Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): I welcome from the Department for Infrastructure Peter McParland and Joanne Veighey. The Committee has just had a very interesting session with Cycling UK. I invite you to make an initial presentation. We are pressed for time, and Committee members will probably have a whole range of questions for you, so it would be useful if your answers were to be as focused as possible. Peter, I am happy to hand over to you.

Mr Peter McParland (Department for Infrastructure): Thank you very much, Chair and members, for giving us the opportunity to present to the Committee on the active travel delivery plan.

I will start with a bit of background. As you heard earlier, urban bicycle network plans formed part of the build pillar in 'Northern Ireland Changing Gear: A Bicycle Strategy for Northern Ireland', which has been out since 2015. It is fair to say that the increased investment as a result of the Climate Change Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 has led to a renewed impetus to invest in active travel and to plan for it. In 2023, we started to work on the draft active travel delivery plan. You heard about that earlier, so I will not go into too much detail on it. When finalised, the delivery plan will complement the Belfast cycling network delivery plan and the strategic plan for greenways and provide us with a firm basis for the prioritisation and delivery of active travel over the next decade and beyond.

In November 2024, we held a grand launch event for the consultation to generate interest. We were thankful to have as speakers two Ministers: the Minister of Health and the Minister for Infrastructure, who, at the time, was John O'Dowd. An international perspective was provided by a representative from the Dutch Cycling Embassy who spoke at the event. We also had subject matter experts on health and transport in attendance. There was TV and local media interest, for which we were very thankful. We also went around every council area during the consultation period and held public engagement events. We held an online seminar and had focused engagement events with particular groups. We met representatives of older people and of people with disabilities, and we met university planning students to try to get younger persons' perspectives. Furthermore, we held a technical talk with the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT).

Those efforts resulted in 346 responses to the consultation, almost 300 of which were from individuals and 53 of which were from organisations, including councils and interested parties such as Cycling UK, the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust, the Inclusive Mobility and Transport Advisory Committee (IMTAC), RNIB and Guide Dogs.

The first thing that we asked about in our consultation was prioritisation. This is the prioritisation framework that we heard about earlier, and we were quite clear that we felt that most valuable journeys to prioritise in terms of routes would be connections to schools, to public transport interchanges and to town centres. That is a clear prioritisation framework, and you can see on the slide that, over the past year or so, to try to make that meaningful for people, we have boiled it down to the ideas of people, places and provision. How many people will a project connect and how many will have the opportunity to make use of the infrastructure investment? What places does it connect those people to, with that weighted priority towards those particular connections? What is the level of provision? We are trying to make the idea of prioritisation and a clear prioritisation framework on that basis.

We then went on to talk about design principles, and we asked two questions around that. We asked whether our designs should be people-centred with the aim of creating places that are welcoming and accessible to all, and you can see that we had very high support for that principle and for the principle of provision of high-quality infrastructure that is appropriate to the situation, with safety at its heart. Again, there were very high levels of support for that principle. The consultation responses included calls for clearer definitions and practical standards to ensure that those principles are meaningfully applied. We have carried out a lot of work on a review of best-practice guidance across these islands, and two of the key documents that we will apply to our designs going forward are there. 'Cycling by Design' is the Transport Scotland guidance for cycling, and 'Inclusive Mobility' is the key UK guidance document on pedestrian accessibility and inclusivity in streets.

We went on to ask some questions about road space allocation and rethinking traffic management. Again, you can see that there was high support for that ideal. On the idea of rebalancing the street, we are talking about looking at a street in cross section from building line to building line and considering the space that is required by each user group in that street, concentrating on the most vulnerable users first. We are talking about people who are pushing prams, wheelchair users and pedestrians. First, what space do those people need in the street? Then, if we are considering introducing cycling in the street, how much safe space is required to enable safe cycling infrastructure in the street? And so on, and so on. If there is not enough space in the cross section of a street, can we rethink traffic management and look at reducing speed limits and one-way systems? Are the public open to those types of ideas in order to try to make our streets more people-centred? You can see that there was strong support for that in principle.

