Planning for infrastructure (but what about cycling?)

In which a few things change, but not much changes

Surfacing improvements to NCN2 near Rye, East Sussex, spring 2022.

This week the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is being debated in Parliament. It will, the government says, “speed up planning and remove unnecessary blockers and challenges to the delivery of vital developments like roads, railway lines and wind farms”. Cycling and walking are notably absent, and Roger Geffen, long-term active travel campaigner, now of Low Traffic Future, says it looks ominously like the Bill will simply enable roads to gain planning consent more quickly and cut the public’s ability to bring legal challenges. So much for the previous Secretary of State, Louise Haigh, telling me ‘active travel and cycling will be part of’ the infrastructure bill.

For now, it is much of the same. Last month, the government announced ‘Almost £300m to gear up new walking, wheeling and cycling schemes in England’, including 300 miles of cycle routes, new guidance for local authorities - and £30m for the National Cycle Network.

As readers of my book, and those who work in active travel, will know, funding (or a lack of) is one of the big issues holding back cycling, and the growth of cycle routes specifically. Specifically, it’s sustained, multi-year funding that’s needed. With a prevailing wind, cycle routes take three years to build: one year to talk about and design, one year to get the permissions and finalise funding, and another to deliver. If there are complications, which there often are, that timeline obviously stretches.

The history of cycle route funding in England is a patchy one – traditionally we lob some money at cycle route construction each year, including at Sustrans, who deliver the National Cycle Network, and year by year people scramble to spend the money in time. Their ability to do so is dependent on staffing, and a pipeline of projects where ideally at least one of the three stages have been complete – because the deadline in which to spend the money is often a year, give or take.

You can see how this starts to get tricky.

Last year I asked Sustrans for the annual NCN funding settlement from government sources from the last five years – including from National Highways. And I made a table.