Women’s Safety: Walking, Wheeling, Cycling and Running

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I thank the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important debate.

I am passionate about women’s safety, especially in semi-rural areas such as Frome and East Somerset. This is not an abstract policy discussion. As has been discussed, it is about the constant calculations that women make every day: “Do I take the longer, better-lit route? Do I run before dawn, or wait until daylight? Do I walk home, or pay for a taxi that I cannot really afford?” These decisions are so ingrained that many women barely register them any more. But this should not be accepted—it is not normal. No one should have to limit their freedom of movement because they feel unsafe.

Last year, I met a constituent called Holly who had been the victim of repeated incidents of flashing when she was out walking in her village in Somerset. As a result of talking to Holly, I launched a survey in my constituency to hear directly from women about safety in rural areas. With nights getting darker, I wanted to understand how safe women feel when getting to work, socialising or simply going about their daily lives. The responses were sobering. Women spoke about being followed on dark country lanes with no street lighting, waiting for buses on isolated roads with no shelter or CCTV, giving up running and cycling altogether because it simply did not feel safe, and above all, the constant vigilance required just to get home.

Rural areas face particular challenges. Public transport is limited and street lighting is sparse or non-existent. Communities are spread out and mobile signal is often unreliable. The scale of the problem is clear: UN Women UK found that 71% of women have experienced sexual harassment in public spaces, yet most never report it because they believe nothing will be done. The Government are right to call violence against women and girls a national emergency. I know that members of the Government are committed to this issue, but there is currently a glaring gap between Government Departments on planning policy.

Just days before publishing the new strategy on violence against women and girls, the Government also published a revised national planning policy framework, with no reference to women, girls or gendered safety. That omission matters. The places we build determine whether women feel safe walking home, waiting for a bus or going for a run. Planning policy is one of the most powerful tools we have to prevent harm before it occurs. A place cannot credibly be described as “healthy” if half the population feel unable to use it safely after dark.

We know what works: good lighting, clear sightlines, active streets, safe transport routes, and design that considers how women experience public space. Without explicit national policy, women’s safety becomes a postcode lottery. I put it to the Minister that if we truly believe in a whole-society approach to ending violence against women and girls, women’s safety must be designed into our streets, paths, transport networks and public spaces, not just bolted on as an afterthought.

Will the Minister talk to colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Home Office about the importance of this joined-up thinking? Women are not asking for the impossible; they are asking for the freedom to move through their communities safely. Let us commit to making that a reality.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lilian Greenwood]

My hon. Friend makes a number of very important points. The scale of violence against women and girls in our country is intolerable, and that is why this Government are treating it as a national emergency, but the most important change is a change in the behaviour of men, frankly.

The Government published our strategy to build a safer society for women and girls last month, and have set out a range of actions to prevent violence and abuse, pursue perpetrators and support victims. Giving women the confidence to report incidents is essential. The strategy includes an ambitious aim to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, which will require us to take a transformative approach to the way that we work across Government and with other partners. I can assure the shadow Minister that Ministers regularly come together from all Departments to discuss the action that we need to take.

Turning to active travel, in December we announced that we are allocating £626 million over the next four years for local authorities to deliver walking, wheeling and cycling schemes—enough for 500 miles of new walking and cycling routes. That is in addition to almost £300 million of funding that we announced in February 2025.

In November, we launched a consultation to develop the third cycling and walking investment strategy, which recognised the need to address the barriers to active travel, including for women and girls and proposed two new objectives to support the long-term vision for active travel: ensuring both that people are safe to travel actively and that people feel it is an easy choice. The consultation closed on 15 December; we are looking carefully at all the comments received and the final strategy will be published this spring.

Since its establishment in 2022, Active Travel England—ATE—has worked with local authorities to help them to make walking, wheeling and cycling a safe and attractive choice for everyday trips. That has included overseeing £435 million of investment to deliver more than 400 miles of routes and hundreds of safer crossings and junctions.

ATE has commenced a project focused on the need to design streets better for women and girls and to support local authorities in the delivery of that. The organisation is working with Living Streets and with Footways to pilot an approach to developing walking network plans. Through that project, women have highlighted issues with walking, including—these will be very familiar to hon. Members—poor lighting, isolated routes and limited visibility, which strongly shaped their willingness to walk and influenced route prioritisation. Those findings will inform an important part of the evidence base for planning walking networks that work for everyone. I welcome the examples of good practice highlighted by a number of hon. Members, including Members from West Yorkshire.

This year, through ATE, we have provided £2.5 million to Cycling UK to deliver the Big Bike Revival, which is now in its 10th year and has reached more than half a million people. The Big Bike Revival programme helps people across England to get back on their bikes and experience the many benefits of cycling. Since it began in 2015, more than half of participants have said they now feel safer cycling and 49% of participants have been women. Women who have taken part in the programme have described being made to feel comfortable, having their confidence and self-esteem boosted, and feeling empowered.

Last October, Cycling UK organised “My ride. Our Right”, and approximately 60 women-led glow rides took place across the country to increase the visibility of women’s cycling and demand better infrastructure. In my constituency, the cycling groups Women in Tandem and Pedals organised rides and are doing great work to give more women the confidence to ride a bike especially, or including, after dark. As Women in Tandem says, cycling should “feel liberating, not intimidating”—hear, hear!

We know that good street design can contribute to helping women to feel safe when walking, cycling and running, and enables safe access to public transport. We are currently working with MHCLG to update the manual for streets, which was first published in 2007. That will include advice on aspects of street design that can help to improve personal safety and perceptions of safety: how safe is it, and how safe does it feel?

[Anna Sabine]

I thank the Minister for giving way. It may be that she is coming on to this issue but, while everything she is saying on active travel is fantastic and I recognise the point about the manual for streets, does she recognise that if the overarching framework, the national planning policy framework, does not pay regard to women’s and girls’ safety, it is much harder to enact those subsets such as active travel?

[Lilian Greenwood]

I thank the hon. Member for her contribution. As I said, we are working with our colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure we have a coherent approach.

I welcome the support of the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Chelmsford, for our proposals to tackle pavement parking. Of course, the issue is not just safety on the street, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West highlighted, but having the opportunity to walk, wheel, cycle and run in our green spaces and parks, on canal towpaths and on greenways. Natural England’s “Green Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide” offers detailed guidance on creating accessible green spaces and, for teenage girls specifically, emphasises the need to design spaces that are not only safe and inclusive but also comfortable and welcoming. Sport England is also running campaigns challenging prejudice to make clear that sport is for everyone. That has included the “This Girl Can” and “Let’s Lift the Curfew” campaigns; the latter included 320 local events in October to amplify women’s voices and overcome barriers that prevent women from being active outdoors.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft for raising this important issue. It has been wonderful to see the level of contribution and the interest that has been shown in the debate. I look forward to continuing to work with her, with other hon. Members here this afternoon, and with my colleagues across Government to take further action on this important issue and ensure that for our daughters the opportunity to go out and walk, run and cycle is different from how it perhaps has been for our generation. We can, must and will do better.