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news
London cyclists (Ayad Hendy via Unsplash) (credit: road.cc)MPs call for “urgent reform” of Cycle to Work scheme to tackle active travel inequality
The Cycle to Work scheme should be rebranded “Cycle for Health” and opened up to low-income employees, freelance workers, and pensioners, as part of a series of reforms urgently required to tackle inequality and lack of access to active travel, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Cycling and Walking (APPGCW) has said.
A report published by the cross-party group of MPs this morning, assessing ‘social justice’ in active travel, including the barriers that prevent people from cycling, walking, and wheeling, also called on the government to tackle pavement parking, remove discriminatory access barriers from cycleways and footpaths, and ensure that inclusive mobility is included as a legal design standard for all active travel projects.
The report, authored by Tom Cohen and Ersilia Verlinghieri of the University of Westminster’s Active Travel Academy, explored what the APPGCW described as the “wide disparities in opportunities to travel actively”, based on gender, age, disability, ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, economic status, and residential setting.
Nine expert witnesses gave evidence to the inquiry at a parliamentary hearing, while the report’s findings were also based on evidence from nearly 100 individuals and organisations.
Cyclists at traffic lights, London © Simon MacMichael (credit: road.cc)The report, noting that government ambitions for cycling and walking have “stalled”, identified “three principal barriers” to active travel in the UK, including the uneven provision of “appropriate environments”, the uneven distribution of and access to cycles and mobility aids, and unsupportive environments and culture.
The high cost of cycles and mobility aids, unsafe streets, lack of inclusive infrastructure, and “systemic underinvestment” were also highlighted as “key obstacles” that disproportionately affect marginalised communities from participating in active travel.
According to the inquiry, for actions addressing social injustice in active travel to have their “full impact”, three fundamental changes are required: reducing road danger, predictable and sustained funding, and for all active travel infrastructure to be of a high standard.
This sustained investment and collaboration across government departments is key, the report says, to tackling inactivity among disadvantaged groups.
Based on the inquiry’s findings, the report published nine key recommendations, which the APPGCW says will guide its campaign efforts in parliament.
The first of these recommendations involves reducing the financial barriers to cycling by reforming the Cycle to Work scheme to enable access for low-income workers, freelance workers, and pensioners, who are all ineligible for the current initiative.
The government’s Cycle to Work scheme – which this month was described by the Daily Telegraph as an opportunity for “middle-aged men in Lycra earning six figures” to buy “fancy new toys” – has come in for criticism in recent years, amid claims it is “sucking the lifeblood out of cycle shops”.
Last year, the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT) and senior figures from cycling retailers met with MPs from the APPGCW to make their case about the “need for urgent systematic change” of Cycle to Work.
And now, focusing on the accessibility, rather than the business side of things, the cross-party group’s report has called for Cycle to Work to be rebranded as “Cycle for Health”, opening it up to more people.
This shift, the report says, would help make cycling affordable by “supporting low-income individuals, subsidising e-cycles, recognising adapted cycles as mobility aids under Motability, expanding low-cost cycle hire schemes, and capping cycle hangar fees”.
Another reform urgently required, according to the report, is the need to clamp down on pavement parking, which disproportionately affects disabled people and parents with young children, the APPGCW pointing out that a government consultation on this issue has gone unanswered since 2020.
“We urge the government to respond to their overdue pavement parking consultation, make unnecessary obstruction a civil offence, empowering local authorities to enforce penalties, and ensure accessible streets,” the report says.
The report also urged the government to make inclusive mobility a minimum standard for designing infrastructure “to ensure active travel infrastructure works for everyone”, and called for the removal of discriminatory barriers from cycleways and footpaths while strengthening action against antisocial motorcycle use.
“Access control barriers often block disabled people and those with non-standard cycles while failing to stop antisocial motorcycle use,” the report noted. “New guidance should focus on inclusive design, removal of historic barriers, and tougher enforcement against illegal riding.”
