OPINION
A year in cycle advocacy: the highlights of 2025 and what comes next
By Duncan Dollimore, Head of Campaigns at Cycling UK I
f you’re a glass-half-empty person, you might not last long in the world of campaigning. A former colleague once told me that campaigning is often a series of noisy defeats, interspersed with the occasional quiet victory. This always comes back to me when I reflect on the previous year’s highlights and frustrations! I’ll start with a quiet win, but one that’s nevertheless hugely important for cycle advocacy and the industry: a collaboration. During my ten years at Cycling UK, the
E-Bike Positive campaign has been our first major collaborative campaign involving multiple partners. It aimed to promote e-bikes as a safe, economical and healthy mode of transport, while educating people about the risks of aftermarket lithium-ion batteries, chargers and conversion kits. There’s still much to be done to address all the concerns, but it’s a highlight because of the incredible collaboration with the Bicycle Association (BA) and the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT), addressing concerns around e-bikes, getting more people to ride them, and ultimately increasing sales from reputable retailers. Originally launched by the Electric Bike Alliance, a
partnership involving BA, ACT, Cycling UK and Bosch eBike Systems, with fantastic marketing support from SHIFT Active Media, the campaign will be stewarded by ACT and BA in the new year. Cycling UK will continue to support this as an ongoing Alliance member. A common problem in life, the cycle industry, advocacy and charity sector is: too much to do and not enough resources. Teaming up with others can be a solution, but many of us bear the scars of partnerships that suck time and energy from the room instead of helping progress. The E-Bike Positive campaign has been the polar opposite of that, with significance beyond its initial success. It demonstrates there’s real potential for the industry and advocacy groups to collaborate more and deliver our mutual goals – something we haven’t seen enough of.
22 | January 2026
After such a positive story, it’s probably time for something verging on satire. One of our most intense frustrations also highlights the complexity of our advocacy work. As a UK-wide charity, and with
transport issues largely devolved, we lobby in all four UK nations – not always simple. For many years, we’ve been asking all four
governments for more funding for cycling. We were therefore delighted when, in 2022, Northern Ireland made it law that the government must allocate 10% of the transport budget to active travel. I avoid jargon when I can, but I’m using ‘active travel’
here because that’s what the legislation referred to – but crucially, without defining it. This led to some deeply frustrating accounting gymnastics by
the Department for Infrastructure, turning an open goal for cycling into a spectacular own goal. Rather than actually spending more money on cycling, the
Department devoted huge resource to a creative accounting exercise ‘revising’ historic budget reports – quietly rewriting what happened. Having reported a £12m spend on active travel in 2022/23, they redid the sums by adding in road maintenance and street lighting costs, which no other government counts as active travel spending. That way, spending was now magically £50m per year, reducing how much spending on cycling needed to increase, despite delivering virtually no cycling infrastructure. We invested a huge amount of time last year to challenge
this. It led to a damning report by the Northern Ireland Audit Office, and this year, we’re hoping to give evidence to the Infrastructure Committee on the imaginary millions for cycling.
Sticking with devolution, we’re now in an election year
in Wales and Scotland. We’ve been developing manifestos and engaging politicians to secure commitments on issues including funding and safer roads. We’ll launch those manifestos in February, with various events including a parliamentary event at Holyrood.
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