Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): We welcome to the Committee today Colin Hutchinson, who is the director of the A5 western transport corridor and active travel in the Department for Infrastructure; and Peter McParland, who is the deputy director for active travel in the Department for Infrastructure. Colin and Peter, you are very welcome to the Committee today. We appreciate your time. I will let you get settled and get your files opened; it was a quick turnaround. I was just saying to the Committee that time is tight, so, if you do not mind, please brief the Committee for five minutes, after which I will go to members' questions.

Mr Colin Hutchinson (Department for Infrastructure): Thanks, Chair and members. It is probably a year since we were last here. I do not know whether it is to the day, but it is pretty close to that. I think that we were talking about enablers and what we were doing to get the Department ready for delivering on the 10% requirement in the Climate Change Act (Northern Ireland) 2022. You have the briefing paper, which is fairly extensive and gives you a detailed update on what we have been doing. I am going to summarise some of that and then move to where we are now on delivery. The focus is on the delivery of infrastructure projects on the ground.

A question that gets asked quite a bit is, "What is the definition of 'active travel'?" The Climate Change Act did not define what it was. The definition, which we have published as part of the consultation exercise — I will come to that in a second — at its highest level is travelling by physically active means, such as walking, wheeling or cycling. It covers all pedestrian activity, as well as cycling, and includes walking, wheelchair use, pram use, older people and people with disabilities, as well as all types of cyclists. That covers some of the most vulnerable road user groups. We want to ensure that everyone's journey is respected and that the infrastructure that we provide is as accessible and inclusive as possible. Accessibility and inclusivity are at the core of our new design guidance.

You asked last time, in about five different ways, what the 10% transport budget was, so we have done a lot of work on that. We have worked through every line of DFI budgets and identified the transport aspects. Whilst it fluctuates every year, the average over the past three years has been £850 million. Ten per cent of that is £85 million. Last year, it was £893 million, for example, so there is a fluctuation of almost £5 million in the 10% over that period which we will look to balance out as we move forward. We have looked not just at the brand-new, shiny infrastructure that we deliver each year but at what the Department has done historically. Again, we touched upon that briefly the last time we were here. There are key activities, such as footway maintenance and resurfacing, which are critical to ensuring that we have not only new infrastructure but maintenance of the existing infrastructure. We have something like 10,000 kilometres of footway and cycleway across the network. We also have street lighting costs, which are also critical in ensuring that we have safe and attractive active travel infrastructure, and other costs, including maintaining and upgrading pedestrian signalised crossings and other minor pedestrian enhancement measures. When you take all of that together with what I described as the "brand-new, shiny infrastructure" that we are building, you will see that it was £50 million last year. That is about 6% of the 10% active travel spend that is set out in the Act.

We talked about delivery. Our focus has moved to delivery. We have spent about 18 months to two years looking at setting the foundations to ensure that we have the capacity and capability within our teams to deliver the 10%, which is a big ask. We published what is probably the biggest active travel delivery plan that the Department has ever published. It was out for consultation, and the consultation closed in February. It identifies 200 kilometres of active travel infrastructure to be delivered in the 10-year period of the plan, with a further 1,000 kilometres beyond that period. We received about 330 responses to the consultation, and we are giving those consideration. Later in the year, we will be bringing recommendations to the Minister to finalise and, hopefully, publish the final version of the plan.

Last year, we had 53 schemes across the four divisions in various stages of delivery. In that year, we delivered 12 kilometres of new cycleway, footway and shared paths. The picture is something similar for this year. The key point to get across on delivering the schemes is that they take time. There is a lot of planning and consultation involved with them. We may have to go through the formal planning process, carry out environmental impact assessments and vest land, particularly for the bigger schemes. All of that takes time. We have set out a bit of detail in the briefing note about the schemes that we have delivered in the Belfast cycling network (BCN). I am not going to go through each of them, but I will say that a number of schemes are at various stages of the legislative process, because we have to have legislation in place to ensure that those cycle lanes are not blocked when they are built.

A further eight schemes are heading towards various stages of public consultation later in the year. We said last time round that, in this financial year, we will try to deliver as many as possible of the schemes in the short-term section of the Belfast cycle network delivery plan, and we are pretty much on schedule to do that.

I will quickly cover a couple of other areas. We have set up an active travel support office that has a small number of key consultant staff, who are focused solely on active travel activities. They develop programmes for us and assess the routes that we have identified in the delivery plan. A line in the delivery plan may start at A and end at B, but it could go to C or in various directions before it gets from A to B — it does not necessarily have to take the one route — so they will assess what is the most feasible route and develop a brief that can then be used to carry out the detailed design. They have carried out appraisals of about 150 kilometres over 90 routes since we appointed them. From our perspective, it is a really positive story, because it gives us that resource that we did not have.

