September update

A message for industry

It’s a new school year and there’s lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future going forward, not least Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh getting so firmly behind funding for active travel. You can read more about that here  and in the newsletter.  

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to our survey around grant funding and what we should be asking for. We appreciate you taking the time to complete they survey and your comments and suggestions will help shape the our submission for funding. The need for a multi-year funding settlement came up repeatedly, which of course did not come as a surprise! We have been pushing for a long-term settlement and will continue to do so. Louise Haigh’s recent comments on active travel hopefully make this more likely to happen in the near future.  

Ahead of the Autumn budget on 30 October, we will be submitting a business case to Active Travel England. Once all departments have received confirmation of their respective budgets after 30 October, they will need to agree how to divide this between sub-departments and organisations, including Bikeability. Timescales are not confirmed, but as soon as we have more information, we will share an update on funding for April 2025 onwards. 

From their manifesto, we know that the government see health and road safety as priorities, and Bikeability cycle training is one way to address both issues from a young age. We will continue to lobby for Bikeability and trying to secure the funding we need to keep delivering gold standard cycle training to every child. Again, your input is very welcome and valid – and we appreciate your support of our key ambitions for the future.  

Evidencing Bikeability

We continue to look at ways we can improve the evidence of the effectiveness of Bikeability training. To this end, we have been working with TRL on KSI (killed and seriously injured) stats. Later in the Autumn we will be sharing an impressive piece of statistical modelling that looks at whether there’s a correlation between children trained in Level 2 and KSI in subsequent years. The model shows some encouraging data and we’ll be looking to share with LHAs (local highways authorities) to help you build support for road safety.   

We are also starting to see data coming through digitised deliveries, with parent and rider data starting to show the positive impact of Bikeability. This is one of the reasons why our digitisation project is so critical. I presented on this at Active City Leicester last month, and we are working on how we can share this data more readily with local areas in the future.  There are separate communications about digitisation and if you are unsure about any aspect, please see the FAQs here.  

Thank you as always for all your hard work – I’m looking forward to another great year of Bikeability!