Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Rejected
Little progress made against DfT's active travel targets for 2025
Conclusion
In June 2023, the NAO found that the latest data showed little progress had been made against the targets set by DfT. In 2021, DfT was close to only one of its targets – to increase the percentage of short journeys in towns and cities that are walked or cycled, which was just under 46%. However, this this may reflect changes to travel patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic which appear not to have been sustained. For the other three objectives, levels of activity were lower than they were when DfT first set active travel objectives in 2017.13 For example, between 2017 and 2021, average annual walking activity reduced from 343 stages per person per year to 279 stages, when DfT’s target is 365 stages per person per year by 2025. We therefore asked DfT whether it thought that it would meet the targets it had set. DfT told us that it had raised its ambition to increase active travel very significantly in the last five years and that its objectives to 2025 were deliberately ambitious. It explained that it had set its targets at a “very, very stretching level” and that it thought that the progress recorded in the NAO report probably understated the progress it expected to make. DfT told us that data for 2021 were likely to have been affected by the pandemic and that the data for 2022 was expected to show more progress.14 On 31 August, DfT published its statistics for 2022. These showed some improvement in rates of walking, although there was not a return to pre-pandemic levels, and the proportion of short journeys walked or cycled remained close to the 2025 target.15 However, rates of cycling and walking to school showed little new progress. DfT told us that it could not say with confidence that the targets will all be met, but that it was “looking very hard at the way we can secure the maximum benefits”.16
Government Response Summary
The government disagrees with the implicit recommendation to re-evaluate its active travel objectives, stating this will be reviewed and revised in the 2025 report to Parliament on CWIS 2 and the third CWIS, for which research has been commissioned.
Government Response
Rejected
HM Government
Rejected
2.1 The government disagrees with the Committee’s recommendation. 2.2 As the Committee has noted in its report, the intention of the department was to set deliberately challenging objectives for active travel in the second statutory Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy (CWIS 2) and this was irrespective of the funding available. 2.3 The most recent National Travel Survey statistical release on walking and cycling, published on 30 August 2023, showed that the department is on track to achieve only one of the four objectives for active travel in CWIS 2 (that 46% of short journeys in towns and cities should be walked or cycled by 2025). 2.4 The department does not consider it to be necessary to re-evaluate what it expects to achieve against these objectives by 2025. This is because it will be reviewed in the report to Parliament on CWIS 2 and revised objectives will be set within the third CWIS (both due in 2025). 2.5 To inform the report to Parliament and the third CWIS, the department has commissioned research on active travel funding for the first and second CWIS (from 2016 to 2025) and the outputs of that funding. Many of the funding streams within both CWIS periods are projections, based on a range of evidence. This research will more accurately measure how much money has been spent, and what was delivered against the projected outputs.