Cyclists in London male and female in cycle lane (credit: Simon MacMichael)Among the APPGCW’s other recommendations are the need to provide stable, long-term funding for grassroots organisations to increase participation, better data collection, ensuring UK-wide access to free cycle training, widening its current reach, communicating with diverse community voices when planning projects, and building social justice into performance management in local transport.
“Walking, wheeling, and cycling should be available to everyone, but right now, too many people are excluded,” Labour MP Fabian Hamilton, the co-chair of the APPGCW, said in a statement marking the report’s publication.
“If we are serious about increasing active travel, we must address the systemic barriers that prevent millions from participating. This report provides clear, actionable solutions to make active travel truly inclusive. We will be working hard in parliament to push for change.”
Caroline Julian, brand and engagement director at British Cycling, which supported the report’s work along with solicitor Leigh Day, said: “Cycling has the power to transform lives, but too often, the people who stand to benefit the most are unable to take part. The barriers outlined in this report are therefore a matter of social justice that need to be addressed now.
“We must ensure that cost, infrastructure, and safety concerns make walking, wheeling, and cycling truly accessible to all. Together with our partner, Leigh Day, we wholeheartedly support these recommendations and urge national and local governments to adopt them with urgency.”
Meanwhile, Naseem Akhtar, CEO at Saheli Hub, a Birmingham community group that encourages women from disadvantaged communities to cycle, added: “Community organisations like Saheli Hub play a vital role in empowering women, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, to access walking, wheeling, and cycling.
“However, the biggest barrier we face is the lack of long-term funding. Short-term grants force us into a cycle of uncertainty, limiting our ability to build sustainable, impactful programmes.
“Community-led initiatives are often best placed to reach underrepresented groups, but we cannot continue this important work without financial stability.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
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Q36.5 Gregarius Essential Bib Knickers fit the bill: 3/4 length bib tights for warm weather.
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Jolly good. Only it hasn't been and it is still a public bridleway. Feel free to look it up.
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"...it feels more like a £100+ jersey". It's almost as if cycling apparel is over priced.
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I've had a few Lezyne bits and bobs over the years and while it's true I've never bothered to return anything under warranty, I've had a couple of...
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There's a transition period. For the benefit in kind (BIK) tax to the employee, it will be treated as a goods vehicle as it is now (rather than a...
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As witnessed at so many infrastructure improvement projects similar to this one, all those who object should ignore the consultation and pray at...
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It's a DLO to those in the trade.
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Cars keep getting wider and wider, but it's those damn cyclists with their wide handlebars that are the real problem. ref
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52 comments
Would it just be simpler to have a zero VAT band for bikes up to a certain price, and key accessories like helmets, lights, locks etc - than having to have all the bureaucracy and associated costs to run cycle to work schemes.
No. Within a very short period of time, the RRP on these items will have ratcheted up to where they were before, with the exchequer not getting VAT on these items, and they cost the same as they did before. At least with the current system, the government gets 16.7% of the whole transaction back in VAT, which goes some way to offset the tax relief that the employee is getting.
Make it a registered charity/not for profit, like Motability?
I think we are missing a very important part of the report. This is from the executive summary :
I think this can be interpreted as : until we tackle these three things any other incentives to active travel will be a waste of time and money.
The first point is certainly crucial in my experience. I know of quite a few people who started cycling during lockdown but soon gave up when it ended.
Yup - they've got that all right.
"Reducing road danger". That means "the perception of danger" really because statistically the UK's roads are "very safe" in global terms *. And as you allude to people judge that by how they feel on the roads. That is both "behaviour of other road users" but also "volume of traffic", "speed differential" and "mass differential" (e.g. cycling around buses and trucks.
Not coincidentally that is exactly what e.g. one of the Sustainable Safety principles addresses ("Homogeneity - of mass, speed and direction").
... which is why (while we have plenty of motor traffic and we "have to have" lots of places where motor speed limits in urban areas are 30mph or greater, we need the sustained funding to address the provision of active travel infra! (And actually that needs done together with measures to discourage driving some journeys - but currently that is really a stretch in the UK...)