In the briefing paper, six active travel signature schemes, totalling 38 kilometres in length, are identified. The last time that we were at the Committee, we talked about having a conveyor belt or a pipeline of schemes as we move through the years. It is key that we have as many schemes in the system now, because they take a number of years to get to construction. Those big active travel signature schemes will probably take about four years, because they will require vesting of land and potential public inquiries and will have to go through the formal planning process.

In the briefing paper, we have listed some of the key greenway projects that are under construction or have been delivered. I will draw out a couple of points. We are working closely with councils to develop a strategic, forward-looking five- to 10-year plan. We are also working with colleagues in the South on cross-border opportunities, how we deliver cross-border greenways and opportunities for other cross-border projects. On that point, we issued grant funding last year of just under £2 million to a number of very good projects.

The final topic —.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Very briefly, because you are close to your time, Colin.

Mr Hutchinson: I appreciate that. Lots of stuff is going on in the area. The behavioural change projects that we run are really important. We have the cycling proficiency scheme, the child pedestrian safety scheme and the active schools travel scheme, which representatives from Sustrans talked about the last time that they were here. I will not give you the numbers, but those have been really successful over the past year. They are the foundations to make sure that, through the means of education, we get children to use active travel — walking and cycling — so that, in future, more and more adults use it.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Thank you very much for that information and the information that you gave the Committee. Obviously, this session comes off the back of a session on the budget, and you may have heard our questioning the officials about the visibility of spend on active travel and whether it would be useful to have a separate allocation for that, because we know that 10% now needs to be spent on active travel. It would be useful to see where the historical spend has been. At the minute, active travel accounts for 5% to 6% of the budget. We need to get to that extra 5%, but the budget picture today is quite bleak. How confident are you that we will reach that 10%, given that we do not have multi-year budgets that allow you to plan for those big, capital-type projects, which are the same as building a road, essentially? You have vesting as part of that as well. Will you reach that 10%? If so, when?

Mr Hutchinson: As we know, there is no additional money coming to the Department as a result of the Climate Change Act, but my task is to get us to a position where we can reach that. We have said publicly that, by 2030, we expect to be in a position where we have the pipeline of projects there to be able to do that. That is why we are investing money in design now, at the early stages, so that we have that ready, in the hope that we have that 10% of the transport budget available to spend on active travel at that later time.

You will have heard before that 95% of the activities that we carry out in DFI are legislated for, and Ministers will have to grapple with the challenge of where they prioritise that funding. As officials, we are making sure that we are in a position where we can achieve that as soon as the budgets are available.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): OK. With regard to work that is being undertaken to link active travel with a decrease in emissions, we have been looking at transport plans and that type of thing recently, and a very stark graph was shown in the Committee of where we need to get to. What work is going on in the Department and cross-departmentally on that?

Mr Hutchinson: The Department is doing a lot of work on pulling together the impact that all types of modal shift will have on reducing our carbon footprint. The reality is that getting people onto public transport will do much more good on the carbon front than getting people into cycling.

We talk about the percentage of journeys that are less than two kilometres. If we were to get 50% of people switched from a car for those journeys, the amount of carbon reduction would still be very small relative to the overall amount of carbon that we have to reduce by in the three carbon budget periods and to hit the 2030, 2040 and 2050 targets. We can provide you with some figures around that if that would help.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): It would be good to see that. You made a very fundamental mistake today, Colin and Peter. You have come to the Committee, and you have not referenced Fermanagh and South Tyrone. [Laughter.]

Mr Boylan: Or Newry and Armagh.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Dungannon Park is mentioned, but the Sligo, Leitrim to Enniskillen greenway has not been touched on. I know that it is on the starting blocks, but, surely, that is a signature project. You referenced six signature schemes across Northern Ireland. There are six counties. Fermanagh is one of them, and I would like to see it included. There is a cross-border nature to it. It would be huge for tourism in my area. Can you also touch on what support will go to the council in relation to that? I am aware that there will be some vesting issues. Will the council have to vest that land or DFI?

Mr McParland: That project is council led, like all the major greenways. We are working closely with Leitrim County Council and Fermanagh and Omagh District Council on the delivery of the project. It is at stage 2, which is the preferred route corridor. At a certain point in the project, there will be a split, and Fermanagh and Omagh council will deliver the part in the North. We are working closely with them, and we are identifying their funding requirements in the incoming years to develop the design for that project. Apologies if we missed it from the briefing, but it is a major project that we are doing.