Finally, we proposed draft network plans and draft priority routes within those network plans. Not only did we say, "Here are all the routes within every settlement, which, if they were all delivered, would be a clear and comprehensive network", but we set out what we could deliver over the first 10 years, with a reasonable expectation of future budgets and those future budgets being a commitment to meet the Climate Change Act objective of 10% spend by 2030 and then continuing at that level. That is what we believe we could meaningfully deliver in a 10-year period.

With regard to next steps, once we have taken the Committee's views on board from today's feedback, we hope to finalise our plan in the coming months and present it for ministerial approval and publication. We will then commence work on tranche 1 of the schemes. In your evidence session with Cycling UK, you heard about the Bee Network in Manchester and what was able to be done there over five years. A problem that we faced with the Belfast cycling network delivery plan, which was published in 2022, is that it takes two or three years to bring a programme of schemes from inception to construction. I think that the Bee Network and its programme of schemes took from 2019 to 2024, which is a five-year period, to be brought from inception to construction. An individual scheme of 6·5 miles was delivered within that time. These things do not happen overnight. There are traffic regulation order (TRO) processes associated with them, and there are meaningful objections that need to be dealt with in any individual scheme. There is the whole process of bringing in secondary legislation to legislate for cycle routes in order to make sure that people do not park on them and things like that.

The Department is committed to delivering the schemes that matter most to people. We will engage with the public on an ongoing basis throughout the implementation phase after the plan is finalised and published. Thanks very much for listening, and I look forward to your questions.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): Thank you very much for that presentation, Peter. I am going to kick off. Cycling UK raised the issue of stakeholder engagement, and I think that Andrew McClean phrased it best when he said that his son had just been born when this started, and that he is now three. Our understanding, from what you said last time, is that this stakeholder engagement forum will start in May. Briefly, and in general terms, what happened in the period between 2023 and 2026? That seems like quite a long time for something to be put in place to capture stakeholders' views.

Mr McParland: The draft plan was developed through 2023 and 2024. We engaged with councils, particular user groups and other things like that to develop the draft plan that then went to —. A lot of transport planning work — a lot of number crunching and things like that — goes into that to come up with network plans. We then launched the consultation in November 2024, and it ran until the end of February last year. In the past six to nine months, we have taken on board all the comments from the 346 respondents and amended network plans based on the local engagement that we got from people during the consultation period. It takes that length of time to amend those local networks and get ministerial agreement to the consultation response report, which we sent to the Committee in November last year. As you know, this has been the first opportunity to have this session. Months of the timeline have been lost, but there have been steps along the way.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): OK. I get that. I am trying to be fairly balanced. I do not want to assume what the policies and procedures for consulting or engaging are in the Department. My understanding, from my experience in the Department, is that you can do —. My reflection is that, in that time period — it is not a question; it is more of a statement. My understanding is that reaching out to key bodies for advice, even if it is vaguely consultative or asking for opinions on stuff that is being drafted, gets those people on board. They may not like your response, but you have asked for their opinion, and that is a useful step for the Department to reflect on when it engages in the future. I will park that one there.

The next one is urban and rural balance. From the correspondence that we got, and as you reflected on the responses from the consultation, there is a bullet point on the need to:

Can you give a little more detail about what that looks like?

Mr McParland: The active travel delivery plan is the plan for urban settlements, and that is why we used the 5,000 figure that we heard about earlier today, and there is a view that that is spreading the jam too thinly. Good active travel infrastructure in a rural settlement can look quite different. In a larger, more urban settlement, the opportunities for cycling to be an attractive mode of transport are greater than they would be in a village, where it takes 15 minutes to walk from one side of it to the other.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): And it probably has a 30 mph speed limit, which is a bit safer.

