The UK spent £4.1 billion getting people to walk and cycle – it’s not working

The government invested £4.1 billion in walking, wheeling and cycling across England between 2021 and 2025, more than it originally planned to spend, yet the latest figures show the country is on track to miss almost every target the money was meant to deliver.

That is the picture set out in the Department for Transport’s second Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy Report to Parliament, published in June 2026, which tracks progress over the period from April 2021 to March 2025.

When the second strategy was drawn up, the Department projected £3.6 billion of investment over the four years.

An independent evidence review commissioned from Frontier Economics and SYSTRA later revised that figure upwards to £4.1 billion. Of that total, £857 million was channelled through Active Travel England, the quango set up to assess funding bids and oversee delivery of cycling and walking schemes.

Missed targets

Despite the higher spend, the most recent data, which runs to 2024, shows shortfalls against all four of the strategy’s 2025 objectives.

The biggest miss is on cycling. The government set a target to double cycling activity from 0.8 billion stages a year in 2013 to 1.6 billion stages by 2025.

In 2024, residents of England made an estimated 1.0 billion cycle stages – up around 15% on 2013, but nowhere near the doubling the strategy called for.

A further 0.6 billion stages would be needed to hit the target, and cycling levels have fluctuated year to year rather than climbing steadily.

The other objectives are closer but still off-pace. The proportion of short journeys under five miles that people in towns and cities walked or cycled reached 43% in 2024, against a 46% target for 2025.

Walking activity stood at 339 stages per person in 2024 – up 4% on the previous year and roughly level with pre-pandemic 2019 – compared with a target of 365. And 51% of children aged 5 to 10 usually walked to school, short of the 55% goal.

One important caveat is that the figures only go up to 2024. The Department says it cannot fully evaluate progress against the 2025 targets until the 2025 National Travel Survey is published in summer 2026.

It also warns that reduced data collection during 2020, 2021 and 2022 because of the pandemic means year-to-year comparisons should be treated with care.

The report also points to a mid-period funding decision that reshaped the spending. Among the factors it lists for the change in investment profile is a £200 million reduction in capital funding for Active Travel England in March 2023.

Some bright spots

There are bright spots in the demographic breakdown. Between 2013 and 2024, average walking stages rose 12% and cycling stages 6% across the population.

Older people drove much of the walking growth, with those aged 70 and over walking 41% more.

Cycling rose sharply among people from ethnic minority backgrounds, up 57%, and among 60 to 69-year-olds, up 61%. The biggest decline was among 17 to 20-year-olds, whose cycling stages fell 42%.

The June 2026 report is the third progress update Parliament has received on the cycling and walking strategies.

The third strategy, CWIS3, was due in early 2025 but was delayed by the timing of the 2024 General Election and the subsequent Spending Review. It has now been published alongside this report.

The longer-term ambitions set out under CWIS2 remain in place: for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be walked or cycled by 2030, and for England to have a “world-class” cycling and walking network by 2040.

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