Programme for Government 25/26 – retreat on active travel, bus and traffic reduction

The Scottish Government’s 25/26 PfG has one big and welcome surprise on sustainable transport – peak rail fares will be permanently abolished from 1st September. Apart from that, funding for active travel is no longer transparent, the PfG confirms that the 20% traffic reduction commitment no longer exists, and trunk road expansion continues.

In terms of the climate crisis, SCCS called the PfG “deeply disappointing and a missed opportunity to set out concrete measures to reduce emissions.” Specifically on transport, Transform Scotland, whilst welcoming a few aspects, said the PfG “falls far short of what’s needed to improve our public transport system and reduce car dependency.” The Transform response also includes a handy compilation of all the transport elements (good and bad) in the PfG.

The abolition of peak rail fares is certainly welcome, and is presumably made more affordable by the major changes in working practices following covid, so there is less need to ration the ‘morning rush hour’ by higher prices.

Active Travel funding

As we explained in our responses to the 25/26 budget (here and updated here) the government has changed the ‘active travel’ budget line into ‘active and sustainable,’ with the amount specifically for active travel now being unspecified. The further we have dug into this, the more ‘non-active’ this budget line appears to be – the total also includes bus infrastructure, money towards EV charging and unspecified ‘other.’ As a result, the amount actually going to active travel might still be around our original estimate of 4.6% of total transport spending – or might be far lower.

Knowingly misleading presentation

Despite the above explicit change in the budget’s structure, the PfG includes this graphic [page 23] …

This is blatently misleading, as the 21/22 figure is for active travel only, whereas the 25/26 figure, as mentioned above, also includes bus infrastructure, some EV funding, and unspecified ‘other.’ We had already heard government MSPs referring to the £188m as increased funding – glossing over this underlying reality. Now we see the £115m/£188m misleading comparison printed in this major government document.

Declining PfG active travel ambition

On the positive side, even with last year’s significant AT cuts, and this year’s severe uncertainty, investment in active travel since 2021 is still much higher than in previous decades. Nonetheless, ambition and investment in successive recent PfGs are now clearly falling.

• 23/24 PfG -> £320m (future) promise, 10% of transport. [£189m budgeted in 23/24]
• 24/25 PfG -> 10% promise dropped. [£220m budgeted but later cut to £155m]
• 25/26 PfG -> £188m which now ALSO includes non active-travel, as above

All this at a time, when usage statistics show the need for and the value of such investment, with big rises in bike use on new main-road segregated bike routes in Edinburgh and Glasgow [page 1 & 10 here].

Bus investment suffers

Bus infrastructure funding (e.g. bus priority lanes and management) has suffered greatly. Only 5% of the £500m multi-year fund announced in 2019 had been allocated by the Scottish Government before the fund was scrapped in 2024. Now, shockingly, it has been replaced for 25/26 by £10m taken from the Active and Sustainable budget. It would hardly be suprising if there is lobbying going on behind the scenes for more of the Active & Sustainable money to go to bus infrastructure (with the consequence of even less for cycling and walking).

Declining traffic reduction ambition

No one is surprised that the Scottish Government has dropped its 2020 commitment to 20% car-km reduction by 2030. From the very outset, no effective steps have ever been taken to achieve it; and indeed the government has sidelined its own commissioned research which showed that the commitment could be met – but only through some form of road user charging.

The government has been fully aware of this throughout – for example, in evidence to the Scottish Parliament in 2020, Chris Stark, then CEO of the UK Climate Change Committee, told MSPs that the car-km reduction “will not happen unless there is a combination of carrots and sticks, and the kind of policies (in the government’s Climate Change Plan) are mainly carrots.“

It is good to see that the PfG does at least promise a new traffic reduction target. It will “publish jointly with COSLA a renewed policy statement on reducing car use in Scotland, which will set a successor target for car use reduction aligned with the development of the draft Climate Change Plan.”

But have lessons been learned or is this just more talk? Will the government take heed of its own commissioned research, and the advice of transport experts, and develop an appropriate form of road user charging – for example, along with councils, congestion charging in the main cities? So far, the signs are not encouraging.

Trunk Road capacity

Finally, of course, given the politics, it is no surprise to see that the PfG continues with trunk road expansion. The A9, for example, being dualled, whilst the adjacent railway remains single-track. As Transform Scotland says, “Road-building is incompatible with our climate goals: it induces more traffic, drives up emissions, and locks us into car dependency at a critical moment when we need to be moving away from it.“

Whilst trunk road widening is often for political or capacity reasons, or both, it is ironic that one critical and very costly road project is to keep open the A83 Rest and Be Thankful road to Argyll – a road increasingly devasted by the impacts of climate change – which itself results in part from growing traffic and its emissions!

Spokes Bluesky post of this article – reposts welcome!