Welsh Government’s ‘failing’ active travel policy has cost £218m, says auditor
Martin Shipton
The Welsh Government’s much trumpeted policy of “active travel” has failed to engage the people of Wales, with fewer participating now than in 2018, despite nearly £220m having been spent encouraging them to take part.
A damning report from Audit Wales suggests serious mistakes have been made and a new delivery plan needs to be implemented, with better evidence made available to track progress and assess value for money.
“Active travel” describes walking and cycling, possibly combined with public transport, for everyday journeys like to or from a workplace or school, or to access health, leisure or other services and facilities. It doesn’t include walking and cycling solely for leisure.
The Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013 aims to increase active travel rates and places duties on the Welsh Ministers and local authorities.
The Welsh Government has allocated £65m to its key active travel initiatives in 2024-25, with the Active Travel Fund the largest component. However, the fuller picture of Welsh Government and wider public services expenditure on active travel is not clear.
The Active Travel Fund, established in 2018, helps local authorities develop and deliver improvements to active travel infrastructure and related facilities. Annual Active Travel Fund or equivalent expenditure by local authorities increased significantly between 2018-19 and 2023-24, from £20m to £46m. Total expenditure in the period was £218m.
‘Step change’
The report says: “Despite this increased spending, and a new wide-ranging delivery plan, the Welsh Government remains a long way from achieving the step change in active travel intended through the Act. The limited information available suggests active travel rates have not improved in recent years, with headline walking rates below pre-pandemic levels. In 2022-23, 51% of people said they walked at least once a week for active travel purposes and 6% cycled. The figure for walking compares with 60% in 2019-20 while cycling rates have remained broadly static.”
The report highlights various issues and areas for improvement, including around target setting, the extent to which active travel has been integrated across wider policies and programmes and prioritised locally, national leadership arrangements, capacity issues in local authorities, and the approach to and prioritisation of funding.
It also emphasises that the building of physical infrastructure has not been accompanied by a strong enough focus on awareness raising and behaviour change.
Alongside this, approaches to monitoring and evaluation do not currently go far enough to enable robust tracking of progress or an overall assessment of value for money. The Act’s reporting requirements are not being met consistently and a Welsh Government review of the Act is overdue. The report emphasises the importance of the Welsh Government now delivering with its partners on the new delivery plan. This includes work on a new monitoring and evaluation framework and a new assessment and funding framework to support delivery.
‘Prioritising’
The report states: “The Welsh Government has set active travel targets without Wales-specific data to establish the baseline position. It is uncertain whether the targets are achievable. The new active travel delivery plan is wide-ranging but includes some actions outstanding from the 2016 plan. “Various national policies and initiatives integrate commitments to active travel, but this does not always play through to local decisions. There also appears to be variation in the extent to which local authorities are prioritising active travel and related investment. Leadership and oversight is complicated by the involvement of multiple stakeholders and some lack of clarity around responsibilities amid changing remits.
“The Welsh Government’s active travel team is small, and while Transport for Wales’ team has grown over the past three years there are capacity issues in local authorities.
“The annual funding cycle and uncertainty about future funding can make some local authorities reluctant to take on more ambitious multi-year schemes.
“It is difficult to assess the extent to which active travel networks have improved over time from the network maps alone, but the pace of change appears too slow currently to achieve the ambitions. We heard that routes put forward for funding by local authorities are not always in the best areas, or adequately connected, to facilitate modal shift but Transport for Wales has developed a tool to improve prioritisation.
“The Welsh Government and Transport for Wales are developing an overall monitoring and evaluation framework, but it has been a long time coming.
“The quality of information reported by local authorities varies considerably, including baseline information against which to assess impact. The Welsh Government’s annual reporting has been limited in scope. Current arrangements for monitoring and evaluating Active Travel Fund expenditure do not enable an overall assessment of value for money.”
‘Reflect’
Auditor General Adrian Crompton said: “The Welsh Government needs to reflect on why, in over a decade, the Active Travel (Wales) Act and the arrangements to support delivery have not yet had the desired impact. Various factors influence active travel behaviour across a range of policy areas.
