Transport Minister Challenged! End of the £140m road for Cycling England…?
Posted: 11th September 2010 | 4 Comments »
I got excited news from a prolific writer about train and bicycle stuff this morning. It came from Christian Wolmar right, who is self-styled as ‘Britain’s leading transport commentator’. We’ve met on various occasions and although I haven’t always agreed with him, I’ve often found his passionately expressed views interesting – and that he is generally quite an an affable chap.
But now he has written an “angry” open letter to Norman Baker, Lib Dem MP left, who is our new Transport Minister responsible for Regional and Local Transport…
It turns out that dear old Wolmar has got his knickers well twisted by rumours that a £140m fund to run a body he is director of, at a cost to the taxpayer that began at £5m and increased to £60m per year, is about to get the chop. The body concerned is called Cycling England and Wolmar asks Norman some searching questions. These include:
What is Norman Baker for? What is the point of you being in the Department of Transport? Then, with no more beating about the bush, our new minister is asked this.
“Are you a fig-leaf for the most reactionary policies to come out of the Marsham Street since the days of Nicholas Ridley?”
Cripes! I thought. That’s quite a question to ask a guy who, whatever you may think of him, at least had the guts to voice serious concerns over the exceptionally odd death of Dr David Kelly – who may have known far too much for his own good about the weapons of mass destruction that ‘justified’ the Iraq war – but weren’t actually there. Anyway, Wolmar also tells Norman that Cycling England is facing the axe “for the crime of being a quango – when it could quite easily not be one”.
In response to all this excitement and rumours of funding cuts, the bicycle industry has quite understandably “raised its voice” in support of Cycling England. But whatever the rights and wrongs of all this may be it is set in a tough situation in Britain where spending cuts amounting to £6.2bn need to be made with £683m to be hacked from the Transport Ministers’ budget.
Now I remember passing the good old cycling proficiency test and would love to see it continue to help youngsters learn how to ride a bicycle safely. But I am left with a number of puzzling questions. First, do we really need to spend £60m of public funds per year to do so? Secondly, is an angry letter from the nations’ ‘leading transport commentator’ likely to encourage a Transport Minister to keep a body like Cycling England safe from the budget slasher’s knife?
To be honest, I have no idea what the answer to the first question is but it does seem odd that the costs of running the quango that runs a proficiency test should grow from £5m to £60m in two or three years.
As to the second question, I will leave you to decide for yourself. But I offer a couple of illustrations to show how wide the gap can be between the opinions of prominent figures who comment about cycling. There can be no doubt that Bojo, London’s larger-than-life Conservative Mayor is a great fan of bicycling. But his fellow Tory peer, Lady Sharples is right at the top of the premier league of Baroness bicycle bashers.
Now, whatever comes of this challenge to save Cycling England and all the worthy work it does, there is one for for sure. There is no need to worry about saving the future of a government funded body that gets £60m a year to do similar worthy work to promote the training and testing of scooter or motorbike riders. And that’s for the simple reason that such a body is a bit like Blair’s WMD in Iraq, it does not exist.
Nevertheless, concerned as I am about such iniquities, I am not a bicycle basher like the Tory baroness – or in anyway anti-cyclist. Actually, in my humble opinion, cyclists and riders of of motorbikes or scooters have to key things in common. First, we ride single track machines on roads and help cut congestion like no twin tracked vehicles can. And secondly, all single-track machine riders are vulnerable to attack by people in or out of big tin boxes with wheels on – and we deserve as much help and protection as we can get. But going back to dear old Wolmar’s angry letter, I have to say that it never ceases to amaze me how much some fans of cycling will demand – even in times when everyone is facing cuts.
“it does seem odd that the costs of running the quango that runs a proficiency test should grow from £5m to £60m in two or three years”
Are you really that ignorant?
The “costs” of Cycling England didn’t grow by this much – this is how much their budgets have been to spend on promoting cycling – extremely productively, by the sounds of it, on (1) Bikeability training for kids and (2) establishing 17 cycling towns.
In the first batch of towns, cycling rose by 27%. Elsewhere in the UK it’s stagnant.
Cycling projects typically repay the taxpayer in benefits three to one – approximately half of this in health improvements.
Sorry, but scooters and motorbikes have ZERO benefits to public health, which is why there is no such body as Motorbike England, and nor will there ever be…
To say scooters and motorcycles have “Zero” benefit to public health is bizarre. What of the Bloodrunners? A group of volunteers who delivers urgent medical supplies at no cost to the public purse. What of two-wheeled paramedics and police officers? What of the despatch riders that lighten the pressure of office-workers? What of the PTW commuters who lessen the burden on public transport systems, pollute far less and don’t congest the roads? What of the pleasure, camaraderie and relaxation brought to hundreds of thousands of people who ride motorcycles just for the fun of it?
Does not one of those people count ?
Thanks for comments so far. It is delightful of Mike to raise awareness of a “27% rise” in cycling in a town where part of the millions allocated to CE have been spent. Unfortunately, such impressive looking rises are not as great as they seem when the thorny issue of the numbers is included by those of us who are interested in the core facts; i.e. how many people and trips are involved in such rises. Sadly these numbers are, in the grand scheme of transport statistics on modal share, pathetically small. As the latest DfT statistics clearly shows, (Transport Trends 2009) despite the countless millions that has been spent on encouraging cycling between 1980 and now, the number of trips and kilometres travelled by bicycle has remained a more or less constant at under 2% of all passenger trips – which is a similar proportion to those made by scooter or motorcycle – on which nothing has been spent to encourage ridership of powered two wheelers at all.
:quote from mike:
Cycling projects typically repay the taxpayer in benefits three to one – approximately half of this in health improvements.
………………………………………………………
Bollocks!
Cycling dosen’t improve your health to the point where you can say you will live longer if you cycle.
Especially when most people who take the cycling profeciency test and even the PM runs red lights and cycles the wrong way up a one way street or jump from pavement to road or not look behind them when they turn.
I would especially like to see the health benefits if i had to do bloodruning or st johns on a bycicle. the patient would have died by the time i reached them.