Cyclists: Safety
Lord Boateng Excerpts(3 days, 19 hours ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The £626 million investment over four years in active travel infrastructure is designed to do precisely that. The noble Baroness is completely right; we want people to walk and cycle, and we want kids to do that as a matter of habit. That is why the Government are investing so much money. Before Christmas, we consulted on the third cycling and walking strategy. I anticipate that that too will have something to say in the direction that she wants us to go in.
Lord Boateng (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister please tell us what action the Government are going to take to make cyclists more aware of their responsibilities towards pedestrians? All too often, cyclists show a complete disregard for the Highway Code and the safety of pedestrians.
Noble Lords
Northern Powerhouse Rail
Lord Boateng Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Birt (CB)
My Lords, I worked at No. 10 as Tony Blair’s strategy adviser in 2005 when an in principle go-ahead was given to an ambitious high-speed rail network for the whole country. Twenty-odd years later, we do not even have one small part of that plan in place. In the same period, since 2008 China has built 48,000 kilometres of high-speed rail.
I am a Liverpool supporter, so I regularly go—
Lord Birt (CB)
It has been a difficult weekend. I regularly visit the north-west of England, as I did at the weekend. I am involved in an east of Pennines business, so I am very familiar with the 19th-century infrastructure of the whole of the north of England. Are we remotely ambitious enough with our rail infrastructure?