Sunday, September 22, 2024
Money for nothing
The paper adds that the Active Travel Fund, established in 2018, helps local authorities develop and deliver improvements to active travel infrastructure and related facilities like adding cycling and walking paths. They say that this fund or equivalent expenditure by local authorities increased significantly between 2018-19 and 2023-24, from £20 million to £46 million:
Total expenditure in the period was £218 million with another £65 million allocated by Welsh Government to its key active travel initiatives in 2024-25.
But Audit Wales says 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.
They added: "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 (Active Travel) 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."
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."
To use a well-worn cliché, you can lead them to water, but you can't make them drink.
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I blame parents. My kids walked to school by themselves (all of half a mile) from around the age of 9. Now kids get dropped off and picked up by car. It's no wonder that the habit of exercise is stillborn!
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