Stormont has been building fake greenways to pretend it is meeting a legal target. On Tuesday, Northern Ireland’s independent Audit Office called it out.
The problem began with the 2022 Climate Change Act, supported by every assembly party except the Traditional Unionist Voice. The Act requires 10 per cent of the overall transport budget to be spent on “active travel” – walking, wheeling and cycling – by 2030. This year that would mean spending £85 million.
Stormont’s Department for Infrastructure, responsible for all roads and transport, clearly considers the target impossible, so it has embarked on some creative reclassification. The most blatant example is describing road resurfacing works as “active travel schemes” by marking out a cycle path on the adjacent pavement. The two main “greenways” delivered by this method are beside the Coleraine ring road and an isolated stretch of trunk road outside Derry. Both are about as useful for walkers and cyclists as a motorway hard shoulder.
Such an obvious absurdity has not gone unnoticed. The resurfacing trick has attracted complaints and questions from residents, political representatives, campaign groups and the media. All have been brushed off by the department and its two ministers since 2022, both of whom are from Sinn Féin.
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The audit office has now revealed this is only a fraction of the reclassification. It has uncovered a determined effort over the past two years to widen the definition of “active travel spending” to include all maintenance of existing footpaths, 40 per cent of traffic signal costs, half the street lighting budget and the employment costs of everyone involved. There was no consultation outside the department on these new definitions, which have taken the supposed spend on active travel up from £13 million (€14.9 million) in 2023 to £50 million last year.
Over the same period, there has been almost no construction of actual greenways and cycle paths, and no increase in walking and cycling. The Republic has built 91km of greenways in the past two years; Northern Ireland has built 4km while claiming to have spent a comparable amount of money. In a final insult, the public has begun blaming the disruption of road resurfacing on cycle paths, having been told this is what the work is for.
‘Legislation that stops a road being built while failing to build cycle paths and greenways might be considered the worst of both worlds’
— Newton Emerson
Stormont has been paying lip service to active travel for decades. It has separate policies to build networks of cycle paths and greenways and encourage “modal shift” to walking and cycling, all with their own non-statutory targets. Progress has been glacial or non-existent. The Climate Change Act was meant to focus minds – instead, it has produced behaviour close to duplicity.
With an accountant’s understatement, the audit office warns this “could create an impression of the Department ... applying a window-dressing approach to comply with the Act but not truly delivering”.
This is the second disaster the Act has caused the Department. In June, a court quashed the A5 cross-Border dual-carriageway, a joint project with the Irish Government, for not complying with carbon emission targets.
Legislation that stops a road being built while failing to build cycle paths and greenways might be considered the worst of both worlds.
As with the A5, it is a mystery why Sinn Féin is risking reputational damage to defend this law to the letter. The Climate Change Act was put through the assembly by the DUP in a compromise with the Green Party. The DUP responded to the A5 ruling by suggesting the emission targets need to be changed. It should be easier for Sinn Féin to say the same.
The Act was rushed through in 2022 because the DUP first minister had resigned, triggering a two-year collapse of devolution. Sinn Féin has only been properly in charge at the Department for Infrastructure since February last year and could distance itself from much of what went on before. Yet it has embraced the 10 per cent target and its ministers have approved all the dubious redefinitions of active travel spending. Their complaint is that London does not give Stormont enough money: in other words, they could meet the target if their budget was 10 per cent larger. It often seems Sinn Féin knows no other argument.
Legally binding targets can seem presumptive in a democracy but there is an unusually strong case for their use at Stormont – the audit office is among those normally in favour of them. Mandatory powersharing creates coalitions with little shared ideology, so a shared practical goal can keep everyone pulling in roughly the same direction.
However, with multiple parties involved, there is matching danger of the horse trading and posturing seen during passage of the Climate Change Act, creating targets unmoored from reality. The active travel target should have been closer to 1 per cent of the transport budget. That would have had a better chance of driving meaningful change.
