Grant Shapps snaps up BLAH OF THE YEAR AWARD

 

 “The government has a long history of setting targets to increase cycling without providing the funding to support them”…

Roger Geffen, Policy Director, Cycling UK

Shock, horror, Cycling UK has spilt the beans and all but admitted that the government is doing its best to avoid funding the eight billion pound cycling and walking strategy.  It’s all blah, blah, blah and very little action.

It means  that Grant Shapps, because he is transport top dog, is singled out for Blah of the Year Award, even though he might not be the villain at all, simply the messenger delivering confused tidings.

He might be kept guessing like the rest of us, told what to say by the Oracle, someone guiding policy from deep in the heart of government, some Blofeld figure with a glass eye sitting in an armchair and stroking a cat. Or it might even be Dominic Cummings who has never really gone away.

We’ll never know.

What we do know for certain though, is that nothing has changed since that great deception of 1996, when the National Cycling Strategy was launched with no funding whatsoever.

Loathe as I am to follow up my most recent blog on government deception with another tilt at the devious bunch, I changed my mind upon learning that Cycling UK’s Policy Director Roger Geffen is pleading for ministerial help to get the delayed Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy Report published.

Geffen says that for over a year now the government “has been sitting on a report showing how much more funding it must spend to meet its own targets to increase cycling and walking by 2025.”

His report published last week in a Cycling UK news email to members is full of complex detail but I think I've got the gist of it.

About year and half ago Geffen persuaded an MP to table a parliamentary question asking when the Strategy - commissioned in 2018 - might be published.  He learnt it would be ready for publication early in 2019, almost a year later than promised.  There had been delays!  Guess what? It wasn’t published in 2019.

 

This from Geffen: “Unfortunately, the Treasury didn’t want this to happen – presumably because the research said that meeting the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy targets would require a lot more money than the Treasury was prepared to spend.”

Which was a fraction of the 27 billion pounds they are prepared to spend on new roads.

Last year when Geffen asked if the report would be published in full, he was told that the DfT might publish parts of it…blah,blah, blah… but not the whole of it!  They were being as inscrutable as the panellists on Television’s “Would I Lie to You”.

He continued to press for the release of the missing parts of the report, before and after the country went into lockdown.

There was then more government blah blah, building up all our hopes, when transport secretary Grant Shapps announced 2billion for cycling and walking over five years. Well, this pleased the campaigners, until they realised it was a few billion short of what was required.

For although it was a six-fold increase on the funding announced in 2017, it was but a fraction of what is required now –between six and eight billions pound, if the government is to meet its 2025 targets.

Then in July hopes were raised again when Blah in Chief, the Prime Minister announced blah, blah his “Gear change” vision for cycling and walking, together with new cycling infrastructure design guidance. 

This included the excellent government funding for “Pop Up” cycle lanes when lockdown was prematurely ended last year. Sadly, the Pop Up lanes are now a distant memory as many of them have since controversially been ripped out.

Last month when Shapps gave evidence to the Commons Transport Select Committee he avoided answering a question as to whether the much delayed report Geffen is keen to see actually  exists.

Instead he  throws more blah into the ring, announcing the government’s target is to increase cycling and walking by 50 percent in towns and cities and the target date to achieve this was to be extended by five years. So, pushing it back a few more years. More delaying tactics.

This of course begs the question, 50 per cent of what? 50-per cent of 2-per cent? That’s the current woefully low figure which has remained largely unchanged for some three decades? That would lift cycling trips to the magnificent figure of three per cent of all modes, whereas in Holland bike use is 27 per cent of all modal trips.

Then comes another below the belt punch -  the government blah, blah makes a 15 per cent cut in the active travel budget!

And all the while, no one has seen the government funding report which is supposed to say exactly what needs to be done.

 BLAH, blah, blah, blah………….