Active travel in England – Report Summary

Summary

Walking and cycling as ways of making every day journeys can have a wide range of benefits for health and the environment, but despite this being an area of long-standing focus for government, it has taken the set-up of a new body to start making a real difference to how it approaches active travel. The Department for Transport (DfT, ‘The Department’) has made little progress against its objectives to increase active travel and it is not on track to meet its 2025 targets. There has been no sustained increase in either walking or cycling since DfT set its objectives in 2017. The establishment of Active Travel England by the DfT in 2022 was a positive development and it has made good early progress. It is important that this momentum is maintained and that adequate funding and support is provided to the new organisation.

Despite spending over £2.3 billion on active travel infrastructure between 2016 and 2021, DfT knows far too little about what this spending has achieved. To properly protect taxpayers’ money, and make sure future spending decisions are fully informed, DfT needs to do much more work to improve the evaluation of active travel schemes and how the delivery of cross-government benefits from active travel, including health benefits, are identified, tracked and communicated. Public concerns around safety remain a barrier to more people taking up active travel. To address this, changes made to improve the physical safety of active travel, such as revisions to the Highway Code, need to be communicated effectively. The Bikeability programme is an important part of increasing active travel, but greater support is needed from DfT so that more people can receive training and have the confidence to cycle safely.

We look to DfT to play a much more active role in building support for active travel and promoting its benefits. More needs to be done to join up active travel with other forms of public transport, so that it is easier for people to walk or cycle as part of longer journeys which include trains or buses. We welcome Active Travel England’s commitment to work with local authorities to build their capability to ensure that active travel is fully integrated into their local plans. However, as we have repeatedly found in our examination of local government financial sustainability, local authorities need a more coherent and stable system of funding to enable them to take long-term spending decisions and be able to plan and undertake this work effectively.