Report of Public Meeting 18 June

Our speaker this month was Dez Dell, who has many strings to his bow but spoke to us about active travel. Dez’s slides will be made available soon, in the meantime a recording of the meeting is on our YouTube channel. 

Apologies: Clare Slater, David Garlick, David Reed
Present: Alison Barlow, Christine Walsh, Emma, Harry Mellor, Jane Wood, John Hunt, Leonie Beale, Martin Coombs, Mike Longman, Rachel Tighe, Rupert Frost, Rupert Knowles

Introduction
Dez works for an active travel social enterprise, Brightwayz, and is a director of Stride and Ride CIC, a Kettering-based active travel advocacy and campaigning organisation.
He is also a Green Party councillor on North Northamptonshire Council and Kettering Town Council, a campaigner with Save Weekly Hall Wood, a director of Boards of Kettering CIC, who organise the Northants Board Game Convention, a trustee of Kettering Refugee Assistance, and Treasurer of Kettering Repair Cafe.

Active Travel
This covers transport methods from horse riding to mopeds, but mainly means walking, scooting, cycling and wheeling, in a wheelchair, power chair or mobility scooter.

Why is active travel a good thing?

• Less vehicles on the road reduces road casualties - cutting the number of vehicle movements reduces potential for conflict between vehicles and pedestrians.
• Reduce congestion and parking issues, such as pavement parking.  
• Reduce fossil fuel emissions resulting in cleaner air, less pollution and less noise, which links into…
• Improved neighbourhoods. More people actively using streets means a stronger community, with less anti-social behaviour. If you’re cycling it’s easy to stop and chat to someone you know, which you can’t do in a car.
• Access to jobs and easier recruitment. Many people can’t drive, whether because they are young, on low incomes, or have a condition that prevents them from driving (e.g. epilepsy). These people are hidden because driving a car is the default.
• The local economy benefits – people spending more time in their local area also spend more money in shops and cafes. Parking time limits don’t apply to cycles or pedestrians.
• Finally, mental and physical health. Traveling actively helps you keep fit physically, and we saw how much access to the outdoors and being outside helped people in the pandemic.

Active travel and climate action
The North Northamptonshire Local Area Energy Plan, released in March 2026, sets out how to reach net zero by 2050. Transport is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in North Northamptonshire, accounting for 46% of in scope emissions. The bulk of this is from cars, although HGVs contribute too. 

Electric vehicles (EVs) are part of the solution, but if every car on the road was an EV, the issues of congestion and parking still exist. And emissions come from tyre and brake wear as well as out of the tailpipe.  So, we need to think about how to reduce the number of cars on the roads, whilst acknowledging that some people will always need a vehicle.

The Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP) for Kettering was adopted in 2023; there are also LCWIPs for Corby, Wellingborough and Rushden. These are the plans for making infrastructure improvements - just plans because funding is required to build the routes. Kettering is hoping to get funding in the next couple of years to build one of the LCWIP routes.

For connectivity between towns there are plans for Greenways to be built over a ten-year period, providing traffic-free routes between towns and villages throughout the county. These are mainly for leisure use, but could be used to commute by cycle. One from the Brampton Valley Way to Braybrook was part funded by a brewery which has opened a tap room there, so funding can be from various sources.

Active Travel England have released their third cycling and walking investment strategy, or CWIS3. This was reported mainly as aiming for 60% of children to walk or cycle to school by 2035 – a good hook as making travel safer for children is hard to disagree with. The vision is for walking, wheeling, and cycling to be safe, easy, and accessible for everyone, with 55% of all short journeys in towns and cities to be walked or cycled by 2035. Active travel should be the easy and integrated choice - you can cycle to catch a train for example. It doesn't have to just be about walking or cycling, but about linking transport methods together.

To access funding for active travel schemes local councils need good capability ratings – these are Active Travel England’s assessment of how effective authorities are at planning, designing and delivering active travel schemes. The 2025 rating for both North and West Northamptonshire was 1 out of 5.

Local projects
The latest Brightwayz project, funded by the Northamptonshire Community Foundation, is artworks on walking and wheeling routes. In partnership with Kettering Street Art CIC, local artists have painted telecoms boxes around Kettering (with permission). Laugh Out Loud Theatre Company are giving street performances and taking theatre into local schools. An active travel themed mural has been painted on the side of a building and there will be art installations as well.

A monthly active travel hub in Kettering town centre, where bikes are fixed and security marked for free. Brightwayz tries to be very visible and active in the town centre, to encourage people to get out cycling.

Brightwayz is also a delivery partner for the Big Bike Revival from Cycling UK and is doing 10 or 12 events this summer as part of that.

Grant funding is really important for all these projects.

What you can do
When Dez started at Brightways, he did a Healthy Streets survey for Kettering town centre. It encourages people to think about various aspects of their street: Do people feel safe? Are there things to do? Is there somewhere to sit down and rest ? Is it easy to cross the road?

This gave Dez a good grounding in how streets work and how they should be built for people (but often aren't). For example, people ride their bikes on the pavement because they don't feel safe on the road. Out of this survey came the first accredited town centre travel plan in the country, and the data from it was used in the Kettering Neighbourhood Plan, which is very active travel friendly.