Mr McParland: Good active travel infrastructure in a rural environment looks quite different. What we had to do first, within the urban environment, was work out what a good active travel network would look like at that slightly larger scale.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): No, that is fine. I am sure that we will hear more about that. Finally, on the Department taking forward some of those plans, whatever the schemes themselves look like —. I am not going to get into the minutiae. I am sure someone else will pick up on — I think you used the phrase "spreading the jam a little thin" — what these schemes will actually look like. I think they are called the tranche-1 schemes. Coming from the other side of the argument, if you are going to put a cycle lane along a road that has lots of houses on it, and if the constituents prefer it not to be there because it takes away car parking or makes it more difficult in terms of how they go about, what recourse do they have to feed into what happens next? Has that stopped now, because the consultation is over?

Mr McParland: The consultation and the finalisation of the priority routes will set out what we intend to do over the next 10 years across the settlements. The individual council areas probably have a couple of towns, and we could put all the investment for the next 10 years into one of those two towns. However, you can imagine what will happen if I go to Derry City and Strabane District Council and suggest that all the money be spent in Derry and none be put into Strabane, or if I ask Ards and North Down Borough Council to spend all the money for the next 10 years in Bangor and not worry about Newtownards. Whilst there might be an argument for that from a technical point of view, the reality is that none of our elected representatives' groups are in that space. In an individual settlement, we have to look at the schemes that have the greatest benefit, and we will try to do that with our tranche-1 schemes. We will try to show people the benefits that can accrue if they invest in active travel and make walking and cycling a more attractive option. The hope is that, from that, the acceptance of and support for the schemes will grow.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): That is fine. That certainly explains it. I will make a reflection before I bring in the Deputy Chair. When we grew up, my generation all used active travel. I am so archaically old, but that is what we did. We all had bikes, and we cycled to school and ran around the streets in uncoordinated chaos. As Cycling UK said, we are a car-heavy society, and our children seem to be slightly more compressed into their homes than we were. There are not just health benefits from active travel; there are a whole range of benefits. For my son Zach, who is in P6, it is about confidence. When we told him that he could cycle to school, he said, "Really?" He crosses two roads, and that is a big deal for him. We want to see good schemes coming forward, as Andrew McClean pointed out, particularly for young people, which facilitate hubs and spokes, or whatever it looks like, especially those of primary-school age. That is pivotal. I will stop there and try to live by my own rules and bring in the Deputy Chair.

Mr Stewart: Thank you, Peter and Joanne, for your patience today and for your presentation and answers so far. None of us expected this to be perfect from day 1. This is a process that you have been given, and I know that it is going to evolve over time. What we heard from Cycling UK, as you will be aware, was a pretty damning assessment on the back of a pretty damning report from the Northern Ireland Audit Office. First, then, how are you going to take stock of and resolve the main issues that have been highlighted by the likes of stakeholders such as Cycling UK and by the Northern Ireland Audit Office in its report, which points out key failures up to now, particularly around a strategic and coordinated reply? Are you confident that the consultation and the work that is going to be done is going to lead to resolutions of the problems that have been highlighted to date?

Mr McParland: I will start with the Audit Office report. The Minister welcomed the responses to the Audit Office report, and so did I personally. In a sense, all of the Audit Office report's recommendations were things that we wanted to do anyway or were planning to do. To have the Audit Office reinforce that was a very powerful and useful thing for us. It pointed out, rightly, that we have not yet reached agreement with all of our stakeholders in respect of, in particular, what we constitute as active travel spend. Going back to the first presentation, the Department's position is that fixing and lighting footways is primarily beneficial for pedestrians and cyclists, and that is why they have been included in our calculations of where we are. We might never reach agreement with all our stakeholders on that, but it will not be for the want of trying.

Mr Stewart: That is fair. The stakeholder engagement forum is really useful, because it is integral to all of this that we have complete buy-in — maybe not always agreement, but buy-in to a process of proper engagement. That has clearly not worked up to this point; we can all accept that there has not been that level of engagement. How do you see that evolving? How do you see the stakeholder engagement group working? How do you see it shaping policy? Where does it sit when we compare it with engagement and overlap with local councils and other Departments?