“The importance of being able to put value for money to the test through strengthened monitoring, evaluation, and reporting, reflects a recurring theme from my wider audit work. Without better supporting evidence, the risk is that doing more of the same, including in how funding is prioritised, may simply produce the same results.”
A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “We would like to thank the Audit Office for its report. We will be considering the recommendations and will respond formally in due course.”
Dr Dafydd Trystan, Chair of the Active Travel Board, and independent body which aims to advance active travel initiatives across Wales, said: “Today’s comprehensive report, by Audit Wales, once again highlights the challenges facing Welsh Government and its delivery partners to meet our collective active travel ambitions.
“Many of the findings reiterate and reinforce the nine recommendations contained in our own report, published last month, which examined the implementation of the Active Travel Delivery Plan between April 2023 and March 2024.
“We welcome Auditor General, Adrian Crompton’s stark words that invite Welsh Government to reflect on ‘why, in over a decade, the Active Travel (Wales) Act and the arrangements to support delivery have not yet had the desired impact’.
“Wales’ ambition to become an active travel nation is, without question, the right one. Its recent levels of funding can also be widely applauded. But Welsh Government can no longer ignore mounting evidence that its methods to meet that ambition are not where they need to be.
“The good news for Welsh Government is that the themes of this report reflect ours, which means that the recommendations we have laid out in our recent report towards successful delivery are sound. This includes changing the way it spends current funding and putting in place mechanisms, like improved data collation, in order to evidence significant modal shift.
“The Active Travel Board remains committed to working with Welsh Government and local authorities, and is hopeful that a collective redoubling of efforts will drive the behaviour change we all seek that will lead to healthier, more sustainable communities across Wales.”
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I knew it…a big club of hobbyists…remember when they got rid of the ‘Clerk of Works’…
The Active Travel concept is nothing more than an excuse not to provide good public transport.
Well the idea is there’s no point in good public transport if you can’t walk or cycle to catch the public transport.
Agree.
Public transport has always been a part of active travel. Personally I don’t think they match ideas. But Sustrans has always included it.
Big problem and no matter how much I like cycle lanes, there is no where to secure your bike. No facilities. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. (though a new storage at Newport looks good). I can cycle to the supermarket but no where to secure the bike, same for town, no where to secure the bike. I don’t mean a metal hoop in the ground. That will keep your bike in the same place but wrecked (if only we had more police eh?). So I drive. And then try to get one on a bus or train. Cycle lanes are good.… Read more »
To be fair, the Dutch have been working on it since the 1970’s… Cycling infrastructure has been integral to planning for decades, I often hear the ‘look there’s a cycle path & no one is using it’ trouble is it is often an isolated stretch of a mile or so between two dangerous roads where there is no cycle path… Partly it is a problem of ‘critical mass’ you need a certain amount of infrastructure before it becomes logical/possible/convenient… In the Netherlands you can literally get on your bike and go anywhere, no planning is needed, cycle path road signs… Read more »
Yeah, appreciate that but they have a sweet system. Envy I suppose. There are parking requirements in the Welsh Gov doc but all that I can find in my town are the hoops and wrecked bikes. Hoops at the supermarket but then the supermarket will know that cyclists will carry less so I expect them to do bare minimum. Or will I be surprised? (some great bikes over there with large trollies)
Lets hope some infrastructure comes long that is a bit more than hoops.
The Dutch had solved it by the late 80s and the Germans. Used to live on the border of those 2 countries, never felt issues. Move home and cars out to kill you to gain a bike length. Facilities to park under cover etc. I am lucky, my work has great commuting facilities. But cars doing 70mph at 6am on a 20mph Rd isn’t going to encourage cycling. We need laws like the Germans on priority.
