New Forest cycle projects fail to live up to grant expectations

The New Forest’s grant bid document

The New Forest’s grant bid document

The New Forest National Park Authority may end up spending just 15 per cent of its £3.57m  DfT cycling grant award in the way the original bid document proposed.

The flagship plan for a £2m bike hire scheme collapsed last month (LTT 22 Aug) but LTT has learnt that two of the other four projects in the funding bid will not be delivered as envisaged.  

The only projects that seem on track are a £500,000 capital grant scheme for local businesses and communities to bid to, and a £50,000 signposting project.

The collapse of the bike hire scheme prompted calls for the National Park to hand back the grant to the DfT. However, the Department has said the park can  keep the grant and spend it on other cycling projects.

The New Forest received £3.57m from the DfT towards a £5.7m cycling programme. The Park Authority told the department that all the projects in the bid had been “carefully designed to be deliverable by March 2015” – the deadline for the funding to be spent.

One high profile project was to be a £1.6m family cycle centre located beside Brockenhurst railway station. As well as being the main base for the bike hire scheme, this would have provided retailing, workshop facilities, a visitor information centre, café, showers, an area for cycle training, and a luggage transfer service so that people arriving by train could cycle to their hotel/campsite with their bags delivered by an electric van. 

The bid said £1.3m of the costs would be met by the private sector. But a spokeswoman for the park authority told LTT this week: “The commercial partner has now decided not to proceed with their project. As part of the programme review, we are currently assessing other ways to deliver the family cycle centre.”

The bid also included a £500,000 ‘pedal bus’ network, deploying 15 pedal buses, each with capacity for up to eight people. The buses were to operate a network of short-distance routes to published timetables between March and October, and should have started this year. The National Park estimated 30,000 passengers would use the pedal buses in year one and said the  project would be the “first public transport operation of pedal buses, potentially in the world”.

This project will no longer proceed in the way it was originally envisaged. A spokeswoman told LTT: “Following further feasibility work which identified the legal and operational challenges of implementing the pedal bus project on highways, we are investigating delivering the project on private land through our grants scheme.”

Discussing the overall cycling programme, she said: “We are currently meeting with a range of partners and the DfT to discuss the revised programme, which will focus on improving routes in and immediately surrounding the National Park to benefit a wide number of cyclists and improve safety.”

The park has so far released £381,000 of its capital grant scheme funding to 13 local businesses and communities, including to provide more children’s bike hire, support new cycle hire businesses, and install bike racks in local villages.