* That doesn't mean the current position is "good enough" - in fact we've gone down the direction of making things safer on the roads and streets by simply discouraging people travelling outside of motor vehicles (and very much for "transport cycling"). Which of course gives safer "road" statistics but doesn't help at all with overall population health and wellbeing...
But as I frequently highlight, the stats don't include the near misses, it's those that put people off.
(Agreeing with your drift, but...) I'm sure they do put some people off, but I bet that's not what puts most people off! Because most people (as adults) don't even start!
If they think of cycling about the place at all * I suspect they decide it's "too dangerous" either from experience as a pedestrian walking near motor traffic, or seeing other drivers (or perhap themselves). Or perhaps it's just a "stands to reason" kind of intuition?
* Driving, getting the train or walking (short distances) are kind of "defaults". They are normal ways to travel; nobody raises an eyebrow ("you're going to ... drive there?"). But if you cycle for transport quite often there is that (initial) hurdle of making a deliberate choice to do something a bit unusual - "I'll rollerskate to work today" or "my friend only lives 10 miles away, I'll just walk there". And that's aside from the fact that it can be quite inconvenient in the UK.
If you look at this Parliamentary group's similar report of 2023 you can see the same sort of doomed recommendations which went straight in the bin. In the meantime, close passing is getting worse, and the police are deploying more dodges to ensure that the drivers evade justice. They still haven't put the promised evidence online, likely because they're removing anything of interest and that's a big job
APPGs (not just this one) are pretty low down the influence ladder, and their recommendations generally are low impact. (Unlike Select Committees, who are taken much more seriously by government.)
I've got 14+ bikes, lost count. The last one I paid £1600 2nd hand, Titanium frame, Carbon wheels, Ultegra in mint condition. I've got a carbon road bike and 2 carbon MTBs in the lot. The point being.......
My favourite is a 1993 Kona Cinder Cone. Put slicks on it, and it's the best commuter bike going. You can probably get something similar off eBay for £250-300. Steel, quite light at 23lb, robust, easy to maintain, but most importantly, it rides amazing.
I had a 1990 lava dome that I did the same with, passed it on to a bike re-furbishing shop when I retired. It didn't cost much more than £300 when new so value now is negligable but it is reliable and simple to maintain and if you let it get a bit dirty it is not attractive to thieves.
Mine is a 91/2 Marin Pine Mountain, fully ebayed up. Keep trying to retire her, but broken frames on my other bikes means she has to be regularly taken back to work.
Part of the reason I got rid of mine was that I'm at S-1so it has to be one out, one in and I saw a Flying Scot frame I really wanted as a retro project, otherwise I would have kept it as a bike of last resort that was guaranteed to work through a nuclear holocaust
...ly
"Amazing" has been in use as an adverb since the 18th century, most often, though not exclusively, as a modifier for other adverbs, e.g. "He writes amazing well". Very common in Welsh dialects, "She plays amazing" etc. It's colloquial and more often used on the other side of the Atlantic but it's not wrong.
Lets hope "Cycle for Health" will mean I can get a power meter
The scheme has always been a colossal waste of public money.
Any bike costing over £500 'for commuting' is as likely as not, overkill.
Also, the mobility scheme is overkill too. The norm here, needs to be etrikes, not cars.
My bike cost me over £2k four years ago. I ride it to and from work (45km round trip) four days a week. As it happens, I didn't buy it on the cycle to work scheme but I don't see why it should be excluded.
Because the number of 40% tax payers buying downhill bikes on the scheme, whilst lower rate tax payers (who are more likely to actually cycle to work) get a worse deal - that's why
On the face of it yes, but if the difference between a £500 and £2k bike is that if the cheap bike ends up in the shed because it's too heavy/cheap components failed etc. (yes I know great value can be had at that price point if you know what you're looking at), but the more expensive bike sees use as it's nicer to ride and allows the owner go out on the weekend as well, then the benefits to society in facilitating the more expensive bike will pay off in terms of reduced stress on the NHS (people are healthier), modal shift leading to less congestion (chance would be a fine thing) etc. In fairness to APPGCW, this is what they're recognising in trying to make it more equitable.