Specifically on vesting, a lot of the councils raised it as a concern. We were looking for pilot projects in various council areas to test different methods of land acquisition, and we selected Fermanagh and Omagh. That is why I chose Enniskillen greenway as one that we would investigate using the Roads Order (Northern Ireland) 1993 for the vesting of land. It comes down to asset ownership and maintenance on completion of the scheme, and that is what we are currently discussing with the council.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Will it take legislative change to facilitate how it is vested? I worry about delay to the project.

Mr McParland: No, it will not require legislative change. The definition of a road in the Roads Order includes roads that you cannot drive a car on. Roads that can be used by pedestrians are within the definition. We are confident that we can use the Roads Order to vest land for a greenway.

Mr Hutchinson: I will just add to that and clarify a point. Leaving aside the legal advice, the Roads Order is not designed to vest land on behalf of other bodies. It has to be for the Department, for an asset that it owns. Pretty much all the councils have powers to vest, and we understand the difficulties that they have with them. We have encouraged the councils to use those powers. As Peter says, we are looking to pilot a way in which we can vest the asset so that the Department would own it but would allow councils to enter into some sort of maintenance agreement for it over a long period.

If we were to try to overcome the problem completely, so that the Department could vest for the purposes of delivering council schemes, it would require a legislative change. We are trying to work within the existing constraints of the legislation to see what we can do.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Yes. It is a concern for councils and what it will mean overall for their budgets. It is something that comes back to me.

I will move on. There is lots for members to ask, lots on the list. John?

Mr Stewart: Yes, Chair. Thank you very much, Peter and Colin, for coming along today. We heard earlier about the massive financial pressures on the Department. Every pound is a prisoner, and I wonder whether you are the envy of directorates across the Department in that you have a bit more leeway in that it is ring-fenced for you, and at the moment you are unable to spend the money that you have, rather than requesting more. With the quest to try and spend this 10% in mind, how do we ensure value for money, to ensure that the projects that are being approved and delivered maximise delivery for the taxpayer?

Mr Hutchinson: That is a really good point. I touched base on part of that the last time that we met. All the enabling work that we have been doing is to try to move away from a scenario that we saw quite a number of years ago, in which we were spending money quickly on active travel schemes, and we were picking low-hanging-fruit-type schemes. Now we take a much more strategic view. That is where the active travel delivery plan comes into play. We focus on the routes that connect schools, town centres and communities, and those will be prioritised. Everything that we do comes with a business case. We have a scoring mechanism to make sure that the routes that we choose tick the boxes that we want them to. Those are the obvious areas that we want.

I am very confident that we are in a position where every pound that we invest provides the best possible value for money.

Mr Stewart: Thanks, Colin. The Chair referred to tracking emissions to quantify the spend versus the lowering of emissions. With that quantification in mind, how do we track the increase in the numbers of cyclists and pedestrians? How do we set targets? Does a pound buy us 0 1 —?

Mr McMurray: Garmin. [Laughter.]

Mr Stewart: You can try that on your watch. Have any of the Departments got a massive Garmin to track the entire country? How do we do that, and how does it progress over time in delivering value for money on active travel?

Mr Hutchinson: I will get Peter to touch on the surveys that are carried out now, and I will comment on the overall challenge [Inaudible.]

Mr McParland: In the short term, when we are developing the network, we need to think about the number of people who can access that network. We can calculate how many people we will be providing with a choice of how they travel for those shorter, everyday journeys, and, as Colin said, where it connects to. The level of provision is also really important, because the quality of the active travel infrastructure has to be sufficiently high in order for a large number of people to feel safe and confident in using it.

In the short term, we will know how many people we are giving the choice to make that shift. You have to remember that active travel journeys make up 25% of all journeys in Northern Ireland. That is what we believe from surveys. They are already carbon-free, so they do not impact on carbon reduction. If somebody switches from a car journey to an active travel journey, they are reducing their carbon footprint. In the grand scheme of things, compared with changing from internal combustion engines to electric cars, it will not move the graph, but everybody can make a difference in their journey and can reduce their own carbon footprint.

Other evidence tells us that, in order to create significant modal shift in the longer term, you have to have a connected active travel network. While a single scheme might connect 5,000 people to two or three destinations, connecting two, three or four schemes in a town and creating a whole connected network is where you will see the longer-term modal shift and, potentially, where we will see greater uptake of use. It would not be proportionate for us, every time we put in a new footway or cycle track, to carry out significant surveys before and after. Active travel is quite weather-dependent as well, but, in the larger towns and cities, for example, Belfast — for the multimodal eastern transport plan stuff, not for active travel — they will set up a ring of survey points so that, longitudinally, over a long period, we will be able to track modal shift through numbers coming into Belfast. That model could be replicated in other large towns, but it would not be proportionate to do surveys before and after every scheme.