Mr McParland: The governance arrangements that we are setting up are that there will be a programme board for the delivery of active travel. That is the decision-making body with a senior responsible officer in charge of it who is a director in the Department. The stakeholder forum and the local council engagement forum will sit below that level. The board will take the views of the forums and seek their opinions on things, which will help to inform policy. That is the simple layout of it. I hope that we, Cycling UK, IMTAC and the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust all have shared aims and objectives. We generally work positively together to try to further those aims. I hope that the stakeholder engagement forum will be a vehicle that strengthens that partnership.

Mr Stewart: You said that the chair who would oversee that would be somebody internal, likely at director level. Is there any argument, or might you be swayed by the notion, that there chair could be independent — somebody who can bring all stakeholders together, given the level of overlap — or, potentially, an active travel champion who could be, as is the case in other areas, a key tsar to oversee this and bring everyone together, rather than being an internal departmental role?

Mr McParland: That is an interesting point, John. It is not the model that we have set up or —.

Mr Stewart: I appreciate that, but is there any scope to look at it?

Mr McParland: I am not saying that it does not have value. I know that there are independent commissioners for a number of things in Northern Ireland.

Mr Stewart: I am not just suggesting a commissioner for the sake of it, by the way.

Mr McParland: An active travel commissioner would be pretty niche. You could potentially have a commissioner for infrastructure delivery, but I do not know about a commissioner for active travel.

Mr Stewart: When people hear the word "commissioner", they think, "Massive office, huge staff and massive budget". I am not suggesting that. I am talking about having an active travel champion in the same way that we have digital champions, who can bring things together without massive expense to the public purse. It would be somebody outside the Department. Other regions or areas do it that way. I just wondered whether bringing people together and keeping them on their toes would add benefit.

Mr McParland: I, personally, do not have an opinion on it, to be honest, except to say that I will answer to any master. [Laughter.]

Mr Stewart: OK. My final question is about the ongoing consultation on the plan and how that links to public transport. We expect people to walk and cycle and then maybe get the train. How is that being done in working with Translink and other organisations that provide, for example, community transport and public transport? How do you see those linking up?

Mr McParland: At the active travel delivery plan level, linkages to public transport interchanges are one of the key priorities. We also work directly with Translink. As it is part of the departmental budget, some of Translink's spend is on active travel. The idea behind that is that it will invest in, for example, secure cycle storage at its origin train stations for the first-mile journey. At destination train stations, such as Belfast Grand Central Station, a bike share scheme might be more valuable — the likes of Belfast Bikes linking up with Grand Central and access to Belfast city centre. That is, more or less, the Dutch model of multimodal journeys. Some other countries, such as Denmark, for example, invested quite heavily in allowing people to bring their bikes on trains. However, that fell foul of its own success. Sooner or later, when such a scheme becomes successful, you will run out of space. Under the Dutch model, there are some train stations in the Netherlands that have 5,000 bike parking spaces. It is scalable.

Mr Stewart: We have seen that at some of the local stations. Less so at park-and-rides, but that may evolve over time and the scheme may be extended.

Mr McParland: It will evolve over time. That is the model for multimodal journeys that we are aiming for.

Mr Stewart: OK. I have a few more, but I will wait until later, because I am conscious of time. Thank you, folks.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): Thank you, John, for parking those. We will see how we get on at 12.30 pm.

Mr Harvey: With regard to your consultation, was it always —. Sometimes, consultations mention the groups or people whom you met and did it with. Would you ever visit areas and talk to locals who could tell you that there was a need for connectivity there? I will go on a wee bit, and then you can respond. Also, we do not want paths and stuff to be built where it is handy. We want them to be built where the need is. I like your connections to schools, interchanges and town centres. What is most important to be people-centred. As I say, it is one thing to decide, "Right", and then go to an area, but in that area the need needs to be greater. Is that OK?

Mr McParland: Harry, I will start off with our approach to trying to get the local voice during the consultation on the active travel delivery plan, and then Joanne can come in and explain a wee bit about what we intend to do through meaningful engagement on schemes that fall out of the active travel delivery plan.