I bought a hybrid for commuting on Cycle to Work a few years back. Set out with a budget of £500 and ended up with a £1200 bike (only because the £1400 one was out of stock).
I'm thinkng of replacing it with a Brompton, might go electric. Might spend some money getting it customised.
Sure there are £500 bikes out there, but fewer and fewer of them and they're not what everyone wants for their commute.
Stop reading the Daily Fail for just long enough and you might realise that there is no reason that a disabled person should not have whatever car they like. The enhanced PIP that the Government effectively puts towards the scheme is the same amount whether they get an e-trike or Bentley Continental. The difference is how much they contribute towards it for themselves. A bit like a lot of company car schemes really where the company provides £x per month towards a car, you either have a bog standard mid range work horse and contribute nothing or you decide to lob on £y a month yourself and have something a little more up market.
Personally there are much bigger wastes of money and abuses of tax-payer cash to subside motorists than Motability. Just look at all those business owner extended crew cab trucks that have never ever seen a bag of cement, a garden rake or a high Viz jacket but get massive tax advantages given to them as "business vehicles".
I couldn't agree more, but you'll be pleased to know that from next month HMRC are shutting that loophole and double cab/extended cab pickups will be classed as cars for tax purposes.
That is good news. The proliferation of oversized "work" vehicles is a real negative while moving about outside.
Is that definitely going ahead? I'm sure I read that they'd dropped it. Whenever I see one I assume it belongs to a useless relative of the boss who was given a job as a favour, but doesn't know how to do anything useful on site.
There's one that belongs to a neighbour on a nearby street that struggles to fit an average sized car, never mind one of those monstrocities. It's always very clean.
There's a transition period. For the benefit in kind (BIK) tax to the employee, it will be treated as a goods vehicle as it is now (rather than a company car) until the end of the lease, it is disposed of, or 05/04/29, whichever happens earlier. Same for any vehicle ordered before April 25 and delivered before October 25. The above also applies to capital allowances for the company buying it, 100% is allowable for tax purposes. The VAT treatment won't change at all, it will be treated as a goods vehicle if it has a 1 tonne or more payload with VAT reclaimable as it is now.
A Rohloff set up is over £1300. The basis of my Ultimate Commuter. The surly dirt wizards that are essential for my rather extreme commute are generally £100, but can occasionally be got for about £85, will do me for a winter on the front and then worn down from a winter on the rear. You may have an easier commute of course...
Never used the scheme myself, too many restrictions and far too many short term contracts.
Treated myself to the hip lock DX1000 last birthday, that would would cover a majority of your overkill commuting bike.
I do like a IGH and I think I'd love a Rohloff ... but it's basically an extra decent bike before you've even bought a bike. And knowing that I'm not sure I'd sleep easy I'd it wasn't in the same room as me...
I've been commuting on my Triban 3 for 13 years now, 9 miles each way. Single speed wouldn't work as there are hills, nor would a dutch style bike. It cost £300 in 2012. I wouldn't want a bike that cost below £500 these days to commute on.
A lot of people leasing cars on the Motability scheme are not capable of mounting an etrike, let alone using it as their sole means of transport. Additionally, whilst for people who enjoy full health the axiom that there is no bad weather, just bad clothing choices, is very much true, asking people with compromised immune systems to use bicycle/tricycle transport in freezing and/or wet weather is asking for trouble. Also, many disabled people who lease cars under the scheme may work at a considerable distance from their home and/or live a long way from their families and public transport frequently isn't a viable option for them. Even if you have the battery range, asking people to do a 60 mile round-trip commute on a 15 mph tricycle isn't realistic. I'm all for any scheme that gets cars off the road provided it's realistic and equitable but telling disabled people they can't have cars isn't one of those.
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