Mr Stewart: Thanks, Peter. I have one more very brief question, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Very briefly, if you do not mind.

Mr Stewart: This ties into my last point about value for money, need and consultation. As an East Antrim representative,

I think that we might know what is coming, and that is the monstrosity that was built along the seafront at Whiteabbey with a budget from active travel. I know that there is progress on this, and I understand that it cost about half a million pounds, but I have never seen a fence trigger so many people in a really nice beauty spot along the seafront. How was that spend justified? Can we get an assurance, now that there is some rowback, that we will see consultation with councils and local representatives in future, so that, where cycle lanes are installed — I hope that they are — along promenades and along our lovely seafronts up and down the country, we will not see 6-foot walls and mesh all the way along those seafronts depleting the beautiful views?

Mr McParland: My understanding of that scheme is that the council was informed of the upcoming works through the divisional reporting cycle. However, it is probably fair to say that, when it was constructed in front of their eyes, there was a difference in what they perceived.

Mr Stewart: I think that that is fair.

Mr McParland: The previous barrier there was not adequate. It would not have stopped a car if it had left the road. The car would have ended up in the sea. When you replace a barrier, you have to look at the standards as they sit today, and the barrier that was put in was up to the current standard. The other thing to remember is that a cyclist's centre of gravity is higher than that of a pedestrian, so that is why a barrier has to be higher if it is beside a cycle track. The grid on the barrier is to stop kids. If it did not have that grid, kids could quite easily step and stairs their way up and over the barrier. That is the purpose of that, but I understand that they have decided to remove the upper portion of the grid.

Mr Stewart: I think that it is a work in progress, to be honest, but the reality is that there is going to be significant rowback on it. My hope is that we will have an amazing promenade and, up and down the country, will see cycle lanes being developed. No doubt, the fences that are there will need to be replaced, and my fear is that the norm, as the Department is now saying, will be a 5 feet-plus fence with mesh. First of all, you are going to run out of budget within a week because it costs £500,000 to build 100 metres. Secondly, you are using a sledgehammer to crack a non-existent nut because the problems that you identified have never happened at that location. That is my fear.

Mr Hutchinson: Your point is made. We are dealing with a few other projects at the moment on the north coast, and we want to make sure that they are sympathetic to the environment. We are totally on board.

Mr Stewart: I appreciate that. Are we going to see some progress on it, then?

Mr Hutchinson: Yes.

Mr Stewart: OK, thanks.

Mr McReynolds: Thank you, Colin and Peter, for coming in. I remember, when the Assembly was down, getting briefings from Colin Woods and Denis McMahon. The Department was exploring, at that stage, the definition of "active travel". Who did you engage with to come up with that definition, and is it now set in stone, or will there be further engagement to gather views from the public and the sector?

Mr Hutchinson: It is defined in the active travel plan. During the consultation, when we came up with the wording, we looked at Wales, Scotland, England and the Republic of Ireland, and they had similar but subtly different definitions. We tried to simplify it while not losing the message. Will we listen to other views? Absolutely. Even though the consultation on the active travel delivery plan, which included that definition, is closed, we are always open to listening to others and are happy to hear if you have a view on it.

Mr McReynolds: Lots of views are brought to me, as I am sure you can imagine. We heard about footways and street lighting. Is there a comparative breakdown between schemes and schemes being delivered? How much is spent in schemes and on street lights and on footways? I imagine that I will have a couple of calls after this because I did not hear the fixing of street lights mentioned previously in the context of active travel. Where has that come from?

Mr Hutchinson: We can provide the breakdown in writing. We had generally just been reporting on active travel in the form of, "Here's a new scheme. That number goes in there". However, we had not been looking at the wider role of what we already did and what was essential for active travel. Maintaining the existing network is key. If we do not do that, the 10,000 kilometres that we have will degrade and not be attractive for active travel. A primary reason for having street lighting, particularly in urban areas, is to make the streets safe and attractive. It is not for cars. It is primarily for pedestrians and making an area feel safe. Moving forward, we have agreed that we will provide street lighting on a lot of the key active travel infrastructure that we build to make sure that it can be used at all times of the day, winter and summer.

Mr McReynolds: Does your unit consider, for example, cars parking on footways? Do you look into that? If you are looking into making sure that the active travel infrastructure is well lit so that it is well used by pedestrians, do you look into cars obstructing footways? Do you have creative ideas that could be implemented to make them safer for pedestrians?