As well as the launch event, the consultation, the information on the website and things like that to try to get the attention of the general public, we went out to every council area. We had at least one event in each council area, and the main purpose of those events was to try to get the local voice. I always use Ards and North Down as an example, because the Ards and North Down Cycle Campaign Group was very considered and positive in its engagement with us.

I think that we spent two or three hours with Andrew McClean and a number of members of the group going through the network plans in significant detail. They proposed changes, and we had to go back to the transport planners, run those numbers through the system and check whether the suggestions stacked up quantitatively against our prioritisation framework. By and large, they did. Where we could, we made amendments to the network plans based on local information that we received. Joanne, do you want to speak about that?

Ms Joanne Veighey (Department for Infrastructure): We are trying to embed stakeholder engagement throughout the design process of the individual routes that we are bringing forward. A key bit of that at the very earliest stage will involve drawing up an engagement plan, identifying all the stakeholders that we want to engage with and looking at how we will do that. There will then be initial engagement on the preliminary design stage. A public engagement event associated with that will allow people in the area to give us their views, which we will take through to detailed design.

We are also looking at ways in which we can engage with other groups. If there are schools along the route, we will look at how we can engage younger people. We are exploring ways in which we can do that.

Then, in the statutory process stage, when we come to TROs, there will be another engagement event, which will be a statutory consultation, to allow people to view the final proposals. We can amend signs based on anything that we hear, should that be appropriate.

Mr Harvey: There are 42 urban settlements. Do you feel that there are any that have been left out?

Mr McParland: We had to split it somewhere. There is a view that you should concentrate all your investment in the four or five largest, most densely populated areas. The counter-view is that everyone is a stakeholder, and that there should be regional balance and fairness right down to the individual.

In the active travel delivery plan, we had a clear urban/rural split, and the limit in the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) statistics for urban settlements is 42 towns. When you get below that and your settlement size starts to get smaller, cycling becomes, on a shorter everyday journey basis, less of an attractive option because walking is a perfectly attractive option. If you can get to your local school, shop and doctor in a village all within a 10-minute walk, is it worth investing in segregated cycling facilities in that village for a two- to three-minute cycle, or are you better off spending money on reducing speed limits, on traffic calming measures, on additional pedestrian crossings and on other things that make the streets safer for people to walk around?

Mr Harvey: We nearly need to consider putting roofs on our cycle paths at the minute.

Mr McParland: Absolutely. [Laughter.]

Mr McReynolds: Thank you both for coming in today. I will touch on something that you, Peter, mentioned about the regional balance piece. I will play devil's advocate for a second. MLAs in the Building have talked to me quite disparagingly about work that they see in their local areas in respect of ring roads and stuff such as that. I fear that, if we spread ourselves too thin — I think that the phrase "spreading the jam" was used in the previous session — we will lose those naysayers, who may see active travel schemes popping up that start at a strange location, finish at a strange location and are not really used that much. We have seen examples of that in Belfast. I think particularly about the Dublin Road, where there was a lot of confusion about the cut-off for a temporary cycling scheme. It started nowhere and finished nowhere. I have been on that route myself. We may lose the active travel sector a little bit if we spread ourselves too thin with those minor schemes. We are also losing people who may not be supportive of active travel in the grand scheme of things.

Andrew spoke about Luxembourg and Greece. How do you square the circle of the 42 locations across Northern Ireland, which may create more minor schemes in comparison with one location that is all-singing, all-dancing and is something for all areas to look at and say, "Jeez, I really want that"?

Mr McParland: We are not talking about a large number of minor schemes. The active travel delivery plan rightly acknowledges that, previously, schemes were prioritised using a different matrix. They were prioritised at a divisional level as well, so there was no centralised plan for what we were to do. There was a prioritisation matrix in each area, based on requests from members of the public, or for whatever other reasons. That is what we have moved away from with the active travel delivery plan. When people see the plan, they will see where we are going to spend our money over the next 10 years. They will see that the routes are in settlements, and that they are being prioritised on the basis of connecting the greatest number of people to the most beneficial places.

