IWRATS - accounting for cycling investment would give a Panamanian accountant a headache. Fundamentally, the Scottish Government provides three funding streams:
1. Walking, Cycling and Safer Routes: Ring fenced capital fund, a portion of which is allocated to each local authority. It is up to each authority what to spend this on, roughly one third gets spent on cycling projects. This will be £7.4m for the whole of Scotland next year.
2. Sustrans: Funding is allocated to sustrans, which then runs the community links grant scheme. Local authorities must submit scheme proposals to sustrans, with awards made to those schemes which best meet the relevant criteria. Funding can be for pre-construction design, community engagement and feasibility work, construction work and post construction project enhancements. Funding is awarded on an annual basis and must be spent within the year of award. Multi-year projects must be broken up into phases that can each be delivered within a single year. Local authorities must match fund the award from sustrans,some use cycling,walking and safer routes funding for this. Roughly £18m was allocated to this in 2017/18.
Sustrans also run Community Links +, which is for larger schemes, with funding awarded on a competitive basis - there is still a match funding requirement.
3. Local authority block grant: Local authorities can choose to spend capital and/or revenue funding on cycling schemes, maintenance or promotion. This can be used to match fund sustrans funding or to finance other projects. There are huge competing demands for this funding, which means cycling is usually near the bottom of the list.
There are other pots of cash for cycling, but these are the main ones. The involvement of sustrans, the requirement to apply or bid for these funds and the need for match funding make it very difficult to track funds from allocation to scheme completion. It also means most authorities have trouble developing multi-year cycle infrastructure capital investment plan - as they are never completely sure they will secure funding for a particular scheme.
I suppose the big announcement is when sustrans announce the winning bidders for community links/community links + funding.