists and pedestrians, and that is now seen as an absolute positive? In effect, the positives of getting more people cycling and walking negate the build-up of congestion because there are not so many cars on the road.
Jesse Norman: I would rather not pick on a particular scheme. That is heavily contested for all kinds of reasons, not just historically but actually now when a City of London group is trying to contest it. I do not want to get involved with it. It is a TfL issue, so I will leave it to them.
In a highly expert department like the Department of Transport, full of people who have dedicated their lives to the different aspects of a safe transport system across different modes and who are having to move from an environment in which it was basically modal to an environment of place making and very rapid technology change, there is no doubt that differences of opinion are going to exist and that is going to be reflected across Government. Part of the argument we have to make, and it is one of the reasons why work on the investment model is so important, will be to provide robust analyses that we can use to persuade people that these things are really important and that we take them seriously.
Q343 Huw Merriman: As an open dialogue, I wanted to talk about the design requirements that the Department may have, which may actually make for an unsafer environment. It touches on something that Ruth mentioned.
When we went to Manchester, we heard from Chris Boardman that they were looking to put in place what they termed informal zebra crossings, which would of themselves make things safer for pedestrians. But they maintained that the DFT would not allow them to do so because it was not 100% safe, if anything ever is. I have local examples as well, where my local authority say, “We would like to put this in place but it has to meet these standards. That means that just to get a puffin crossing will cost £180,000 and we cannot deliver it at all, so the road continues to be unsafe.” Is that a fair reflection on the Department, or is it unfairly blamed by local authorities that could themselves be more flexible?
Jesse Norman: There are a whole series of different things that we ought to touch on. In general, local authorities have many more powers than they often recognise. In some cases, it is not cost-effective, or they do not think it is cost-effective, to use them. There is a fair margin for error or ambiguity, but in many cases there are plenty of powers that local government has to combat some of these issues.
There is no doubt that there are embedded national standards that the Department rightly wishes to preserve because they have proven their worth over the years. We touched on the issue of zebra crossings earlier. That raises the problem, “Well if it is an embedded standard, how do you ever get any innovation or change?” A series of workarounds have been developed, including experimentation through the Transport Research Laboratory. That is the approach that we have adopted with Chris and Brian. I think it will yield good outcomes. If what they say is true and validated—and I have no doubt that it is true, given their experience and the way they have used other countries’ experience—we will have had a proper process of change and derogation from an achieved national standard.
That is completely different from saying to a local authority, “We don’t like these rules. We are going to adopt some different rules as regards signage or road markings.” Those things are very important and they carry huge safety implications. It would be quite wrong for Government to be too quick in changing them and ignore experience and evidence, or to allow too much scope to local government to vary without evidence or on a whim. We have to have proper processes of variation, but where we have those we are very keen to have that conversation with local government, as we have done with Greater Manchester.
Q344 Huw Merriman: I think the design guidance is being updated.
Jesse Norman: It is, yes.
Q345 Huw Merriman: Is it going to be updated for both cycling and pedestrians?
Jesse Norman: Let me hand that over to Guy and Kevin. It is a very important issue, as you know. You have already had evidence from Phil Jones on it, but I will get them to talk about it.
Q346 Huw Merriman: Will it give greater scope for the flexibility that I was referencing?
Kevin Golding-Williams: As you say, we are currently updating it. We are about a year into that and hoping to publish it later this year. Phil Jones, who has given evidence already, has led on that, so it is informed by best practice, including the London design standards and the Welsh active travel design guidance that I have already mentioned. It is looking at a lot of the new approaches to standard features that the Minister mentioned.
We are working in that group, and in the Cycle Proofing Working Group. The Minister made an announcement last year about how we disseminate good practice and guidance. That is important. It is great to write guidance, but in the old days failure was that it would sit on a shelf for many years gathering dust; now it just floats around on the internet and no one reads it. The key thing is that the guidance gets to those who are delivering the schemes. There is a direct read-across to the work on the LCWIPs and empowering and bringing up the skills level of local authority officers, and supporting them in the use of that.
