No, Prime Minister

A new Whitehall cycling farce written by Downing Street’s embedded Cycle Blogger.

Curtain rises on a dimly lit back room café off Parliament Square, frequented by ministers.

SCENE ONE, ACT ONE.

Blogger: Hi, PrimeMinister,  I understand you think that the Get Britain Cycling Report and the Department for Transport’s Cycling and Walking Strategy are both excellent.

PM: Yes, I do. As you know I am a cyclist – or was until my security team

forbid me to cycle to work since becoming Prime Minister.  Couldn’t risk going under a lorry.”

Blogger: Yes, that’s pity. Er, no, that sounds bad.  I mean, it’s bad you not being allowed to cycle anymore.

The good news, PM, is that the Get Britain Cycling Report, in conjunction with the Walking and Cycling Strategy, promises to bring about road improvements to help make cycling and walking safer. And it will attract millions more people to cycle more often, instead of them always driving. So cutting congestion and pollution which is killing thousands of people a year.

PM: You’re right. Sounds excellent.

Blogger: So, tell me, PM, what do you think of the  recommendations made in both the Report and the Strategy?  

PM: ….Well, if we do as they say and spend more on improving the roads for cycling, we would save the NHS £billions because we would have a healthier nation, less time off work, fat people would be thin, we would reduce pollution and congestion.

It’s a win, win, win situation – to borrow a saying from a well-respected transport journalist, cycling and railway expert – his name escapes me -  who had hoped to win Labour’s nomination to run for Mayor of London.

Blogger: Glad you agree, so refreshing for the PM to say that, a first for your office in the history of cycle campaigning.  What must be done to bring this about?

PM:  Well, we are told that in the Netherlands 27 or 28 per cent of all journeys are made by bike and that should be something to aim for here in the UK. The report is calling for an increase in cycle use from less than the current 2 per cent to 10 per cent of all journeys in 2025 and 25 per cent by 2050.

Blogger: Does the Report say how this should be accomplished?

PM: Yes it does. It wants us to increase the level of funding for cycling from £2 per head of population to £10 per head immediately (that’s about £500m per year), and to increase it further, to £20, more or less in line with what they spend in Holland.

Blogger. And how is this extra money to be spent?

PM: It is recommended we redesign roads, streets and communities; it calls for safe driving and safe speed limits; for training and education of all road users, and for, ahem,  political leadership.

Blogger: Wow, that’s impressive. When it says POLITICAL leadership, that means YOU, the PM, giving the Get Britain Cycling Report Cabinet backing. When will you announce this?

PM: Ho, ho, hold on there. Never. We can’t do that! We can’t give it proper funding.

Blogger: Really!  Why ever not?

PM: Well, first off there’s the Daily Mail,  the Middle England backlash, we would lose voters if we are seen to back what many would see as a working class transport revolution.

We couldn’t be seen to giving £500m a year for 12 years, even though this is piss all from the transport budget swimming in £billions.

Blogger: But you do say you support the Report and the DfT’s strategy and all  they recommend?

PM: Oh, yes.  They’re both excellent. 

Blogger: So what is to be done?

PM:  I think it’s best left the to Local Authorities.

Blogger:  The same LA’s who have done fuck all. The same LA’s who have, over four decades, only ever built short cycle lanes with posts and telephone boxes in them, cycle lanes that don’t go anywhere.

PM: I wouldn’t be so hard on the LA’s as all that. Afterall, they are the very embodiment of what underpins our “Can’t do” mentality of government in the UK.

Blogger: Surely, the benefits to be had from making walking and cycling more pleasant, safer, will reap huge cost benefits?

PM: Look – between you and me and that fly on the wall - the snag is, it’s all a bit political.  You see, we’ve been told by our unelected advisors that  it would be political suicide to throw all that money at cycling.

These advisors have done their own Costing the benefits of increased cycle use. And it’s not a pretty picture. It’s all very well having a nation of fit thin people but the downside of  this is that cars will never ever be used again, or not much anyway. Think of the petrol sales lost, car sales lost, the huge loss in taxes to the Treasury.

Blogger: That’s a bit of twisted logic, Dave.

