Question
In August 2020 the Borough Council submitted a bid for Active Travel Phase 2 funding, claiming to have undertaken “a robust scheme prioritisation process” leading to 2 alternative options. £576,650 was granted in November 2020 but the Council decided to spend this on an entirely new scheme in Woodley. Inevitably, this took longer than originally envisages and after a rushed consultation process, the scheme and the associated funding are on hold indefinitely.
The wider network plan for walking and cycling – the LCWIP – was to be developed for public consultation starting in June 2021. It is now March 2022 and there is no forecast for when this consultation will start. The first part of this – an LCWIP for Wokingham Town – was completed and presented to the Executive Member for Highways and Transport in 2020, but never published.
The Low Carbon Transport Plan which was commissioned by the Council in 2019 has yet to be seen. And projects such as the A327 cycleway and replacement rail crossings to make walking and cycling easier have all slipped. Does the Council acknowledge the urgency of these issues, and can they commit, tonight or in a written response, to a schedule for when each of these issues will be resolved?
Minutes:
Question
In August 2020 the Borough Council submitted a bid for Active Travel Phase 2 funding, claiming to have undertaken “a robust scheme prioritisation process” leading to 2 alternative options. £576,650 was granted in November 2020 but the Council decided to spend this on an entirely new scheme in Woodley. Inevitably, this took longer than originally envisages and after a rushed consultation process, the scheme and the associated funding are on hold indefinitely.
The wider network plan for walking and cycling – the LCWIP – was to be developed for public consultation starting in June 2021. It is now March 2022 and there is no forecast for when this consultation will start. The first part of this – an LCWIP for Wokingham Town – was completed and presented to the Executive Member for Highways and Transport in 2020, but never published.
The Low Carbon Transport Plan which was commissioned by the Council in 2019 has yet to be seen. And projects such as the A327 cycleway and replacement rail crossings to make walking and cycling easier have all slipped. Does the Council acknowledge the urgency of these issues, and can they commit, tonight or in a written response, to a schedule for when each of these issues will be resolved?
Answer
Thank you for your question, Peter. I think I have partly answered some of it in the answer to Paul.
Your recollection of it is not the same as my recollection. The original plans were for three different routes for cycleways. One was in Wokingham, one was along the A4 and either down towards Thames Valley Park or along under the roundabout and into Reading, and the third was a line drawn through Woodley. These were all taken to public consultation. We got a lot of responses, and the one that was most popular was the line that was drawn through Woodley. That was then developed into a more detailed scheme which was the one that was put out for consultation around about Christmas last year. That obviously got a lot of feedback, which suggests that the residents were very unhappy with the one way section on the way into the precinct, by Waitrose at that end. So, we are going to have to take that away and look at alternative routes to see if we can find something that meets the LTN 1 20 requirements and also meets support from the residents. I cannot put a timetable on that because I will not do anything unless the residents are in support of it, and that is what I am here for. I am not here to impose cycleways on people who do not want it, and I am not here to propose routes that people do not want. We are consulting. We have consulted twice now. We have had two different sets of answers and we will continue to work through them.
As far as the question about the Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan for Wokingham, I actually intervened on that and said there is no point in a Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan for Wokingham Town, because people do not actually cycle within towns, they cycle on routes, so we need to do a wider view of all the key routes. They went back to the drawing board and not only looked at the Walking and Infrastructure Plan, which is in Wokingham Town itself, but also how people use it to travel through the Borough as a whole. That is why we have not done anything with the Plan that was originally published for Wokingham, because there is a real danger of if you do not look at the routes, you improve a whole load of cycleways but you do not improve enough cycleways for people to get on the routes that they want to travel on.
Supplementary question
I would be interested to see what you do with the rest of the Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan stuff. One of the things that is apparent is the amount of money that it is going to cost. I wholeheartedly welcome the extra funding that you are going to receive from the Government, however that does leave a gap with the funding as we go on. So, you have got it down to £33million to be spent to complete 50% of the Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan by 2030, and then you are going to do about £3million a year, reducing to £2 million in 2024, so you are still to have a gap. How is the Council going fund that?
Supplementary answer
Some of the funding will come from developers as part of the developments that are being done. Some of it will come from more grant funding. The Officers have already proven themselves very good at getting grant funding from the DfT, and we are going to continue with that process. I do not foresee a gap, but I do foresee that it is 5 year funding and we do not have all the grants in place yet.