It will be published later this year. One of the things we are thinking about with our colleagues on the Cycle Proofing Working Group is how to reflect cycling and walking within it. At the moment, it will remain just cycle design guidance, but there is an argument about whether in future it should be cycling and walking, as was the approach in Wales. There are further things being developed in the “Manual for Streets”, the main bit of design guidance. That alludes to the question earlier about public realm design: what does a good place look like for walking? The group is considering all of those, moving forward, and we have had lots of very good discussions with Living Streets, in particular, with Becki Cox.
Q347 Huw Merriman: That leads me to the final part I was going to mention. It is with reference to those with disabilities. When we were in Manchester and had our open session at the end, a strong message came across from those with disabilities that they felt endangered by cyclists and some of the new cycling designs. Will there be a mechanism when the guidance is updated whereby those with disabilities are better taken into account, or do you feel that currently they are properly taken into account?
Jesse Norman: I talked about a hierarchy of road users. Disabled users are absolutely at the top of that. There is lots of evidence that people with disabilities do not feel safe, for all the reasons you have described and touched on. The levels of take-up of walking and cycling are much less. I think e-bikes can make a huge difference. As we start to see that kind of electrification revolution roll through cycling and different modes of transport, I think we will find it becoming more disability friendly in that sense.
Kevin will talk more on the question of the actual design standards. We have already taken some decisions that are designed to recognise the problem. The classic example would be the pause we put on shared space designs and roll-out because of the concerns expressed by disabled groups about those. Obviously, there has been another huge input from my point of view in areas like Blue Badges or pavement parking. There is the whole question of the mobility strategy that has been published across the Department by my colleague Ms Ghani. It is a very high priority for us, but on the specific design issue I will ask Kevin to comment.
Kevin Golding-Williams: To add to the Minister’s point, we work closely with representatives from DPTAC—the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee—around that. It was at the forefront of our thinking, from all of those involved, as we were developing the revised guidance. A wide grouping helped to develop it. There were representatives from local authorities, designers, engineers, NGOs and the like.
To answer your question in a slightly different way, we are also thinking about accessible cycling. We work closely with Wheels for Wellbeing to consider how design guidance can represent the full range of cycles that exist. That is really important. The other thing to consider is that all local authorities have a duty under the public sector equality duty to consider the impact of any development, work or policy within their area, which should be a filter for any national guidance.
Huw Merriman: Thank you very much.
Q348 Chair: I want to follow up with a couple of things on that. How effective do you think that is? Concern was expressed to us in very forceful terms, particularly by those who have a visual impairment, that some of the new infrastructure left them feeling very vulnerable.
Of course, every local authority has to do an equality impact assessment, but in my experience some of the quality of the work they do is not always where you would want it to be. Are there other things that Government can do to ensure that disabled people, particularly those with a visual impairment, are not disadvantaged by changes to infrastructure?
Kevin Golding-Williams: It goes back to the public sector equality duty as a starting point. I cannot comment on how that has been applied within our policy area. It goes back to the local cycling and walking infrastructure plans, and ensuring that conversations are taking place at local level.
I know that you went to visit Manchester, which I thought was great, and Chris mentioned the workshops that they held across the Greater Manchester area. When you have discussions that exist at scheme level, you are talking about a particular crossing or a particular junction. Within the national guidance, we flag up that that is the correct thing to do. When we were developing the LCWIP guidance, we ensured that there was a big feature about stakeholder engagement and making sure that you hear those views.
Q349 Chair: Do you think that also picks up issues around the interaction between cycling, walking and other transport modes? One of the things I was struck by when we heard the evidence from Brighton was that they talked about not seeing cycling and walking in a silo but actually increasing public transport use. It was all part of modal shift, so you did not want infrastructure that stopped people from using the bus, for example, because people who use the bus tend to walk more.
Is that something you are conscious of? Is there anything you are doing to get people to think in a holistic way rather than in Department silos?
