Walking and Cycling: Government Support

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Guy Opperman)]

What an honour and a privilege it is to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison), who is a former Minister for active travel and a good friend of mine. I was delighted to campaign to get her into the House—I think I visited Copeland on 14 separate occasions during a very long wet and wintry by-election—where she has been a transformational influence. Her legacy is massive, not least because she was an outstanding Minister for active travel.

I thank my hon. Friend for visiting Northumberland when she came to see the benefits of the Tynedale superhighway. Madam Deputy Speaker, I must be careful not to talk for the next hour and a half about the amazing cycling and walking projects that exist in Northumberland and to take my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) to task on why she particularly favours Cumbria over what is clearly a better county in Northumberland. However, the long and the short must surely be that my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland has done a massive amount to drive forward active travel, and she should be extraordinarily proud of that.

[Tracey Crouch]

As Madam Deputy Speaker cannot say this herself, it is only right to note that RideLondon now goes through her constituency, which is an excellent part of the country to cycle in.

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend has done a very good Radio 2 link to what I was going to talk about. As the Minister for active travel, I am delighted to say that I have done RideLondon. On several occasions I have done the Haydon Hundred in my constituency. The most interesting of all is the Dunwich Dynamo, which is undoubtedly the most iconic cycling race of all time. It is an attempt by more than 5,000 people to leave a Hackney pub on the shortest night of the year and cycle, totally unsupported, from Hackney all the way to Dunwich in Suffolk—120 miles—through the night. The instructions are literally an envelope. Without a shadow of a doubt, it is the most fearsome and amazing cycle trip to be part of. RideLondon is a massive boost to the local economy, and extols various local virtues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland asked me to go to Holland on a cycle trip with Danny Williams, the amazing chief executive, and I endorse her assessment of him. I must confess that about 20 years ago, long before I came to this place, I did the trip from Zandvoort on the coast to Amsterdam on a bike, and I have cycled extensively in Holland. We in this House should be excited because although we might say, “Our infrastructure is not quite there. We want to do more cycling and walking, and we want things to be better. We want active travel to be more impressive and for the opportunities to be better,” we only have to look back at the situation in Holland only 30 or 40 years ago to see the degree to which its infrastructure has transformed the nation and how its populus gets about. That is totally tangible. We are some years behind it in that change, but we should strive to emulate that objective.

My hon. Friend spoke glowingly about the coast-to-coast, the quality of which I endorse, having done it. I trump her 190 miles with the 268 miles of the Pennine way, the first part of which I was delighted to do with my good friend the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who sadly is also standing down, when we were raising money for brain tumours, having both suffered from them. The transformation of the visitor economy and the tourism boost from cycling and walking is game changing. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. We should be fully behind that. That is why I invited my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland to Northumberland to get behind the Tynedale superhighway, and why this Government have given £9 million for the Hexham to Corbridge cycle route, the work on which is ongoing. The LCWIPs that she talked so glowingly about are clearly the way ahead.

[Richard Foord]

The Minister talked about LCWIPs at the last Adjournment debate of 2023 on transport infrastructure in Cullompton. I remember him saying that the LCWIPs for Cullompton would be consulted on, which is true—that consultation concluded earlier this month. Can his Department work with Devon County Council to ensure that the walking and cycling infrastructure around Cullompton extends all the way to Tiverton, Willand and Uffculme?

[Guy Opperman]

I will await the information put forward by the local authority, but it is unquestionably the case that we are trying to take forward the LCWIPs and to ensure the best usage, enhancement and improvement of local infrastructure. I await what the local authority has proposed.

On the point my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland made about schools, surely we can all get behind the 20 mph zone around them. It is unquestionable that where local authorities can prioritise LCWIPs around schools, they should do so. If the message has not gone out, I am happy to make that point.

I have been asked to do an awful lot of writing to an awful lot of people, and let me address those points. First and foremost, all cycling and walking has a massive benefit and impact on health. My hon. Friend identified that if we want a healthier Britain, more people need to be cycling and walking. The evidence is overwhelming that regular physical activity of any shape or form reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes by up to 40% and cardiovascular disease by up to 35%. My hon. Friend is right that there are sadly far too many obese children in our schools and far too many people who are not taking advantage of the great outdoors, much to the consternation of my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford. We have to change that. We have to try to change those perceptions and get this country out of the torpor that it descended into slightly during covid.

[Trudy Harrison]

The Minister is making an excellent point on the value of the great outdoors and being active. I know that this is not his Department’s responsibility, but does he agree that approximately 80% of that ill health is related to diet, and that ultra-processed foods have a part to play in the state of the nation’s health?