I challenge anyone who sees our first-tranche schemes in the coming months to say that there are schemes to nowhere. They are not in that plan. Each project in the plan is, on average, in the region of a couple of million pounds per scheme. Therefore, it is not a case of spending £50,000 in one settlement and £100,000 in another to produce low-quality infrastructure, which has been shown not to be beneficial in encouraging more people to see active travel as an alternative.

Mr McReynolds: You talk, Peter, about the next 10 years, but, as a local councillor, I saw schemes being held up or taking a long time in Belfast over the past 10 years. Based on that experience, how confident are you that the next 10 years will be better and faster?

Mr McParland: We have more resources. The Belfast cycle network delivery plan was published in 2022, just short of four years ago. We have already delivered some schemes, including the Comber greenway lighting, which was one of the first; the Lagan gateway; and the Forth Meadow Community greenway. Currently, we have on the ground three schemes from the short-term list: Island Street, Lagmore Avenue and phase 1A of the West Belfast greenway. We are starting to see those schemes. We also have a number of schemes that are in the middle of the statutory process, which is really important. It might be frustrating for somebody who wants to get something built or who has to manage budgets, but, at the same time, the public has a right to object to proposals. That is what those statutory processes are for. It takes time to work closely with individual objectors to try to resolve issues. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we are not, but that is why the schemes that you talked about have taken longer.

In the next month or two, significant milestones will be reached with the likes of the Dublin Road and Botanic, which you mentioned. We will be holding a public information event on that scheme. We are also bringing forward the Ravenhill Road scheme through to the TRO process. Those big, impactful schemes, which will cost at least a couple of million pounds each, will be coming forward in the coming months. Unfortunately, that is how long it takes to bring those schemes forward.

Mr McReynolds: I lived in France for a while, and, when COVID happened, Paris just went out and changed everything. I have been back since, and it is completely different from what I remember. Famously, on Hill Street, we put down some cones, but people drove over them. We did not really do that much when there was a unique opportunity, with fewer people on the roads. I am totally supportive of people having the right to object and not to be supportive of something, but perfection, and getting everybody on board, is sometimes the enemy of the greater good of what we are trying to achieve.

Mr McParland: I look forward to the Committee's having that view when we bring forward pieces of TRO —.

Mr McReynolds: I am always happy to, but do you not think that, sometimes, trying to please absolutely everybody can slow down what you are trying to achieve, which is to get more people cycling? For the past while, cycling has accounted for some 1% of journeys made. During COVID, at Knock junction in East Belfast, I saw two parents out with two kids. I have not seen that since. Parents are terrified of bringing their children out onto the roads.

What you are both trying to achieve is good, but we need to show leadership. That is the point that I am trying to make. What you are both trying to do is really good. We should try to get absolutely everybody fully supportive, so that the process is not frustrated.

Mr McParland: Peter, I assure you that it is not the case that, if we receive an objection, a scheme is shelved indefinitely. However, we try our best to resolve material objections before we bring a TRO to you for approval.

Mr McReynolds: Lastly, you talked about being in front of the Committee today, finalising plans and then bringing them to the Minister for approval. What is the timeline there? I heard "finalisation" and thought that that sounded vague. You talked about bringing them to the Minister, but Ministers have constrained time. What is the rough timeline, from today?

Mr McParland: Go for it, Joanne. Joanne is in charge of that.

Ms Veighey: We are looking at finalising the wording and bringing it to the Minister in late March, and at publication in April. That is what we are aiming for at the minute.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, folks. I will not keep you too long. I appreciate that you were listening to the earlier briefing, so I will not rehearse all the points that were made. I am keen to get a wee bit of clarity around:

which is terminology that is used in the papers. You heard my view earlier: I am clear that, in order to encourage active travel, we need safe roads, working street lights and safe footpaths. I am keen to get a bit of clarity on your position on that.