Jesse Norman: Your point is very well made. We spend a lot of time trying to think about how to get people to think of journeys as the whole journey and to include active travel in a portion of the journey. One of the worries about autonomous vehicles is that you are going to get a world where you simply get a pod to take you to the bus stop rather than walking to the bus stop. Potentially, that massively increases obesity.
A classic example of that in this area would be cycle rail hub funding, for which we now have over £30 million, and a new tranche of schemes is going out. That is another reason why we tend to think of these things as simple facilitatory investments that can nudge people into the use of public transport alongside active travel. You have that combination.
It is part of a wider question. We have not talked about micro-mobility at all, but that is another area where we are going to have to think very hard about the interactions between that kind of activity and public transport. Kevin, do you want to add to that?
Kevin Golding-Williams: No, I think that covers it.
Q350 Ruth Cadbury: On good practice, you say that you want to prioritise the more vulnerable road users. When local authorities and the DFT are assessing the benefit-cost ratios of transport schemes, they use WebTAG guidance based on the value of working time per working person. They do not even think about non-working people like children, or non-working disabled or elderly people. For some reason, walkers and cyclists are only given a value of £17 and a bit per hour, whereas car drivers are £22. Is there something that needs to be looked at in terms of WebTAG to address both working and non-working benefits, which you mentioned very well in relation to health and so on? Surely it needs revising in terms of the working value of different transport users.
Jesse Norman: As I said in Westminster Hall recently, we are having a transport appraisal seminar for colleagues across the House. If any member of this Committee would like to join it, in order to get into the workings of WebTAG, they would be very welcome. Ruth, you would be very welcome as part of that, and the Committee generally. That applies to any Member of the House, or indeed members of their staff. We are very keen to get a wider understanding.
I doubt there has ever been a Minister who has spent more time thinking about economic models and the limits of their applicability than me. WebTAG has the natural defects that you would expect of a very elaborate economic model. It tends to respond to things that can be measured. It tends to respond to things that have financial outcomes associated with them. It is very hard to measure the benefits of active travel. People can try to put numbers on them, but you run the risk of semi-arbitrary numbers compounding into an even more arbitrary number.
That does not mean to say that it does not have value. It just means that when you get these kinds of cross-modal arguments it is quite difficult. Governments have to invest on a basis that is as systematic as possible. The key to using a WebTAG type approach is to think, “Is this really a WebTAG type problem, or do we need to think of other models that we are going to use alongside this?”
When you think of major transport problems, a lot of the mistakes that are made are because people run too quickly to WebTAG, and the same thing is true of local authorities. Sometimes they go there and think, “I can put the numbers in, et cetera,” and of course they are intensely subject to whatever initial starting assumptions you make. Unless Guy wants to come in, we should leave to the seminar the specific examples that we have raised as to how they work their way through. You would be staggered by how carefully and systematically our economists have tried to think through the problems in this very narrow specialist area. The question is, are they the right problems and are they approaching them in the right way?
Q351 Ruth Cadbury: And are they still relevant? Even if you accept a WebTAG type formula basis, you could still look at the values per different user.
Jesse Norman: Of course, the values that you see may not in fact reflect the values for different users so much as values for the time they spend travelling, or the context. There is a lot more detail that we would find if we went into that in detail.
Q352 Ruth Cadbury: And they go back to 2010 anyway.
Jesse Norman: Yes. The value for that would be the change at least as much as what the values actually are.
Guy Boulby: WebTAG is a developing toolkit. It quantifies some benefits such as reduced mortality and increased healthy life years; reduced absenteeism; journey quality; mode shift; and congestion benefits, noise and air quality benefits. It does not capture some other things that we care about, such as the impact in terms of health on the young and the old or the impact on health costs in the NHS in dealing with the improved health that comes from being more active.
How does it deal with e-bikes? An e-bike may not have 100% of the health benefits of a normal cycle but it certainly has—
Jesse Norman: It may have 120% of the benefits.
Guy Boulby: If you get them on to it. There has been some concern that WebTAG discriminates against active modes. That has come from some of the misconception or confusion around what we mean by the value of time.