Q&A
Does Brightwayz have any projects planned for West Northamptonshire
Unfortunately, no. Brightwayz works with councils across the country to provide safety products and Play Street packs but only does projects in North Northamptonshire.

The Greenways map you showed included one that led to Northampton. Are North and West Northamptonshire councils working together on that?
Yes. Lucy Hawes at NNC is also trying to link up with Leicestershire and other surrounding counties – paths don’t stop at county borders!

On Church Lane in Northampton, they've just put in a cycle lane which I think is designed to kill pedestrians. Are there standards cycle lanes should be meeting? This is a contraflow cycle lane that comes to a 90-degree corner, where the footpath is just over two feet wide with a road sign in the middle. Anyone walking there, especially with a pram or pushchair, will step out into the cycle lane with their backs to the cycle traffic.
LTN (local transport note)120 gives best practice for building cycle lanes. Street furniture on pavements is a bugbear – Dez is in the process of objecting to a planning application for smart pulse hubs, which are advertising boards but also include defibrillators and free Wi-fi for people, and will take up pavement space.
Comment from an attendee: This is one to raise with Esme Cushing, the Principal Transport Planner for WNC. Preferred way to contact her would be through your WNC ward councillor.

Should private e-scooters be legalised?
People are using them anyway. The Voi e-scooter trial has been going on for a long time. It seems e-scooters are here to stay, and at some point the government will legalise them, once they’ve worked out how to make it safe. If there is infrastructure separating e-scooters from people and vehicles, they will be safer. They are a useful form of micromobility, but as always some people misuse them.

What can you do to protect cyclists from thieves? Northampton town centre is a hotspot for cycle theft. Cameras aren’t effective as the thieves wear hoodies and they carry bolt cutters to cut off locks. Heavyweight U-locks are a deterrent, but many people don’t use those.
In terms of bike security, I always take a D-lock and another form of lock, either a chain or a cable lock, and lock in two different places on my bike, locking the most expensive part first.
For better security, you need hubs to leave bikes. At Kettering train station there's a camera-controlled room with fob access. There’s also a place in the Town Hall to park your bike securely. Councils can rent bike hangers that take up a parking spot and are very secure.

Do you work with Slowways? This is a national organisation trying to connect the whole UK via walkable paths.
I haven’t heard of Slowways, I’ll look them up.

Is there anything else happening besides the Greenways to put cycle routes along main roads to connect villages? For example we have 7 or 8 villages all feeding into one school and transport is either by bus or car.
We have done cycle training to increase confidence for adults who may not have cycled for a long time. In terms of providing new routes, Greenways are the answer, but it is a long-term project.

I’ve heard of a scheme where parents drop children off a little distance from school to walk the rest of the way. Children who arrive at school on foot are rewarded with a termly class prize, which introduces competition.\
This is a park and stride scheme. Brightwayz has been involved in a couple of those. It does make a big difference to congestion and parking issues around the school gates. More children are injured on roads outside schools than anywhere else.
There are also School Streets, where the street outside the school is closed to traffic at school drop-off and pickup times. This spreads school traffic into a wider area and increases active travel because parents feel their children are safer outside the school. Ironically when parents feel the road outside schools is not safe, they choose to drive children to school which of course increases the traffic.
Trials of School Streets in Northampton and Wellingborough weren't particularly successful because they relied on volunteers to manage traffic. Shrewsbury has got about 8 School Streets that are controlled by ANPR to allow only residents, delivery drivers etc through.
Brightwayz are working with 15-20 schools doing school travel plans, accredited by an organisation called ModeShift . Schools are asked to do show of hands in assembly for how everyone arrived at school, and then how would they like to get to school? Invariably, most children would prefer to walk, scoot or cycle rather than be dropped off in the car. They then do activities such as walk to school with Santa – there are lots to choose from. Travel plans also review the school’s active travel facilities; e.g. do they have enough cycle racks.  
The most important thing is to find somebody in the school that's passionate and will lead the project.

The cycle/footpath between my village and the next one is in terrible condition. I’ve raised it as an issue to Highways but this has been rejected as not meeting criteria for repair. It’s worrying that existing routes are not being maintained while new active travel plans are being developed. Are there requirements for cycle paths to be maintained to certain standards? This one leads to a secondary school so students could use it if it was in good repair.
Shared cycle and pedestrian paths don’t meet the LTN 120 standard mentioned earlier. In terms of maintenance, it will be a question of lobbying and getting as many people to report it as possible, including the school.

I’ve looked into PM 2.5s - very small particles which go straight into your bloodstream with huge health consequences. 21% of PM 2.5 in the air is caused by road vehicles, with 18% of road vehicle pollution being from brake and tyre wear. With bigger heavier cars like SUVs, including EVs, this problem is only going to get worse. Do any political parties have a policy to increase road tax for SUVs?
I don't know the answer to that, but yes this problem needs to be addressed.

Date of next meeting
Thursday 16 July at 7:45pm. Guest speaker is Daniel Shaw, Northampton resident and one of the 5 Just Stop Oil activists jailed for their part in organising a blockade of the M25 in November 2022.
Dan joins us to talk about his experience at JSO, from his drive to defend the climate, to protesting and going to prison.  https://buytickets.at/climateactionwestnorthamptonshire/2275369

Please note there is no meeting in August.