Mr McParland: With the Climate Change Act's coming in, the Department had to, for the first time, properly consider how much it spent on active travel. We had to look at the wording of the Act. It specifically refers to "overall transport budgets". That pushed us to look not only at capital, which is the capital budgets that we talk about for developing the network, but at the resource budgets of the Department, because the law refers to the overall budget. That meant that we started to look at all the different activities, line by line. The rule of thumb that we used in that consideration was, "Is this activity primarily for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists?". That was the measure that we used to determine whether we considered something to be active travel. Take potholes and road resurfacing as an example. Considering that about 1% of journeys on roads are made by cyclists, can you really say that fixing a pothole on a carriageway is primarily for the benefit of cyclists? However, if you are looking at a footway defect, or overgrown hedges that somebody pushing a pram has to go onto the road to get past, is that maintenance investment primarily for a pedestrian or cyclist? That is the measure that we used. You could argue that 1% of the carriageway resurfacing budget should therefore be counted as active travel because 1% of the journeys on carriageways are cycle journeys. However, the Audit Office could have a view that some of our things are window dressing. Probably the most controversial one was the idea of street lighting. We believe that we took a fairly conservative approach to that, attributing 50% of the street lighting budget to active travel. I believe that more than 80% of street lights are in built-up areas where there are footways and things such as that. The primary purpose of street lighting is for the amenity of pedestrians walking at night. Cars have headlights, and can use their full beam on rural roads. Since Roman times, the principal purpose of street lighting has been for the amenity of people walking on streets at night.

Mr Dunne: Safety has to be paramount as well.

Mr McParland: Absolutely.

Mr Dunne: I fully support that.

Do you agree that the poor and dangerous condition of roads discourages active travel? I have heard that from constituents. We see every day that, in some cases, there is a real risk to life. That is the scale of the problem on our roads.

Mr McParland: I absolutely agree. It is about the severity of when a cyclist or motorcyclist hits a pothole versus the severity, generally, of a car's hitting a pothole. There is no comparison.

Mr Dunne: There have been exceptional periods of heavy rainfall over the past six weeks; I believe that there has been a record amount in over 140 years. There is a case for some flexibility, in order to get the basics right. I am firmly of the opinion that we need to make our roads safe for all users, including those participating in active travel. If the foundations are not right, we will, ultimately, not get the right trajectory on active travel.

Mr McParland: There is one wee thing that I will mention in that regard. The refocusing in the Department on active travel and pedestrian and cyclist safety that came about because of the Climate Change Act allows us, for not a lot of extra money, to make a big difference on some easy bread-and-butter issues, such as overgrown hedges and verge creep that narrows a footway.

Mr Dunne: That is a very common issue.

Mr McParland: Being able to acknowledge, recognise and quantify the money that you spend in those areas as active travel helps to highlight all the different benefits for all those different people.

Mr Dunne: There is a focus on cars, but there are so many people who do not have access to cars because of a whole range of circumstances. They need to be considered as well. The point about hedges is very common. I certainly hear about that in my role as an MLA. I appreciate the work that you are doing. Thanks for that, folks. I am conscious of time.

Mr McMurray: Thank you for the presentation. I will try not to be too long-winded. I will pick up on one of the things that you said. Again, it touches on more rural areas and different approaches. You mentioned the process for developing one-way schemes. That has been mentioned, albeit that there has been blue-sky thinking in some regards. You can see how that would affect rural roads and locations where you could link things up. It seems like a sensible way in which to increase it. What is the process for that?

Mr McParland: In the consultation, we asked whether, when we are looking at an active travel scheme, we should try to rebalance the street on the basis of considering the needs of the most vulnerable users first, and then working in. Sometimes, in the cross section of a street, you will get to a certain point at which there is no room left. Generally, it is only when you get into that situation that you would want to start to consider, "Well, if we haven't got enough room for two lanes of traffic in both directions, is it a case of one lane of traffic in each direction, or is it a case of two lanes of traffic in a one-way circulatory system?". It was really asking for the public's opinion on whether they believe that that is a viable thing for designers to consider. It is really more in a settlement environment, Andrew, rather than introducing one-way roads in a rural environment, if that makes sense.

