Culture war-based coverage of cycling based on stereotypes of middle-aged men in Lycra could harm the nation’s health because it shifts focus away from the people and communities who benefit from physical activity, Chris Whitty has said.
Speaking a day before the launch of the NHS’s 10-year-health plan, which is expected to focus heavily on prevention, Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, called for people to set aside media cliches and instead focus on “data which nobody can dispute”.
If active travel “is seen as something which is simply the reserve of middle-aged, Lycra-clad people cycling possibly too fast around the park, that completely misses the point of actually where the huge health gains are”, Whitty told a conference in York.
He said: “There are some areas where you can send a debate from a cultural war into a much more day-to-day one by actually saying, ‘OK guys, but this is the maths,’ and ensuring that you do so with facts which people find surprising.
“So for example, the culture wars will always try and paint the person who’s in favour of active transport, and let’s say cycling, as middle-class, entitled, speeding like a bad person. What they don’t see is a woman in a wheelchair who actually benefits even more from the activity that we’re talking about.”
Being more active, Whitty noted, was “one of the most impressive things you can do to preserve health of all forms, physical and mental”. He added that the best way for people to do this was to build it into their everyday life, for example by walking, cycling or wheeling for transport.
“The people who benefit most from any form of activity are people who are doing none,” Whitty said. “And the next group who benefit most are the people who are doing a very small amount, who might do a bit more.
“The second group of people who benefit most are those who are teetering on the brink of ill health, or are in ill health which could accelerate from under them. And for many of those people, a small amount of activity is going to be very hard work, but it is going to be remarkably powerful at preventing and in many cases, reversing the health conditions they have.”
Transport planners should not just focus on bigger projects such as bike lanes, but also on everyday issues such as uneven pavements, which might put off someone with mobility issues from walking a short distance, Whitty said.
To get more people active, he said, “what we’ve got to do is build between the places people care about: from their homes to their shops, to their place of worship, to the school and so on. We’ve got to think about that in a really serious way.”
In a sign that politics has begun to move on from the culture war-infused transport discourse under Rishi Sunak’s government, 12 of England’s regional mayors, including two Conservatives and one from Reform UK, have signed up to a plan to create a “national active travel network”.
Speaking alongside Whitty, Simon Lightwood, the junior transport minister, said the Labour government took a different approach to Sunak: “Gone are the days, I hope, of this poisonous rhetoric around the war on the motorist.”