Women’s Safety: Walking, Wheeling, Cycling and Running

Gordon McKee Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Kirith Entwistle (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important and timely debate.

Put simply, women are not safe running, walking, cycling or even just existing. We are not safe in our own homes; we are not safe in pubs, bars, restaurants, at school or at work; and crucially, for the purposes of this debate, we are not even safe at the gym.

Girls are at risk, too. How many of us here today have stories that start with our wearing school uniform? When I was at school, men in cars slowed down beside me, men in white vans asked me where I was going, and grown men followed me and asked to wear my glasses; I am not wearing them today.

As the daughter of a prison officer, I was educated early, not in confidence but in caution. My dad would say, “Don’t take your phone out when you are walking home. Don’t listen to music on a walk home. Stay alert. Cross the road if a man’s behind you. Walk with your keys between your fingers.” All of that does not just disappear when we grow up.

Only last week, when I was going for a run in Bolton, I shared my location with my family over WhatsApp, just in case. “Just in case”—those words tell us everything. I wear a running vest with a phone pocket. I clip my SOS fob to my clothes. I plan my route as if I was carrying out a risk assessment, and that is the point. Men do not make contingency plans to exercise, but we absolutely have to.

When it comes to exercise, women are constrained by the hours that we can safely be outdoors. Even in daylight, safer does not mean safe, and after dark many women feel pushed indoors. Here is the bitter irony: a lot of us can only exercise when it is dark, because we are primary caregivers. We do the school runs, and we care for our elderly or disabled relatives, or our children with additional needs. Society relies and depends on that care, and then acts surprised when women’s lives are more restricted and when we are forced to pay for safety. For many women, a gym membership is the price of feeling secure enough to exercise at all. Women-only spaces in gyms are growing, and that is progress, but where is the acknowledgment that many women are paying simply to do what others can do for free—exercise without fear?

Let us be clear: this is not a confidence gap; it is a safety gap that is rooted in our environment and systems. In winter, nearly three quarters of women change their outdoor exercise routines for safety, and over four in five say they feel unsafe in parks at night. I know that most of us avoid parks altogether.

[Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

In the southside of Glasgow, we are lucky to have some wonderful parks and green spaces, but I often hear from women in my constituency who do not feel safe going through them. The Light the Way campaign, led by Radio Clyde, is campaigning for better lighting in parks, including in Queen’s Park in the southside. Will my hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to that campaign, and in encouraging councils to make park lighting a priority so that women can feel safe in their own spaces?

[Kirith Entwistle]

My hon. Friend makes the important point, which I will come on to, that well-lit spaces would make a world of difference for so many women and girls.

The safety gap that I mentioned earlier is also written into our transport patterns. In Greater Manchester, women make less than a third of all cycling trips. When women are asked why that is, they talk about traffic danger, harassment and intimidation. One Bolton resident told me that routes can feel pleasant by day but unusable after dark, and that one incident can be enough to stop women from cycling altogether.

Women’s participation in outdoor exercise is already lower than men’s, but the safety gap widens again for women from ethnic minority backgrounds, who face higher levels of harassment on the streets. Black, Asian and minority ethnic women are nearly 20% less likely than white women to exercise outdoors regularly, and half as likely to cycle to work. If we bear in mind both the ethnicity and gender pay gaps, we are also less likely to be able to afford a gym membership.

In Bolton, I am proud of the grassroots work that is making a difference, including Horwich Ride Social’s women-only rides, Krimmz girls youth club’s glow rides and the United We Run campaign, which gives thousands of Bolton women access to the Her Spirit fitness app. These initiatives, while brilliant, are also a warning sign. Women should not need safety in numbers. It is time that we address women’s safety properly, as we should have done for decades. That starts by building routes that we can actually use—the well-lit, connected routes that were mentioned earlier—and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft said, treating harassment as public safety, making it easier to report and making it clear that it will be taken seriously.

Finally, we must put women’s safety into transport planning from day one, and ensure that progress is measured so that we can check whether the gender gap in cycling and walking is closing.