The age-old problem of socialist Labour is that they think they know, better than you, how you should be living your life, so they introduce mandates or ‘nudges’ to get you to comply. They don’t much care whether you agree: they know best…and of course the new normal rarely applies to them; they’re special after all, it just applies to the prols. Now, I’m happy to seek lifestyle advice from someone who I judge to be a credible advisor, but your average politician is a clueless middle-management type who’s done no work outside of the political sphere, and often nothing… Read more »
Are you able to make an arguement without resorting to childish insults – “These people are morally bankrupt, spineless, comparatively thick…” The irony of this is that you are a supporter of Nigel Farage and his far-right company Reform UK.
It’s not intended to be insulting: it’s simply an observation of objective reality. I can back all of that up with real-world evidence if you like. For example, Starmer took a £5000 bung for his wife’s clothes and didn’t think anyone would notice – so that’s ‘thick’ covered. Oh, and Nigel Farage doesn’t claim that women have testicles.: kind of sets him apart in my view.
I despise extremists from both sides, they coincidentally both use the excuse that ‘at least they’re better than the extreme on the other side’. But the political worlds isn’t flat, it is a circle where the extremists meet up at the back in a dark deceitful belief that being life’s failure gives them the right to exploit normal descent hard working people.
That’s up to you of course: I’m not keen on extremists but ‘despise’ is a very strong word. People of the left tend to throw the terms extremist and far right-right around like confetti though, which de-values the terms. If you believe – as seems to be the case – that Farage is an extremist the you’re going to need another adjective for someone like Hitler.
Painting white lines in narrow lanes in and widening footpaths
Active travel to Inactive unravel. Cycle paths on the road to nowhere. Motorists who pay road tax to use half of the highways. You cannot make people cycle, as is obvious in the Welsh capital, as the cycle lanes are empty most of the time, and food delivery bikes are easily have the majority of usage.
Active Travel has definitely made life more dangerous for pedestrians. Speeding cyclists use pavements and parks as race tracks. Even Queen St, where cycling is illegal, is a nightmare. Cyclists rarely follow the rules of the road and if they damage you or your car in the process there is no way of tracing them. In many parts those cyclists using high speed electric bikes are a danger to all. Shame this money hadn’t been spent on improving Cardiff bus service so that car users had a proper choice of an alternative mode of transport for all The Cycling lobby… Read more »
The tyranny of the biker, full stop…
From the Mawddach Trail to the death defying stupidity on our roads from every form of two wheel transporter…
Even where provision is made for off road cyclists like the specialist forestry and rough terrain tracks they still seem determined to ride down pedestrian paths at speeds well in excess of that which is safe and get gobby as hell if you try to tell them to cut it out. F**kwittery in lycra !
£220m over 6 years for the whole of Wales. This is less than the overspend on the Heads of the Valleys Roads.
And yet imagine how much better our roads would be if they’d invested £220m just filling in pot-holes over six years.
Telling people to ride a bike to work or the shops was always going to be a non-start in a place as remote, hilly and wet as Wales. They failed completely to consider the real issues that prevent it ever being a viable model of transport. They also did major damage to their cause with the implementation of the blanket 20mph limit. I used to do the occasional cycle for fun when the weather was nice, far to far to go anywhere productive. I wouldn’t even consider it now due to the increased congestion, emissions and lower standard of driving… Read more »
Remote, hilly and wet?
Come on, Switzerland has quite a good infrastructure, do you think they are flatter than us? And I got gortex.
218 million would have been better spent on the NHS, school busses to keep children safe, school repairs, more police on the street, filling pot holes, and the 35 million + 5 million wasted on the 20mph fiasco. Wales should have been a nice place to if funds were not diverted to pet projects dreamt up by politicians and their lackey advisors and consultants, Costing millions more.
Isn’t it about time that the individuals who come up with these initial ideas and the ones who sign-off on them, are named and shamed?
Was always going to be hard sell. People are obsessed with cars and lifestyles of laziness. Plus bike lanes are no fun as a cyclist. Often in stupid spots like between bus stops and the road where buses stop or go down streets the wrong way. It’s clear people just have no idea of exercise basics or don’t care to easily fit it into life or the positives it brings.