News
£11m awarded to local authorities and School Sports Partnerships to boost Bikeability offer
Posted on January 19, 2011
Government grants for Bikeability totalling £11m have been awarded by the Department for Transport (DfT) to over 100 local authorities and to School Sport Partnerships across England to help them boost their cycle training offer in the coming year. The funds available will fund over 275,000 additional Bikeability Level 2 places in 2011/2012 – enabling Bikeability to be offered in even more areas than before. Funding will also be available for the next 3 years and details of how Bikeability will be funded and delivered in the future will be announced after a DfT review into Bikeability during 2011.
The DfT will also continue to support the running of the Bikeability scheme and the National Standard for Cycle Training that underpins it.
However, given the financial circumstances there is also a need to significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency. As part of this, the current instructor bursary grants will not be extended beyond 31 March 2011, when most other existing arrangements under the Cycling England programme cease. The Department is no longer able to support the cost of administering the grant, or justify the subsidising new trainers at a time when overall capacity is healthy. To offset the ending of bursaries after March 2011 the grants awarded to local authorities for Bikeability training can also in future be used to fund the cost of training new national standard instructors or assistant instructors. Where any of the grant is used in this way the delivery target of child training places is not reduced. DfT expects the recipients of the bursary to deliver an equivalent number of free cycle training places based on the £40.00 awarded per training place. Local authorities can also use their grant to make funds available to train new instructors or assistant instructors to Instructor Training Organisations or to individuals not employed directly by the authority. It will be for individual authorities in conjunction with the trainer or training company awarded the grant to then account for the trade off in free training places either within the authority’s delivery programme or elsewhere.
This ongoing commitment to fund Bikeability over 4 years will hopefully give individuals and organisations the confidence to invest in training themselves.
You can read the details of today’s announcement, along with more about the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, by clicking here and going to the Department for Transport’s press release.
You can also read details of the Local Transport White paper at http://www.dft.gov.uk/press/speechesstatements/statements/baker20110119
A complete list of all awards made to local authorities for Bikeability from the Local Sustainable Transport Fund can be found here.
Great News that funding is confirmed.
More people cycling, more safely, more often.