Dave:  I agree with you.  Absolutely  right. If only cycling could become an election issue. That will swing it.  Then we’ll do everything they want. Because above all else, our main aim is to say in power.

Curtain. End of scene act one.

**************************************

Success and failure -

the great cycling enigma

Concluding the story of how British politics has failed cycling.

Britain is in the midst of a huge cycling revival.  More than a million more people have taken up cycling over the last few years as a direct result of the success of Britain’s racing cyclists.

The sport has zoomed to the top of sports charts with British riders dominating the Olympic Games, the World track championships, winning the Tour de France. Yorkshire’s Lizzie Armitstead is the current world road race champion. Each weekend thousands more ride the semi-competitive Sportives over challenging terrain.

And yet successive governments have failed to make the roads safer for cycling.

The recently announced funding for the walking and cycling strategy represents a cut in the already derisory £2 per head of population (England) to £1.39, compared to the £24 per head spent in Holland!

In the UK, roads are designed to process traffic speedily, roundabouts are race tracks, while corners into side roads have been shaved to enable turning traffic to do so quickly, with hardly a flicker of brake lights.

The roads have become hostile, traffic moving at high tempo, and it is the inappropriate speed which is the greatest  deterrent to a many people who otherwise might take  up cycling.

But here’s a nice irony. For even as the government prepared to reduce the paltry funding for cycling, even though it was taking no notice of the cycling campaigners it was decided to reward one of our top planners in June 2016.

In the Queen’s Birthday Honours,  Roger Geffen, the CTC’s excelleng planning and campaigns chief,  was awarded the MBE for his campaigning work to improve conditions for cycling.

Or, as I would put it,  for his persistence in banging his head against government brick  walls.

And then to dampen Roger’s high spirits, that very same week Her Majesty’s government slashed funding for improving cycling conditions.

You couldn’t make it up.

What of The Times Cities fit for Cyclists campaign, launched in 2012?   This, the biggest, most effective cycling campaign ever, has surely now run its course, is washed up, drained of purpose?

It surely died after giving birth to the impressive Get Britain Cycling Report, which spelled out exactly what needed to be done to make the roads safer and why.

Parliament sang its praises. Prime Minister David Cameron who as opposition leader would cycle to the Commons – although his briefcase followed in an official car – he praised the report.

And then, inexplicably, when asked to give the report Cabinet backing, Cameron declined. He said he considered it best for Local Authorities to take it forward!

Which is rubbish!

The same mostly feckless local authorities who, with few exceptions, either because of lack of money or an abundance of stupidity, continue to make sub-standard cycle lanes while those who do good works do so in a small scale as makes no damn difference.

So it is that the recent national census reveals that in 10 years the percentage of trips made by cycle compared to other modes remains at a lowly 2 per cent – compared to Holland at 28 per cent.

Say no more.

David Cameron the first PM, I am sure, to be directly approached and asked to give government backing for cycling, has refused.

A word for the champions who stand out from the crowd. We can celebrate the likes of Mayors of London Ken Livingstone for dreaming and talking up Cycling Superhighways and his successor Boris Johnson who, for all his comic ways and not really doing much to slow down the traffic,  attempted to fulfil his predecessor’s dream;   albiet there is a nightmare element to them.

The champions of champions among MPs are those who gave us the Get Britain Cycling Report - Ian  Austin and  Julian Huppert. Also Lord Berkeley and Lord Odonis. 

But they, too, like the cycling campaigners, can only do so much.

And the Superhighways are not super at all.

They can be quite dangerous at big junctions, where lives have been lost. 

But because they were on major roads and going direct from A to B, they were expected to be an improvement on the still to be completed London Cycle Network.

This, too, was a ground-breaking project when begun decades ago, but it is a  back roads network weaving here and there and to this day sections remain severed  by major arteries.

However,  Boris, as enthusiastic as he is about cycling, and not withstanding his introduction of the hugely successful Bike Hire scheme putting over 6000 bikes at our disposal, has not been able to bring himself to ban killer HGVs from entering into London.

In the sporting cyclists’ eyes, though, he can do no wrong. For it was Boris, following on from the success of the London Olympic road races,  who gave us Ride London. This annual and unique weekend of cycling in August on closed roads features the 100-mile charity sportive around the Olympic road race course through the Surrey Hills. And it is followed by the big pro race over a lengthier version of the same route.

