Here are four words you might not expect from me, as a former Conservative aide, so make the most of them: Louise Haigh is right. Half right, anyway. Labour’s new transport secretary has taken some flak – though not, interestingly, a vast amount – for interviews this week stating that councils that create low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs), 20mph zones and bike lanes on their roads “will have my full support”.
“An abdication of responsibility,” huffed the Sun. “Labour declares war on drivers,” announced GB News, though no one was actually quoted to this effect – the shadow transport spokesperson, Helen Whately, said only that Labour “seems unable to take a common sense approach”.
Haigh’s position, in the interviews for the Guardian and the Streets Ahead podcast, sounds rather like common sense – that communities and their elected representatives should always decide on these schemes. It’s not quite right, in fact, but it’s arguably better than the position the last government got itself into.
When Boris Johnson was the prime minister and I was his transport adviser, we encouraged LTNs (where residential “rat runs” are closed to through motor traffic) and bike lanes, and increased funding for them.
But by 2023, Boris had gone and I, though still at No 10, was no longer involved in active travel. The then transport secretary, Mark Harper, did what BMX bikers (at least according to YouTube) call a 180 fakie – a complete U-turn where you at one point ride backwards, possibly falling off and hurting yourself if you’re not very good at it.
That was Harper’s fate when an official study he ordered into LTNs, intended to prove they were hated, ambulance-blocking failures, said they were mostly popular and effective; reducing traffic volumes within the LTNs, having limited adverse impacts on boundary roads, and not adversely affecting emergency response times.
Harper himself tacitly admitted LTNs’ popularity when he pledged to defund or stop only “new” ones; a recognition that scrapping the thousands of existing schemes, some there since the pandemic, others for decades, would have been politically damaging.
If LTNs were bad, they should all have been removed. But by 2023, hundreds of thousands of voters, including many Tories, were enjoying quieter, safer streets, while traffic displacement on to boundary roads had fallen or ended as people made fewer short, local journeys by car.
It follows the “controversy-acceptance cycle” for street, and many other, changes: noisy opposition at the start, albeit usually from a minority, which disappears after a year or two if councils and politicians hold their nerve. (That’s not to say that every single scheme worked and was perfect.)
I was encouraged that Haigh appears to get this. Her promise to “invest on unprecedented levels” will be tested in the budget, but as she clearly understands, cycling could do a lot, very cheaply, for some of Keir Starmer’s core “missions”, including reducing pressure on the health service and growing the economy by getting more people fit to work.
All I’d add is that the money has to be spent properly for that to happen. And this is why Haigh is only half right. In another interview this week, she said it would be “entirely up to local areas to decide” what they did and decried Whitehall “dictating” that a “road in Chester should be a 20mph zone”.
Under Johnson we seldom, if ever, “dictated” at that local or specific a level. But we did tell councils that to get our money they had to do schemes well, because many, perhaps most, existing cycle schemes were so bad as to be pointless, even dangerous.
We said they had to put those schemes where they most reduced danger, where most people travelled, and where they would get the greatest number of new cyclists. Which are often, by definition, also the places with the greatest motorist demand for road space.
Many councils didn’t really want to do this. Some were great; others didn’t even pretend to support active travel. Perhaps most often, they were happy to say the right things, but not to actually do anything that risked a row.
If the government lets councils do whatever they want, funding them regardless, many will take the cheques but also the route of least resistance, delivering little or nothing of value to cycling. The unprecedented investment will mostly go to waste, and the missions will be no further forward.
As Labour has wholeheartedly accepted in housing, councils will have to be pushed to do the right thing. Indeed, if councils are allowed to chicken out of putting a bollard on a side road, it might be harder to insist they put 8,000 new homes on their green belt.
As for the Tories, 2024 was the latest of half a dozen elections – parliamentary, mayoral and local, in good times for the party (2021) and in bad – where campaigning against traffic restrictions has not worked. Even Uxbridge, where a 2023 byelection saw the tactic’s only success, went to Labour this year as the controversy-acceptance cycle on the ultra-low emission zone reached its later stages.
My favourite statistic from Harper’s LTN report was not that, among those who expressed a preference, support for the schemes was double the opposition to them. It was that for all the noise on social media, 58% of voters in LTNs didn’t even realise they lived in one. Tory activists may hate LTNs, and their friends may hate LTNs – but political parties always get in trouble when they go by what their activists, rather than the public, think. Perhaps, in the years of recovery ahead, the Conservatives will learn this lesson.
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Andrew Gilligan was transport adviser to Boris Johnson in Downing Street, and cycling commissioner for London 2013-16.
