Rebecca Bland speaks to Cycling UK chief executive Sarah Mitchell about the charity’s latest efforts to get more people on bikes, winning the BikeBiz Cycle Advocacy Award in 2023, and its first-ever five-year plan.
This piece first appeared in the August edition of BikeBiz magazine – get your free subscription here
Cycling UK is the biggest cycling charity in the British Isles with over 70,000 members, and its focus has primarily been to get more people, more types of people, on bikes, and facilitating the enjoyment of cycling across the nation.
Last year, the charity won the BikeBiz Cycle Advocacy Award for the tireless efforts the staff have put into not only visible changes to things like the Highway Code, but for the behind-the-scenes efforts that have helped to tackle public perception, and for lowering barriers to getting people on bikes.
Several months on from the awards, we spoke to Chief Executive Sarah Mitchell, who has been with the charity since 2020, about how it felt to win the award, and what the next steps are for the organisation.
“It’s really great to get that recognition for the whole organisation. I think every year we feel like we do a lot of good work on campaigning, and in 2023 it was really nice to have that recognised, both at a national and a local level.
“Obviously we had some big campaigns like the Highway Code campaign, which I think was probably one of the highlights that drove the Advocacy Award in 2023. And that’s the culmination of many people’s works over successive generations of staff at Cycling UK, because it took about 11 years to bring it to fruition. But of course, we also do loads of other great local cycling initiatives.
“So I think the award is really nice because it encompasses both of those things and really helps to highlight the fact that we have this great local cycle advocacy network, as well as our big kind of political influencing campaigns. And hopefully it will have encouraged a few more people to join that local network and to volunteer to campaign for cycling locally.”
Since the award, the organisation has been working hard on improving diversity, and campaigning to try and reverse the cuts to active travel proposed by the previous government.
“We’ve done a lot of work on trying to demonstrate the benefits of cycling to everybody. Obviously, a lot of work has been on combating attempts to create a culture war against cycling. And we’ve been working on how we talk about cycling in a different way.
“That involves understanding how people who don’t cycle see cycling, and how we can help them to see cycling in a more sensitive way. So we talk about cycling, talk about active travel, and focus more on freedom of choice, and that was something that we appealed to the last government.
“And then we’ve had a lot of focus on diversity in cycling, because we feel like there’s a bit of a stereotype about cycling, and we wanted to show that actually there’s quite a range of people who do cycle for all sorts of different reasons.”
Cycling in general may still hold some stereotypes, but with behavioural programmes like Bike Bike Revival, or Making Cycling E-Asier, run by Cycling UK across a number of cities, you begin to understand that it isn’t the case that only certain demographics ride bikes – or want to ride bikes.
“Those sorts of programmes have been have done really well in the last year. We haven’t released the figures yet, but it’s going to be a really significant number of people that were reached.
“And it’s mostly in deprived communities that we work on those programs. So we’ve got this fantastic data set of people who aren’t your typical cyclists, and lots of really interesting information about how you can help people get confident about getting back on their bikes.
“So that’s something that we’re really proud of, and increasingly, we’re going to try and connect our campaigns to our programs on the ground to try and help people see these different images of cycling and different experiences of cycling, to help encourage, perhaps people who didn’t think cycling was for them to have a go, basically, so kind of change those perceptions.”
Five-year plan
Since the awards, the organisation has also released its first-ever ‘five-year plan’. This showed a shift from focusing primarily on numbers of people cycling, to a vision of allowing people to live “healthier, happier and greener lives through cycling.”
“I’s quite an ambitious strategy, and it has a 10 year sense of direction, but that’s because the thing we wanted to set ourselves was to build positive public perceptions of cycling. We want to see a real shift in the way that we think about cycling across the country, which is incredibly challenging, but similar to what they managed to achieve without consciously setting out to do it in the Netherlands in the 1970s.”
“I think a huge part of this work will be about building partnerships with different partners. Perhaps not the usual suspects within the active travel world, but maybe within industry, perhaps beyond the cycling industry to a degree. Just to be able to reach people who don’t currently cycle, to help them to think about cycling as being beneficial to them.”
So how can the industry help Cycling UK achieve these goals? By offering bikes to suit more people, as a start. Electric bikes are a growing market for a reason, and Mitchell has seen first-hand how they can benefit a wider demographic on their cycling journey.
“We’re in the business of expanding cycling. So we want more people to cycle, and more people to love cycling in the way that we do. And we know that the industry feels the same about that, because who wouldn’t want an expanded market with more people who want to buy bikes, but also who want to buy all of the things associated with bikes?
“And we also know that we’ve got really challenging objectives, and it’s the sort of thing that we can’t do on our own. So we really want to do this in partnership, hopefully with some of our friends in the industry too.
“I think there’s a great opportunity there for the industry, in the expansion of e-bikes in particular, but more broadly, in us all having a much more positive experience of cycling.
So hopefully more and more people will feel like this is a great option, and think, ‘why am I not doing this?’ There’s no reason not to, really.”
