The announcement by the transport minister, Douglas Alexander, this weekend that his department is increasing its funding of cycling in order to encourage more children to cycle to school is certainly welcome.
For Cycling England, the national body charged with promoting cycle use and paid for by the DfT, this is a major vindication of its emphasis on using training as the way to get more people on their bikes; likewise for the Cyclists Touring Club, UK cycling’s largest membership organisation.
Cycling England’s budget is to be doubled, from £5m to £10m, for three years in order to roll out the scheme, which is planned to give on-road training to at least 100,000 school kids. It’s all very good news, as the cycling campaigners were falling over themselves to say “CTC’s director, Kevin Mayne, was delighted with the news,” according to a press spokesperson, as was Cycling England’s chairman, Philip Darnton (“This is wonderful news.”)
Much as I hate to rain on their parade – they both do too much good work for that – I feel the tone of fulsome gratitude and adulation for the visionary Douglas Alexander needs a little tempering. First, a reality check: £10m sounds like a hefty sum, and yes, it will pay for a good number of trainers to go into schools and for some lines to be painted on roads nearby. But how does it really figure in the big picture?
In a parliamentary reply last December, Alexander’s DfT colleague Dr Stephen Ladyman told the Commons that, for this financial year, the Highways Agency was working to a budget of £641m for road-building schemes of national and regional importance. That works out quite neatly as about £10 a head for every single person living in the UK. (and that expenditure is projected to rise by £265m next year, to £15 a head).
Compare that with your local authority’s spending on cycling, which is unlikely to be more than about 50p per head. Even Transport for London’s present unprecedented splurge on cycling has lifted spending only to about £2 a head in the capital. (TfL’s spending on cycling, by the way, is more than double this heralded DfT grant.)
But the allocation for motorways and trunk roads is itself only a fraction of the story. To begin to get an idea of the resources at the disposal of the DfT you have to get your head around the fact that its budget for 2005-06 was £13.4bn.
The £5m then being spent on cycling via Cycling England is the kind of small change the cleaner of Douglas Alexander’s office probably finds down the back of his sofa. Even with Cycling England’s grant doubled to £10m, that still represents less than 10% of 1% of the ministry’s annual budget.
Kevin Mayne and Philip Darnton are much too smart at playing the politics of government patronage to do anything other than proclaim their ecstasy at this news, but surely it must grate on their inner selves to have to be so pathetically grateful for a minister’s largesse? This is the sort of money most municipalities could chuck at cycling and not lose face with council taxpayers and voters.
So for how long will the bloated plutocracy of the DfT continue to insult cyclists by tossing us these alms? Part of the answer to that question may be: as long as we receive them on bended knee. More than that, we need to hold the government to account: it talks a good game about reducing congestion and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it is miles away from putting serious money where its mouth is. The ministry’s spending priorities show that it is still captive to the motoring lobby.
Providing training to kids is a fine thing in principle, but if parents regard the roads as too dangerous to let their children cycle on, not one single extra journey will be made by bike.
If the government were serious about encouraging cycling to school, we would have 20mph limit zones in a half-mile radius around every school. Only that would accomplish the shift that this £10m is a token gesture towards.
But this, of course, would involve a restraint of the precious freedom of motorists, which is anathema to politicians. When will they realise that drivers, too, are parents – and potential cyclists?
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