Recommendation 3

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.