Mr Hutchinson: One thing that we have done — and, as I said, although it takes longer, it is essential — is to have legislation in place to ensure that enforcement can be taken against anybody who parks on footways. We work closely with our parking enforcement team to make sure that we are focusing on those areas.

Mr McParland: In the piece of work that we carried out, we looked at the activities carried out by the Department overall. The Climate Change Act refers to the overall transport budget. That led us to start looking at the overall activities for the benefits of pedestrians and cyclists. That drew out the fact that large numbers of people across the Department are working for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists. For example, The parking enforcement unit, which is primarily responsible for inconsiderate or illegal parking on footways, is primarily working for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists, as are the road maintenance inspectors, who check for footway defects to make sure people do not trip. While our team in the Department, is primarily responsible for the delivery of new active travel projects, although we take a wider view, there are significant numbers of staff across the Department and in the transport and roads asset management (TRAM) group who carry out work for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists. The piece of work we have done to analyse the finances has drawn out the importance of that work to the public and of making sure that people feel safe and secure when they are using the network.

Mr McReynolds: Lastly, Peter, you will remember that the propensity to cycle came up at the last all-party group on active travel. Was there a recent change in how the Department views that? How do you make sure that the routes that will deliver the most opportunities for active travel are prioritised?

Mr McParland: Colin mentioned the active travel support office, and some of the work it is doing around people, places and provision. The propensity to cycle feeds into that because if a lot of people can access high-quality infrastructure that brings them to the places they want to be, and it is not up a massive hill, it encourages the propensity to cycle. Factors, such as gradients, the quality of the infrastructure, the number of people and the places it connects them to, are considered to give us the overall confidence that the route will benefit a large number of people.

Mr McReynolds: Thank you.

Mr Durkan: I thank the witnesses for coming along. It has been a good and positive presentation. We do not get too many like that. What you did not cover in your presentation, you have covered in a lot of the answers. Can you expand on the extension of active travel and its definition to include things such as street lighting? I have asked questions about that for a number of years. The Committee just had a presentation from the Department on its monitoring round bids, and it is bidding for £12 million for street lights. Does the active travel unit see that as a risk? At what stage in the year will someone in DFI or DOF say, "You're not getting that of us, get it out of the active travel piggy bank"?
.

Mr Hutchinson: I am sure that that will not happen because the street lighting element is not new funding. If we attribute £5 million of street lighting costs to active travel, that will not come out of what we traditionally call our active travel budget. If we have an active travel budget of £22 million this year, the £5 million is already in the street lighting budget that we attribute towards the 10%, as opposed to money that we are taking, controlling and putting out. The footway surfacing or repairs are the same because it is money that is already in the section office budgets, but it is being spent on active-travel-related activities. We do not fund other holes in budgets. We all know that the budgets are tight, and Ministers have to make very difficult decisions about where to put the funding.

Mr Durkan: What will happen if it is evident that there will be an in-year underspend in active travel, despite the best efforts of your team and others, given the statutory requirement to ring-fence the funding for active travel?

If that money is taken in, where can it go? Is there somewhere else in the Department that it could be spent, potentially? I am not looking to rewrite your budget but I mean around road safety, cycling, education and things like that, where there have been issues before or difficulty in funding those programmes.

Mr Hutchinson: Something that I did not cover in the presentation is that there has been a view that we will never be able to get to the point where we spend 10% because it would just take so many projects. I think, by 2030, we will be at the point where we will have to make difficult decisions in the act of travel space alone as to which projects get prioritised and which do not. There are lots of good greenway projects, big flagship projects, that we have talked about, and projects, such as the Lagan bridge and the Strabane bridge that are all asking for money out of the active travel budget, so I do not think that we will be at the point of not being able to spend the money. As with any other programme that we deliver, there will be schemes that will run into problems and will have to be replaced with other schemes. There will be a year where we will spend a bit less take and a year where we will spend more. The key thing is whether or not there will be enough money in the budget to provide that 10% to the active travel team to deliver the schemes, whenever you have to weigh up making the road network safe and you do not have enough money to do that as well. Those are the difficult decisions that will have to be made year-on-year moving forward.

Mr Durkan: You will get to a point where there will not be an underspend, but you might not be there yet; it might not be for another five years. In the interim, how can we ensure that the money for active travel is not lost, if it can be because of the legislation? I know it is quite hypothetical but I think it is likely to arise, so how can that be best spent to promote active travel?