Britain doesn’t do “strategy”

And so the question remains, why  has no British government ever provided the financial package necessary to make cycling safer on the roads?

One reason I am sure is, that to do so would  require a strategy. And no British government has ever had a transport strategy for any form of transport, from the canal age through road, rail and air. They were all rather adhoc developments with canals built to different widths, rail routes duplicated, but allowed because there was money to be made! It was all a bit manic, and fortunes were lost as well as made.

The so-called National Cycling Strategy announced in 1996 made news because it was the first national transport strategy in history – well, since the Roman occupation 2000 years before, at  any rate. When they quit Britain their marvellous road system fell into ruin.

Nothing of the like would be seen again until Thomas Telford came along in the 19^th century.

The National Cycling Strategy was launched in 1996 by then Local Transport Minister Stephen Norris, a vocal supporter for the cause, and it promised much.  But it was a red herring,  a false dawn, and Norris must have felt pretty let down.

Over 400 people and tons of press, TV, radio, newspapers, filled the banqueting suite of Whitbread Brewery in the City to hear the announcement.

I remember the press interviews with the new Secretary of State for Transport,  the Right Honorable Sir George Young, who incidentally was – still is for all I know – a member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club (now Cycling UK).

After the announcement, the MPs and officials were available for press interviews. Everyone wanted a piece of Sir George, of course.

The pecking order worked like this. TV got a crack first, then it was radio’s turn before finally, the poor relations of the media world, the hacks, notebooks and recorders in hands and growing impatient by the minute, got in there.

I recall transport journalist Christian Wolmar bowling first.  It was a fast spinner which ought to have had theThe Right Honourable caught in the slips.

“Hi,” said Wolmar casually, as if he knew Sir George personally.

“Hi,” batted back the Right Hon as if he knew Wolmar.

“OK,” said Wolmar. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what,” – Right Hon.

“Where’s the money?” hit back Wolmar.

Sir George, without turning a hair,  smacked it for six.

The National Cycling  Strategy didn’t need a budget as such, he said, because it will be included in the overall transport budget.

“What?” Wolmar!

This was all well and good except that cycling was in dire need of urgent funding immediately in order to start changing road design which had ignored the needs of cyclists for decades.

We were incredulous as the brass neck of Right Hon.

Surely, Wolmar continued to press him, you will have something to show people,  some scheme to show what you can do for cycling.  What about demonstration cycling towns, where cycling safe roads would be  built, for example, to form a benchmark of how to proceed elsewhere?

The interview ended with no satisfactory explanation as to how the National Cycling Strategy was to work.

And of course, it didn’t work. Like the 2016 Walking and Cycling Strategy, the 1996 National Cycling Strategy 20 years before was not worth the paper it was written on.

It was nine years before a few pennies were thrown at the Nat Strat. It was brought to life in 2005, when the Labour government put the National Cycling Strategy on a drip feed of £5m worth of peanuts.  But to their great credit, they created Cycling England and invited some top cycling people to run it and they did so very well indeed. Grimshaw and Wolmar were on the board. It was chaired by Philip Darnton, ex-Raleigh boss and president of the Bicycle Association.

Cycling England did a great job with the little money they were given, to such an extent that the government increased funding to £70m per annum – still some £430m short of the basic needs to kick start a roads redesign programme.

Nevertheless, Cycling England invited towns to bid for a share of the money.  They had to show how they could best increase cycling.  It led to the creation of the first six cycling demonstration towns, and later this expanded to over two dozen.

Each one proved that small but effective schemes to promote increased levels of cycling worked. But it was very low key – perhaps a cycle route into town, or linking a school, or through a park, or the provision of cycle parking -  and although it was a template upon which to base a national plan,  that was as good as it got.

Cycling England proved beyond doubt that if you invest in cycling more people will cycle.

Cycling England was the light shining in the campaign darkness.  And then, a few years ago, the Conservatives closed it down, snuffed the life out Cycling England.

And for good measure, they set back cycling development a good 50 years by reducing funding from £2 per head of population (England) to £1.39.

The End.