[Guy Opperman]

As a Government Minister, I am not allowed to endorse a particular book or approach; that would be genuinely wrong. A bit like the BBC, we think that all organisations, institutions and authors have merit and everything like that. However, having been given as a present “Ultra-Processed People”, Chris van Tulleken’s book on the science behind food that is not food, I have to say that I utterly endorse the point my hon. Friend is making. We have a genuine problem in this country: we are allowing the production of food that is neither supporting our farmers nor necessarily good for our population.

This is not my Department’s responsibility, so I could not possibly comment on the efficacy of evidence or on changes that should be made. However, there is a growing body of evidence that says that Government really have to look at what we are doing about ultra-processed food and how to put out better messaging. That is difficult, and pretending it is not is naive. However, I utterly endorse the message that we need to eat more healthily if at all possible, and taking out of the game some of those ultra-processed foods and their impact seems to be a no-brainer to me. More particularly, it cannot be a good thing for this country that we are allowing our population to eat food that will inevitably give them diabetes and allow them to put on weight without, in most cases, people realising that that is what is going to happen. That just cannot be right, in my humble opinion, and we should do something about it.

There are a few things that I can do about it. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland challenged me on a number of points. The first relates to an inter-ministerial group that I am part of. As anyone who has been a Minister will know, there are some inter-ministerial groups that are really important and worthy, and some that are interesting, to say the very least. The national physical activity taskforce, which is run by the Sport Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), is meeting on 25 March at 2 pm, by chance. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland might want to send a copy of her speech and an itemised agenda to the Sport Minister and invite him to treat that as the agenda for the meeting at 2 pm on 25 March at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. That is merely a suggestion that she could, in theory, contemplate.

As for bringing together all the Departments to address national physical activity, I think it is entirely the right thing to do. It is wider than just saying, “We want people to do sport. We want them to get physically active.” Of course, that is right, and individual Members of Parliament can make a real difference on this. There is no doubt about that. They can meet with Sport England—I recently met both the chief executive and my local representatives—and drive forward the sporting infrastructure that we all want to see; they can get local representatives in their constituency. I should put on record my thanks to the amazing Rob Aubrook—whom my hon. Friend met when, as the Minister with responsibility for cycling, she came to Northumberland—who has driven forward more cycling infrastructure and other local infrastructure projects, just as my hon. Friend made sure the infrastructure was improved in her local area when she was just a humble campaigner from Bootle. That surely is what we should all aspire to.

There is more we can do, and many colleagues put forward proposals. I agree with much of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill) said. I answered the point from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar) made a point about his amazing coast-to-mountains route, of which I am exceptionally jealous and which I am keen to try. It obviously comes third in the batting order of places to visit, after Cumbria and Northumberland. My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) rightly made the point that small pieces of infrastructure, in this case a crossing, enable people to access all the benefits that only one part of the village may otherwise have. I urge him to seek the extra local transport funding in Durham that will flow from the Prime Minister’s decision on HS2; it will release infrastructure funding for certain transport projects. I will take that up with him separately.

This is a good opportunity to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford for her service in this House, because sadly she has decided to step down. She was an outstanding sports Minister. We troll each other in a very polite way on the extent of our Saturday morning cycling or racing activity. Both of us have suffered cancer and have made a remarkable recovery. She is a good example of never letting the past define you, and always looking onwards and forwards. We will miss her desperately. She raised a key point, which is: what more can we get local authorities to do? Bluntly, a lot more.

The first point is surely this. Every MP will see a new housing development come into existence. Said housing development will always have a section 106 agreement on local infrastructure and support. Too often, however, only after its development will there be a thought about cycling infrastructure, accessibility, accessible transport, buses and so on. I am genuinely trying to change that, because what we presently have is unacceptable. It is just not good government to allow a situation in which local authorities do not grasp that there is so much more they could do.

We are trying to retrofit old infrastructure. My hon. Friend the Member for Copeland talked about York. I was lucky enough to go to Active Travel and meet Danny and all the amazing team. Everywhere I go with Active Travel I always get on a bike, so we cycled around the medieval and Roman town of York, with all the difficulties there are there in ensuring cycling infrastructure on the very narrow streets that Harry Potter was delighted to use. But for modern housing, we surely must get it right. When it comes to modern housing, section 106 should provide for all the necessary cycling infrastructure. The best part of 10,000 people are moving to Barrow for the AUKUS project—my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) is doing great work on that—and we are trying to ensure that where we do big housing, the infrastructure is part of the development. That is the first and key point of education for local authorities.

Secondly, we have set up an amazing scheme called Bikeability. It is fundamentally a success story, as my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland rightly outlined, because it encourages more and more children to cycle on an ongoing basis, get training and so on. The honest truth is that some local authorities are very good at that—Cumbria is a great example—and some local authorities are shockers. I am strongly urged by officials not to name and shame them, but I will certainly write to every single local authority and extol those that are doing well, and ask why that is not 100% of them when there is this amazing, free Government scheme to encourage our population to get healthier, get fitter, get outdoors and learn how brilliant it is to be on a bicycle. I give my hon. Friend an undertaking that I will definitely do that.