WebTAG itself has a whole range of numbers for the value of time for different modes over different distances. In fact, for short business trips all modes have the same value of time. For non-business trips—things like commuting and leisure travel—all modes have the same value of time. It is only the longer business trips, where you are spending more time away from the office potentially not being productive, which are taken into account in WebTAG. That is set out in some of the underpinning tables. We will be happy to follow up with a note about that. I think there has been quite a bit of Twitter debate about it. A table has been extracted from the guidance without all the caveats and understanding.
My final point is that WebTAG is just advisory. It sets out a lot of the numbers you can use and the things you can put in terms of benefits, but local authorities and others can look at the local situation, local conditions and local businesses, and amend some of the figures if they believe that is more appropriate to their area, and include why it benefits them, where they have evidence. That would then increase the BCR, potentially, for the schemes that come forward for funding.
Jesse Norman: That is not going to apply to a small local authority, which will take the thing more or less as holy writ. There has to be care applied to that. What would be really interesting would be to see whether, for example, Transport for Greater Manchester, having done the work it has put in, suddenly comes out with a different set of views about what the appropriate levels of active travel recognition should be within the model. That would be an interesting development to come out of that.
Q353 Daniel Zeichner: I have one minor point, as you are here, which Cycling UK has raised with me. A change to the regulations in 2016 covering parking in mandatory cycle lanes had unintended consequences. I do not know whether you can answer now.
Jesse Norman: The topic is so complicated that, even if I could give you a guide through it now, you probably would not be able to follow it. It is in discussion with Cycling UK. There are genuine differences of view. I know it is something they feel strongly about. We have top people working on it.
Q354 Daniel Zeichner: Then you can answer on the value of time as a philosophical discussion.
Jesse Norman: I will spare you that as well.
Chair: Time is ticking on somewhat. I think Ruth has a final question.
Q355 Ruth Cadbury: I have two questions about stop-start funding, which has been raised with us by local authorities and other groups, as you know. First, would you consider longer-term funding such as 15 years for these kind of DFT-funded things?
Secondly, have you considered the impact of stop-start funding on professional development, particularly for walking and cycling? We started to get that under Cycling England until it was cut off in 2010. Would you consider conditioning support on the basis that local authorities employed permanent technical staff rather than consultants?
Jesse Norman: Could you give me the first part of the question again?
Q356 Ruth Cadbury: Would you consider longer-term funding over 15 years for schemes and programmes rather than three or five?
Jesse Norman: And the second question was about capacity.
Q357 Ruth Cadbury: Professional capacity and how the DFT could support its longer-term development by conditioning support on local authorities employing permanent appropriate staff rather than consultants.
Jesse Norman: I understand. Let me give a response to the first question. In general, of course we like longevity very much and we would support initiatives to improve the professionalism of local government officers in this area where we think there is a real lack of capacity. There are obvious democratic potential objectives to one Government seeking to bind their successors by 15-year funding programmes. I am not against the idea at all. We have tended to work in five-year schemes, and that has been regarded as an enormous achievement on the roads side. The stronger towns fund is a seven-year fund, so we are getting out beyond five years on some funds.
On the second thing, the way many local authorities have addressed this in some respects is by using expert contractors. I would not want to reduce the net expertise available to them by forcing them to bring it in-house. Colleagues, do you have anything to say about either of those?
Kevin Golding-Williams: It ties into the whole thing about the dissemination of the revised cycle design guidance, and what follows from there. There are questions coming up through the LCWIP process as well about the skillset. There is further work needed. In the Cycle Proofing Working Group we have been having quite a few discussions about how we can collectively work together with the professional institutions to raise the level. A question there is, what is the role of Government within that? It is certainly important, as we take a long-term view with a statutory strategy, to make a difference for cycling and walking.
Jesse Norman: That is a very interesting point to take away. Thank you.
Chair: There are a few additional questions I am going to write to you about because we have run out of time. It is such an important area. Thank you very much for giving evidence today. That concludes our session.