Mr McParland: The way that it works, within the active travel projects budget, is that if we identified an easement in-year, we have to identify that back into central finance and then central finance will decide what pressures in other parts of the Department that that funding will go to. However, the analysis that we have carried out has identified that there are three or four areas within TRAM where that budget could be reallocated and it would not negatively impact the overall active travel spend. For example, if I identified an easement but the section offices had identified that they were carrying out footway resurfacing schemes, putting in tactile paving and dropped kerbs to help people in wheelchairs or people with prams to navigate around the streets, that might be somewhere that the Finance Minister might decide to divert that easement into, and it would not negatively impact on the overall spend towards active travel. It would benefit some of the most vulnerable road users with how they get around the streets.

Mr Durkan: It is good to hear that a sort of reserve list already exists so that the Department is not clambering around. Thank you.

Mr Boylan: Just very quickly, the Monaghan to Middletown greenway is not on my list. I think that they are brilliant opportunities, to be honest, especially in the border regions. There was great optimism when they talked about that. Have you any information on that? My main question is that a lot of the voicing has been about the time scales and rolling out the schemes. A lot of people see good merit. What can the Department do to move those schemes on? I know about the vesting process; I am very familiar with the planning system and everything else, but, for us, looking forward, what can we do to move the schemes on?

Mr McParland: Cathal, apologies, maybe, within the briefing, it would have helped to provide a greater level of detail on each of the council-led greenway schemes and other active travel activities. If the Committee wishes, we could give a further breakdown of the projects that we have currently committed to allocating to. With regard to the Monaghan to Middleton greenway, we are working with the council on that. Our Southern colleagues are building up to the border and then there is approximately 2 kilometres to get us from the border into Middletown. We are working with the council on options for the delivery of that.

Mr Boylan: It is brilliant. It is not only active travel but cross-community and cross-border stuff. There is a bigger part to it than just all that. How can we move the schemes on and work?

Mr Hutchinson: Again, a lot of it will be budget-driven. It goes back to the point that I made a second ago. We will have more schemes than what the budget will allow for. From the perspective of greenways, it is about getting commitments from the partners, which are the councils, that they have the part funding to take those forward too. If all of those things fall into place, there is no reason why we cannot be on a programme that will deliver them as fast as we possibly can.

Mr Boylan: Work on the Ulster canal, especially, Colin. That is all that you have to concentrate on.

Mr McMurray: Thank you for the presentation. With the six signature schemes, albeit that some of them missed out, how many kilometres of scheme is that?

Mr Hutchinson: Between the six, I think that it is a total of 38 kilometres.

Mr McMurray: You mentioned delivery of 200 kilometres and then you mentioned 1,000 kilometres.

Mr Hutchinson: We are looking for many different routes of active travel through design to construction. The active travel delivery plan looks primarily at populations of greater than 5,000, whereas the active travel signature schemes are looking more at connecting those centres together. They are going to be tourist attractors, and they are going to be attractors for lots of things. The 200 kilometres that are in the active travel delivery plan are on top of those six signature schemes.

Mr McMurray: You mentioned a further 1,000 kilometres, if I picked you up correctly.

Mr Hutchinson: In the plan, the guys could not help themselves and restrict it to 10 years. They have looked at what this could look like in 20 years or 30 years, and they have identified that. Peter talked about the fact that you build certain active travel schemes, but they connect two or three locations at a point in time. If you multiply that by 20 or 30, they start interconnecting everything and it becomes a really coherent network. That 1,000 kilometres that we are talking about is getting close to that coherent network. That is quite a bit away in the future. The 200 kilometres is the 10-year objective.

Mr McMurray: Forgive me because maybe this is out there. You go into these things and there is an interactive map these days. Is there an interactive map for that?

Mr McParland: For the signature projects or for the active travel delivery plan?

Mr McMurray: For the signature projects, the 200 kilometres and the 1,000 kilometres. All of those things.

Mr McParland: There is for the active travel delivery plan. On the Department's website, you can look at the interactive map that shows the draft network plans for each of the settlements. As a result of the public consultation, there will be changes to that because we were very conscious that the people who live in those towns know best. That is why we held such a comprehensive public consultation. Our transport planners could take it so far, and then we really valued the views of the local people. We will make changes to the network plans in the towns to reflect local priorities and things like that. At the minute, if you go on to the Department's website and look at the active travel delivery plan, you will see the draft network plans for those towns. Over time, we will digitise through a GIS. We intend to put all of our plans on the GIS, so you will see how the proposed greenway plans will connect to the active travel delivery plans when they come into town and how the active travel delivery plan will intersect with the Belfast cycling network delivery plan on the edge of Belfast. That is the work that we will be carrying out going into the future.

Mr McMurray: Of those 1,000 kilometres, how much of that is specifically greenways?

