Asked by: Alex Easton (Independent - North Down)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps her Department is taking to help improve road safety for cyclists; and what financial support she has provided for programmes delivered by The Bikeability Trust since July 2024.
Answered by Simon Lightwood - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
In 2022, Active Travel England was established as an executive agency to the Department for Transport, with the strategic aim of enabling people to walk, wheel and cycle and protecting them when they do by reducing road danger through the creation of safe infrastructure. The agency has been supporting the development of designs and the assessment of design quality through the use of recently published active travel design assistance and scheme review tools. Officials use these tools for ongoing design assurance and to identify critical safety issues that are associated with an increased risk of collisions for people walking, wheeling, or cycling, and work with local authorities to remove or mitigate them.
To further improve road safety for cyclists, we are investing up to £30 million this year to scale up Bikeability training to over 500,000 more children, and will announce further funding for Bikeability training in the coming months.
Asked by: Alex Easton (Independent - North Down)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps she is taking to accelerate the rollout of public electric vehicle charge points; and what steps she plans to take to ensure sufficient infrastructure to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles.
Answered by Lilian Greenwood - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
The Government is committed to accelerating the roll-out of charging infrastructure so that everyone, no matter where they live or work, can make the transition to an electric vehicle (EV). As of November, there are over 71,000 publicly available charging devices in the UK. The £381 million Local EV Infrastructure (LEVI) Fund currently supports local authorities in England to work with industry to transform the availability of EV charging for drivers without off-street parking and will support the installation of tens of thousands of local chargers.
The Government also confirmed in the October 2024 Budget that it will continue to support the uptake of EVs by investing over £200 million in 2025/26 to accelerate EV chargepoint rollout.