Mr McMurray: How could the general public say, "Here's an idea" — in the blue-sky thinking sense of the word — "that makes sense"? How would they go about engaging with you guys on that?

Mr McParland: When we bring forward our individual tranche-1 projects, we will have our initial thoughts, so that we have something to talk about. We want to bring the schemes forward to get the public's view at a really early stage, rather than designing a final scheme and somebody saying, at the last minute, "Have you thought about doing this?", or "Why don't you do that instead?". We want to get the public's view at an early stage in scheme development. When we bring the individual schemes forward, I hope that you will see that there will be an opportunity for those types of suggestions to be taken on board.

Mr McMurray: Some of the proposals had a high number of "agree" responses and a low number of "disagree". Equally, a lot of proposals had not so many responses, with there being a bit more of a balance between "agree" and "disagree". What will the approach be to those when they come to be reflected on, progressed and developed?

Mr McParland: There was fairly clear endorsement of all of the main principles for how we are going to go about developing the schemes, but it got a bit more nuanced when we got into the individual settlements and whether respondents thought that an individual route should be prioritised. Some people did not believe that it should. We looked through all of the responses, and, where there was a clear view from the people in that town that, for whatever reason, they did not think that the highest-scoring scheme was valuable, we took that on board, relooked at it and asked what the reason for that could be. We tried to tease that out in the engagement that we had with people on the day. Having heard the views of the people who live in those towns, and their telling us, "That's not where you should be concentrating first", we have amended plans. We have taken those views on board and made changes.

Mr McMurray: The propensity to cycle tool was talked about in the previous session. Have you used that?

Mr McParland: It was not used when we developed the plan. In late 2023 or early 2024, we realised that we needed a plan. We used our transport planning framework to commission transport planners to develop the plan. In the intervening year and a half, we have also commissioned a separate piece of work to develop the propensity to cycle tool, because we knew that the active travel delivery plan was a proportionate piece of work to give us a basis from which to start. However, now that we are going to be looking at prioritising individual routes in each town, the propensity to cycle tool is one of the key tools that we will be using to determine the potential value and benefit of an individual scheme. We did not have the tool in place then, but it is one of a number of key things that we have done over the past year and a half to try to give ourselves a quantitative basis for the prioritisation of the individual schemes.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): Peter, did you want to come in with a quick one?

Mr McReynolds: On Andy's point, how long does it take to apply the propensity to cycle tool? How long does it take to find out the likely uptake?

Mr McParland: The propensity to cycle tool is an app that draws on census data and a number of other datasets to determine the likely popularity of a route, based on how many people live in that area, where the route goes and the density, amongst other things. You can then apply a couple of different filters. You can see how many people, per day, would use a particular route, based on the levels of cycling that we see in Northern Ireland today, for instance, or how many people that would be if we had Dutch levels of cycling. It is a web-based app.

Mr McReynolds: In my head, having an app means that, if you quickly press a few buttons, it will give you an answer. Does it not make sense to apply that now?

Mr McParland: It is there, Peter. All of the information is there for the entire road network in Northern Ireland. When we are focusing on a scheme, we look at that road and at what the tool is telling us. That information goes into the business case for that route and that scheme.

Mr McReynolds: That has not been applied to what we have today. That is my point.

Mr McParland: It was not applied to the active travel delivery plan because we did not have the tool when we developed that plan. However, it is absolutely going to be used in bringing forward the tranche-1 schemes and the priority routes. It is part of our toolkit for determining the business case justification for taking a certain scheme forward and not taking another scheme forward first.

The Chairperson (Mr Martin): Thank you, Joanne and Peter, for coming to the Committee and presenting. It has been a very useful session. We are always very happy to have you guys here, chatting about these things. Thank you very much for your time today.

In a 'Back to the Future' way, I have to seek agreement that the evidence session that we have just had be recorded by Hansard. If not, we will have to put you in a DeLorean and send you back about an hour. Are members happy enough?