Mr McParland: The 1,000 kilometres is 1,000 kilometres identified in the active travel delivery plan. That is the plan for the towns, with a focus on shorter everyday journeys. The number of kilometres in the strategic plan for greenways and those in the Belfast cycling network (BCN) delivery plan are on top of that again. Those three delivery plans all mesh together to create an overall connected network.

Mr McMurray: You mentioned low-hanging fruit being picked off. That is fine. That is 100%. If I think back, I can remember that, in 2016, the Minister gave the green light for that, but it seems to have stalled somewhat. You referenced that, but should we expect that, in the next x number of years, it will ramp up again or what? Is that the plan?

Mr Hutchinson: When I came into post in, I think, late 2022 and took over the active travel side of things, we changed a lot of things internally. We recognised that you cannot just take a burst of money every year, pick a scheme and spend it on that. You need to have a coherent, long-term, strategic plan. That is what the active travel delivery plan, the BCN delivery plan and the greenways plan do. By the way, we are going to review the greenways plan. However, you have to have that strategic view. You need to make sure that you have a mechanism to prioritise which schemes out of all those will provide the best value for money that we talked about. That is where we are at. All the foundations are now there. We have all those mechanisms in place. Moving forward, it is delivery, delivery, delivery but within the budget constraints that we have.

Mr McMurray: One more, Chair?

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Very quickly.

Mr McMurray: You mentioned the schemes to change of attitudes amongst children per se. Are there any equivalent schemes, dare I ask, for adults? I generally find that, when I cycle, it is the adults that perhaps need a change in attitude sometimes.

Mr McParland: There are. The Public Health Agency fund a contractor, Sustrans, to do two projects. One is called 'Leading the Way', and there is another. 'Leading the Way' is essentially about working with employers to try to encourage their employees to use active travel to get to work. There is another programme, the name of which escapes me, but it is funded by the Public Health Agency. It works in communities where there are certain active travel hubs and things like that. It carries out work in communities to try to encourage different community groups to use active travel. That is the Public Health Agency, however. It is not the Department.

Mr K Buchanan: Thanks, gentlemen. My question is about the team or group that you have set up, which you talked about at the start, Colin. Are the people in that team direct DFI employees, or are they consultants?

Mr Hutchinson: Peter, you can provide the exact number of people in the internal team.

Mr McParland: We are above 30 now, anyway.

Mr Hutchinson: Consultants were employed to develop the active travel delivery plan, which was published. That was a unique piece of work. We talked about the active travel support office. A consultant will be there for the next four or five years to basically be a tap that we can turn on and off to support our team. We are talking about a handful of people.

Mr McParland: There is a core group of five people in the active travel support office. They are consultant staff, who work closely with us.

Mr K Buchanan: Are those five people DFI employees?

Mr McParland: Sorry, no. There are five employees for three days per week. They work solely on my work on developing the programme of schemes for active travel.

Mr K Buchanan: They are DFI employees. Is that right?

Mr McParland: No, they are consultants.

Mr Hutchinson: There are 30-something DFI employees, and then there are five who have been externally sourced.

Mr K Buchanan: If you are going to be ramping up to 10% from, say, 6% or 7% at the moment, would it not be more cost-effective to employ your own people with that expertise, if they are out there?

Mr Hutchinson: You have probably heard in general at Committee before about the challenges that we face in recruiting and keeping staff. The Department has done a fantastic job over the past 12 months to two years in increasing the amount of recruitment and promotion. We have recruited externally, but, given the number of people who fall out at the far end through retirement or who leave for other reasons, we have pretty much been standing still. We have done remarkably well to develop a team, which, a couple of years ago was made up of only a handful of people internally, to get it to the point where we are now looking at having a handful of vacancies as opposed to a handful of people.

Mr K Buchanan: What would that save you, Colin, if you were fit to employ those people directly? Let us say that it is a consultant based against a DFI employee: what is that saving in a year, roughly?

Mr Hutchinson: I would not have the figures on that.

Mr K Buchanan: It is thousands.

Mr Hutchinson: It is definitely cheaper to have your own expertise, or the majority of the resource, internally in order to deliver internally, and to go external only for expert resource that you do not have. This is not something that has just happened overnight. I have been in the Department for 32 or 33 years, and this has been happening for at least 20 years. Government policies over the years have led to that position. The market is now the biggest constraint that we have.

Mr McParland: It is also fair to say, Keith, that our external consultant partners bring a lot of expertise to the table. The ATSO team were and are working on schemes in Dublin and Cork and are five years ahead of us. We have expertise from the leaders in England and Scotland. The people who write the active travel design guides and things like that are the expertise that we are able to tap into and we employ those people.

