Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-168)
12 JUNE 2003
MR MIKE
ASH, MS
DANILA ARMSTRONG,
MS IMOGEN
SHARP, MS
PATRICIA HAYES,
MR ALEC
MCGIVAN
AND MS
MELA WATTS
Q160 Sandra Gidley: Have you any
influence over county councils who very often have a large transport
budget but my local county council, the last time I looked, only
devoted one per cent of the budget to providing cycle runs. Are
there any incentives that can be given to county councils to improve
that?
Ms Hayes: I think performance
on cycling is one of the things that is taken into account in
assessing the performance of all local authorities on transport
generally. There is an expectation in the Department's guidance
on local transport plans that all authorities will produce a cycling
strategy and we monitor what they are doing in terms of what they
are spending on cycling. The national picture is of a steady upward
trend on expenditure on cycling from £28 million a year in
2001-02 to a projected £37 million a year in 2004-05, so
across the country as a whole you can see an increased level of
activity on provision for cyclists. Getting down to the individual
authorities, the key thing will be the process I was talking about
a moment ago of the auditing that had been carried out by the
individual regional champions for the National Cycling Strategy
Board because that will give us a much clearer picture than we
have had up until now of how adequate provision being made by
individual authorities is for cyclists in their areas. Once we
have got that information we can reflect that back to the authorities
and challenge them to do more both through the formal structures
of the local transport planning process but also as a more individual
engagement.
Q161 Sandra Gidley: Given that we
want to increase cycling, I am aware that there has been a cycle
helmet promotion recently which I have received a couple of letters
of concern about. The website and the pictures seem to have some
quite frightening pictures and concern has been raised that one
or two are counter-productive and might deter people from cycling.
Who did you consult on this programme and what are you doing to
review the effectiveness of it?
Ms Hayes: The Department's view
is that cycling is not a dangerous activity but that if people
are going to cycle we would prefer them to use helmets. The campaign
that our road safety specialists have launched is targeted at
a very particular risk group which is boys who are in their early
teens. When this was tested on focus groups of boys in their early
teens the message that we got back was that they did not find
the images scary; they thought they were funny, so I think there
is a misperception in that what is funny to a teenage boy may
be scary to an adult audience. There was some very careful testing
done about what this campaign would do in terms of influencing
behaviour and there was an overwhelmingly positive response back,
certainly from parents, that it was a good idea to have a campaign
which was targeted at that very specific groupm which is much
less likely to wear helmets than any other group, and that the
campaign that we had come up with would be effective in doing
that.
Q162 Sandra Gidley: You tested the
campaign on teenage boys. Did you, for example, also test it on
parents and teachers and, bearing in mind that teenage boys often
have younger brothers and sisters, did you also test the programme
on a different age group?
Ms Hayes: I am not sure we tested
it on teachers. We certainly tested it on teenagers and parents.
I would have to come back to you on whether we tested it on potential
brothers and sisters as well. The way in which the campaign has
been marketed is through publications which have a fairly narrowly
defined target audience, so we are looking to get the 12-year
old, the 13-year old boy who is absolutely dead against wearing
a cycle helmet. He is the person that the campaign is intended
to reach.
Q163 Sandra Gidley: Have we done
any research as to whether wearing a cycle helmet does reduce
the overall injury rate, because there are also concerns that
it could increase risk-taking behaviour because people feel safer?
Ms Hayes: That is an issue on
which there are lots of different conflicting views. The Department's
considered view is that overall you gain more from wearing cycle
helmets than you lose.
Q164 Sandra Gidley: Ms Watts, what
is the Department of Education doing and what advice are you giving
to schools, LEAs, to promote walking to school and cycling to
school?
Ms Watts: The Department for Transport
and the Department for Education and Skills are working at the
moment on a paper to think about in the broadest terms the issues
associated with home-to-school transport and trying to tackle
those issues, and we hope to be producing something probably for
consultation over the summer period to try and open the general
debate. The Department, though, in addition to that is certainly
encouraging schools to develop school travel plans and to work
with the staff which Ms Hayes was talking about being funded through
the Department of Transport at a local level to develop school
travel plans. One of the other things the Department has done
is that we have established and developed some software to support
schools in setting up walking buses and car sharing schemes so
that it is very much easier to do that at a school level and is
not an additional burden for administrative staff within the school.
In the exemplar school designs that the Department issues to all
local authorities and which are available to all schools there
are certainly elements in there for cycle sheds and those sorts
of things which are often a problem when youngsters want to take
a bike to school but actually there is nowhere to leave it.
Q165 Sandra Gidley: Are there any
particular examples of good practice that you could direct us
to?
Ms Hayes: Yes.
Q166 Chairman: Ms Sharp, do you want
to come in?
Ms Sharp: I was going to come
in on a couple of other transport examples within our national
service framework for heart disease. The NHS has developed green
travel plans and we have, with the Department of Transport, funded
a number of seminars for the NHS on that so that would focus on
older people as well as general patients, and also we have an
expert patients programme which reaches out to 200 PCTs and picks
up people's engagement in managing their own condition and links
into exercise.
Q167 John Austin: Having just done
inquiries into smoking and sexual health, there may be some risk
in re-introducing cycle sheds. Can I put a final question to our
health representatives? We talked earlier about social class differences
and inequalities of health. Could I raise the race and ethnicity
issue as well because it is quite clear from the evidence you
have given us that not only are there higher rates of obesity
amongst certain ethnic groups but also that risks are triggered
at a lower level among some Asian groups, for example. Often it
is those groups who may have poorer access to primary care facilities
either through ignorance or indeed institutional racism. Is the
Department doing anything to look at examples of good practice
in those PCTs who may have populations at risk so that you can
roll out something for them?
Ms Sharp: We are not doing anything
specifically on obesity but in terms of access to the health services
certainly we have an inequality strategy unit that picks up access
issues in terms of the overall Health Service. As you know, we
also have inequalities. We have produced a cost cutting/spending
review document and also have a forthcoming document with a delivery
plan in terms of tackling health inequalities across government
which will, I think, put some focus through the NHS as well as
through other local services on tackling health inequalities.
Q168 John Austin: Is that likely
to be out in the course of this inquiry?
Ms Sharp: Yes. It is also imminent.
Chairman: Can I express the thanks of
the Committee to all our witnesses for a very interesting session?
We are most grateful to you.
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