Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 3
3
Accepted
Update Committee on plans to evaluate interventions, measure benefits, and improve active travel data.
Conclusion
DfT has not done enough to understand the impact and benefits of the £2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money it has spent on active travel. DfT spent £2.3 billion 6 Active travel in England funding active travel infrastructure between 2016 and 2021, but it knows too little about the quality of the infrastructure that has been built. Local authorities are only required to monitor or evaluate schemes that cost more than £2 million. Yet the average grant per project in the most recent traches of the Active Travel Fund was £750,000. This has resulted in DfT having an incomplete understanding of active travel infrastructure, as the majority of schemes have cost much less than the amount requried to be monitored or evaluated. DfT’s approach to measuring the wider impacts of active travel investment is also underdeveloped. We welcome ATE’s commitment to investing in evaluation and to support local authorities to collect robust and consistent data without making it over-burdensome. ATE is exploring new methods for data collection and has a dedicated data analysis team to bring together local data. Recommendation 3: DfT should, by December 2023, update the Committee on progress with: a) its plans to evaluate active travel interventions and how it intends to use findings from its evaluation activities to inform its ongoing and future active travel activity and investment decisions; b) how it intends to comprehensively identify and measure the benefits of active travel across all government policy areas; and c) how ATE will improve the collection and standardisation of data from active travel schemes.
Government Response Summary
The government states ATE has enhanced guidance for local authorities to use a new 'Active Travel Infrastructure Platform' and employed a scheme database with quarterly pulse surveys to strengthen data collection. ATE is also developing a web-based reporting portal and has strengthened grant agreements to mandate data provision from local authorities.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented ATE has enhanced the guidance for local authorities so that they are strongly encouraged to use the new ‘Active Travel Infrastructure Platform’ so that they can better, and more consistently, detail the type and characteristics of the active travel intervention that they are seeking grant funding for. ATE has employed further tools to strengthen data collection, including a scheme database to collect objectives, spend, output and milestone data for all Active Travel Fund schemes, and monitoring ‘pulse’ surveys that are used to update the database every quarter in a consistent and standardised way. Further work is underway to develop a web-based reporting portal for local authorities. In addition, where ATE enters into a grant agreement with local authorities to fund active travel interventions, the Section 31 grant agreement letters (that a local authority chief finance officer is required to sign) have been strengthened so that it places specific requirements on the local authority in terms of data that must be provided to ATE. All authorities should be prepared to participate in the ‘portfolio evaluation’ as referred in paragraph 2.9 and work with the national evaluator if selected. More broadly, and in respect of funding not directly allocated by ATE, there is a long-term piece of work (which is at the very early stages of development) to align standards of data reporting from local authorities for all active travel schemes. A definitive timeframe cannot be provided at this stage.