Mr K Buchanan: My next question is about what we might call the magic 10% number. Where do you see that being about new schemes that are based on fixing town footpaths? Let us call them old footpaths: are you with me? What is going to be new, as opposed to repairing old? If you were giving it to me in percentage terms, what is your magic goal?

Mr McParland: We set out a coherent plan for the previous Minister, Mr O'Dowd. That was primarily based around development of new projects, containing approximately £30 million of day-to-day spend. You would then need approximately £50 to £55 million of new capital expenditure every year in order to meet that. That new capital expenditure might be for capital resurfacing of footways rather than projects. This piece of work means that the Minister can make that decision in future on a year-to-year basis. It is fair to say, however, that if we want to encourage more people to mode shift to active travel, the development of new active travel —.

Mr K Buchanan: Irrespective of what the Minister is going to do in future, what are you doing today?

Mr Hutchinson: There is roughly £30 million for —.

Mr K Buchanan: Give me a percentage.

Mr Hutchinson: You are talking about 35 or 40% of the things that we do, which are essential to maintain the existing network.

Mr K Buchanan: So call it 35 or 40%, based on 60% new stuff. My concern is that you build new footways, and that is fine. Perhaps you heard my comment earlier about footpaths going nowhere. I am not going to name the one around Cookstown, but you are going to spend x amount of money on something that is going nowhere. You made the point earlier, Peter. It is like me building a lovely bathroom and the wife not using the bath.

Mr Hutchinson: I can answer that. I cannot specifically comment on the one at Cookstown because I do not know it. We get the same accusation about a lot of schemes that are built. We have to think about in terms of the 10-year or 20-year plan. With this plan, at the start, we are prioritising those routes that will maximise the benefit of the number of users on them and the opportunities there. However, in order to have a coherent network, we cannot build that overnight. It will not appear overnight.

Mr K Buchanan: I do not want to cut across you, but I want to make a point and then I will hand back to the Chair. This is about how you get active travel for the people who use it. Let us say that it is a numbers game, based on a safety game. You can build a new footpath in Cookstown going to x, with very little traffic on it, but I cannot get a footpath built for children who are walking to school. There was a big shout last week about putting flashing lights on buses. Children cannot walk to school because they have to walk on the roads. The verges are not being cut and they are lying out an extra metre. The kids are walking an extra metre out in the middle of the road. They are walking on the road, not on the footpath, because there are not enough numbers. That is a complete disaster for child safety. Whenever somebody is knocked down, then something will be done. The grass verges have not been cut, which is a road safety issue.

I am not taking away from your job of promoting active travel. You want to get people walking in numbers, which is fair enough, but there has to be a balance between numbers and safety and bringing it all together. Numbers cannot be the pure, ultimate goal.

Mr Hutchinson: I totally get that. Those things apply differently in rural areas in particular. I would be happy to hear more about that particular case.

Mr K Buchanan: I want to finish on this point: if legislation comes in for buses, it will not be a simple case of the bus stopping and the arm dropping down. There will be specific drop-off points for kids. What will that mean? More kids will be walking to those points, so it will be a bigger issue.

Mr Hutchinson: One of the core things for us is providing good quality active travel alternatives to school. We would be happy if you were to speak to us about that particular case.

Mr K Buchanan: I could spend a day with you in Mid Ulster because you have not mentioned it in your paper either

but we will leave that there.

Mr Boylan: You would not want to build anything in Mid Ulster.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Just Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Thank you very much for your time today. I just want to check up on one thing. Sustrans came before the Committee. It does a lot of work with schools, and I have seen the work that it does in local schools near me. It said that it has to bid for funding for the education piece around schools. Could there be a case where it could be given core funding to do that work right off the bat?

Mr McParland: Not in current legislation. In current legislation, our Department has the powers to provide grant funding to local councils only. Our Department does not have the power to give grant funding to just one charity. That is why we have a competition. Sustrans has been successful on a number of occasions year after year at that competition, but it is still a contract that it then fulfils.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): OK. There is lots more that we could discuss today, but we just do not have time. You are going to come back to us on a couple of things. I noted that one was the modelling around the emissions. We chatted about that, and you said that you might come back to the Committee on that. Also, we would like more of a breakdown on the council-led greenways.

Mr McParland: You will not see Sligo to Enniskillen on it now because it did not bid for any money last time, but we are working with it actively to work out how much it needs to bring that project through to the next stage.

Mr Boylan: After your request today, it will be working on it.

The Chairperson (Mrs Erskine): Do not worry, Peter and Colin; you will be hearing a lot more from me on that one. Thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it.

Mr McParland: Thanks very much.