My hon. Friend rightly raised the issue of schools. It is true that I am not an Education Minister—some would say that that is a very good thing—but I will write to Ofsted, as she invited me to, to establish the extent to which we can drive forward an assessment. I take comfort from the daily mile, a project that originated in Scotland and has percolated southwards. It is a massive success story: every single headteacher at the schools that do the daily mile will genuinely say to those who visit them that it transforms the way that the kids are educated. It transforms their attention, their fitness and their engagement, and does them a world of good in a host of social and other ways. A natural extension of what schools are doing would be for there to be an assessment of, or at the very least inquiry into, how schools are trying to improve rates of walking and cycling, both at school and in the journey to school. We have a Walk to School Week, which is part of a programme organised by the Department for Education, but the blunt truth is that it is not very successful. Far too few kids walk to school, and we must try to do more about that.

My hon. Friend invited me to comment on social prescribing. On her watch, that started with a £13.9 million budget, which has been invested in 11 local authority pilots over three years. One of them is of course in Cumbria; the others range from Suffolk to Bath and from Gateshead to Plymouth. The pilots are expected to engage tens of thousands of people in walking, wheeling and cycling, and we will assess their impact in 2025, at the end of the three-year project. However, I can tell her that if I have anything whatsoever to do with it, we will continue that project, which has my hearty endorsement and support.

I come to our approach to rural areas, and I speak as the Member representing the largest constituency in the country. Rory Stewart and I used to have a dispute over whose was larger. I told him that size did not matter, but that Hexham was larger. The long and short of it is that rurality in general is very difficult, and trying to establish a rural cycling infrastructure is very difficult. Off-road is often better: I can extol, without a shadow of a doubt, the Sandstone Way, which runs from Hexham to Berwick in Northumberland, and the work that we are doing in Kielder Forest. However, it is hard to secure taxpayer funding for more rural routes because the Treasury operates on a bang-for-your-buck, Green Book basis and so tries to get more ongoing funds for urban beneficiaries.

Let me end by saying a bit more about the key issue of funding. Ten or 15 years ago, £30 million, £25 million or less was spent on cycling and walking. I look at the budgets of up to £300 million over the last four or five years, and the ongoing £200 million investment in active travel, and I see that we have come a long way. Do we have further to go? Of course we do, but the direction of travel—and in a debate about cycling and walking, the direction of travel is surely important—is utterly clear. We are investing more than any previous Government. Our projection is that over the period up to 2025, £3 billion will be invested across Government in active travel, including investment from the city region sustainable transport settlements and the levelling-up fund. There will also be further funding opportunities through Network North in future years.

It is important to note that whatever the original active travel budget may have been, the HS2 money—whether through the city region sustainable transport settlements or the levelling-up fund additions—and any further local transport funding that may or may not result in the next few months can be used to support walking and, in particular, cycling schemes, and we would encourage Mayors, where appropriate, to pursue those opportunities.

In September last year, we announced £60 million of revenue funding for supporting active travel to school, including through Walk to School, the Big Bike Revival, Modeshift STARS and, obviously, Bikeability. I have had a Bikeability meeting with Emily Cherry, the brilliant chief executive of Bikeability Trust, who is very well known to my hon. Friend. I endorse the support for that initiative, and we think that more can be done, but 500,000 places with £21 million of support is not to be sneered at. We have reached 51% of year 6 children in 60% of primary schools. I would love to do more, and we are trying to make it happen.

[Trudy Harrison]

May I congratulate the Department, Bikeability and the wonderful Emily Cherry on recognising the difference that it can make to children with special educational needs and disabilities to learn to ride a bike or trike that is right for them? Huge improvements have been made in creating a more accessible Bikeability.

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend is right: Bikeability is transformational. We need to do it bigger and better, and more widely, but it also requires a change in the Great British public. First and foremost, it requires mums and dads, headteachers and local authorities to say, “We want to get behind this.” I think we can do that, and the direction of travel is good. She is right to praise Emily Cherry, Danny Williams and all the Active Travel team. I met the vast majority of them when I went to York. They are doing God’s work in transforming hundreds of projects up and down the country. I have not mentioned Mr Boardman—probably because I owe him a beer, which is always a worry—but it is great to have the opportunity to work with one’s heroes. I grew up watching Chris Boardman in various races, including when he famously led the Tour de France and came off his bike. That was one of the tragedies of my sporting TV career.

What is happening with active travel is genuinely transformational, and we continue to support it. I believe that the record of this Government is good, but we can do more. It has been an honour and a privilege to respond to my hon. Friend and her very important debate tonight.

Question put and agreed to.