Nottingham City scoops the cash (and gets 11 out of 10)
Nottingham City Council has won funding for emergency measures to help people travel around Nottingham safely while public transport capacity is greatly reduced due to Covid-19. The £569,806 funding from the DFT’s Emergency Active Travel Fund will pay for measures to make streets safer to enable people to start walking and cycling, saving space on public transport for those who need it most.
Nottingham is a city with high public transport use and low car ownership (46% of Nottingham households don’t have access to a car [link]). Public transport is running up to one fifth of the normal capacity*.
Measures include –
- widening pavements
- creating protected cycle lanes on busy roads
- preventing rat-running by creating low traffic neighbourhoods
- bringing the popular School Streets initiative to Nottingham
Matt Turner from Pedals, Nottingham Cycle Campaign welcomed the news
“It’s a question of fairness. We must give people who don’t have a car a safe way of getting to work or to the shops.”
Nottingham was awarded 112% of the funding that it bid for, rewarded by the Department for Transport for the quality and ambition of its bid (£569,806 out of a possible £510,000 in Tranche 1).
Link to Transport Nottingham news item about their bid
Link to the bid documents submitted by Nottingham City Council
Link to our blog post where we take a look at what’s in the bid
Nottinghamshire County comes bottom of the league
Neighbouring Nottinghamshire County Council didn’t fare so well, winning just 46% (£263,250 out of a possible £573,000 in Tranche 1), meaning they miss out on over £300,000. This puts them in the bottom 4 transport authorities in the country (75th place out of 78 when ranked by % awarded).
We don’t know what was in their bid as they haven’t published it anywhere (that we have been able to find).
Latest updates
- 06/07/20 – Press Release: Mystery as Nottinghamshire County Council misses out on £300,000 walking and cycling cash
- 14/07/20 – Following an intervention by Cllr Liz Plant, the Emergency Active Travel Fund was added to the agenda for a meeting of the newly set-up COVID 19 Resilience, Recovery and Renewal Committee on Thursday 16th July (see document entitled Addendum to Item 6 – Covid 19 Update Report).
- 14/07/20 – Emma from Pedals emailed Covid-19 RRR committee Chair, Cllr John Knight and Communities and Place committee Chair, Cllr John Cottee, to make them aware that the Department for Transport has now sent this letter to local authorities containing more information about Tranche 2 funding criteria and deadlines, specifically that the deadline for Tranche 2 bids is Friday 7th August(with a subsequent deadline of Friday 11th September for detailed scheme drawings). Responses received from both councillors.
- 22/07/20 – People who’d contacted their councillors as part of a Cycling UK campaign to ensure councils put in good Tranche 2 bids reported receiving standard responses including the line “the opportunity lends itself more to cities and large towns, and not the market towns we have in Nottinghamshire”.
- 23/07/20 – Cllrs Carr, Brown and Plant asked questions about this at Full Council meeting. Watch online (from approx 1 hour 57 minutes in) Also see this Twitter thread.
How was the % of funding decided?
The percentage of funding awarded was determined by how closely the bids matched the funding criteria and how ambitious they were. You can read more about the criteria in the ‘What can the money be used for?’ section of our previous blog post.
List of how much funding was allocated to each local authority (Department for Transport) – [link]
*Inferred from NCT advice to sit in the window seat only and leave a row between passengers [link]
