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.

Agricultural Property Relief and Business Property Relief

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. Here is a new year tip: look at your question, cross most of it out, and then continue.

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

In my constituency, we have not just a lot of farmers but a huge number of other businesses and livelihoods that rely on those farmers, and the whole of that rural economy has been negatively impacted over the last 14 months. Will the Minister undertake not just to apologise to communities like mine, but to ensure that the Government will genuinely start listening to rural communities? At the moment, they do not feel listened to, understood by or even cared for by this Government.

[Dan Tomlinson]

We will continue to listen to rural communities, and to farming communities, to make sure that we can support them as they seek to grow and invest in their businesses in order to improve and support the communities that they are part of. It is because we have been listening to the representatives of farming communities and family businesses that we have come forward with the changes that we think strike the right balance.

Oral Answers to Questions

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised growth upwards from next year, and expects the economy to be bigger at the end of the forecast period than it thought at the time of the Budget last year. We are using the national wealth fund, the British Business Bank and UK Export Finance to support businesses throughout the UK, and we were recently able to announce significant investment at Thales in Belfast to create jobs in the defence industry there for the export of goods to Ukraine.

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

10. What fiscal steps she is taking to support pensioners with the cost of living.

[The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Torsten Bell)]

The Government’s top priorities for pensioners are to raise the state pension and to rescue the NHS. This week more than 12 million pensioners saw their state pensions rise by 4.1%, well ahead of inflation. That is worth an extra £470 a year for someone on the full new state pension, and £360 a year for those on the full basic state pension.

[Anna Sabine]

I have 250 pieces of outstanding casework relating to the winter fuel payment. An elderly constituent emailed me during the winter, enclosing a picture showing that her thermometer was at 15° and saying that she had to remain in bed for as long as possible each day to stay warm. Given that energy bills are now increasing, does the Minister agree that the decision to cut the winter fuel payment has already had serious consequences for the welfare of pensioners throughout the country?

[Torsten Bell]

What the Government are doing is raising the state pension, extending the warm home discount, and ensuring that an extra 50,000 people have had access to pension credit over the last six months. When Members talk about mistakes that have had lasting consequences for pensioners, I look back to the coalition Government’s decision to cut the rate of energy installations by 90%. Pensioners are living with that legacy, in leaky homes, day in day out, but this Government are getting on with insulating homes throughout the country.

Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Bill

Anna Sabine Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 25th November 2024 Commons Chamber

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

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and the fact that I own a high street café.

I am proud that there are so many independent shops and high streets in my constituency of Frome and East Somerset. Midsomer Norton, in particular, epitomises the traditional British high street, with haberdashery, hardware and craft shops. On the other side of the constituency, people need only take a stroll through Frome to stumble across independent cafés, bookshops and tailors. We know that high streets are the centre of local economies and places for community cohesion. They are idiosyncratic to the needs of the communities they serve, and offer local jobs and training opportunities. They also provide social goods. For example, Denude is a zero waste shop in Frome that helps support the local community to live more sustainably.

Yet for the last nine years, small businesses and local high streets have felt the burden of economic instability and other pressures. The shops and businesses that still exist have fought hard to protect themselves, and they have in many ways defied the odds. They have had to adapt to changing consumer trends, compete with the rise of online retail giants, navigate covid-19, and survive the mini-Budget and the subsequent impact on mortgage rates and disposable income, which is still being felt. While still feeling the impact of all this, some businesses will in the short term have to pay both high business rates and national insurance contributions. Small businesses have proven that they are excellent at adapting, but I really do fear the impact that some of these changes may have on our local high streets and independent shops.

Businesses I have spoken to over the last few months often use the phrase that they are “only one bad month away from closure.” While permanently lowering business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure is a step in the right direction, it is still not enough to help our flourishing high streets thrive again, and we know that many important small businesses fall outside these categories. The Lib Dems want to see a complete overhaul of the business rates system. Instead of targeting small businesses, which are the backbone of our high streets and local communities, we want to replace business rates with a new, fairer levy on commercial property owners rather than their tenants. Small businesses can adapt, but not endlessly, and I fear that at the moment too much is being thrown at them with insufficient support.

Banking Services: Rural Northumberland

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Joe Morris]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. We have seen far too many rural towns and rural economies facing a precipice when a bank closes. Businesses are left to deal with uncertainty and a deprivation of banking services, which has an ongoing effect on the economy, before anything else comes in. I hope that we can consider taking any steps necessary to mitigate the impact of those closures, and I agree that a move to a “last but one” system may be a more efficient way of dealing with things. Whitehaven on the Tyne Valley line is a town that shares many of the challenges that I am talking about, and that demonstrates the incredibly important nature of this debate.

In constituencies such as mine and those of my hon. Friends, many residents and businesses already travel out of town for banking. When they are there, they do other shopping. They shop in the major towns or the cities, where they have access to other shops or services. That has a massive impact on the passing trade in Haltwhistle and other towns across the Tyne Valley. Ian Dommett, the chair of the chamber of trade, said:

“For Haltwhistle, this has meant that every shop in the town has lost this trade and everyone of the Chamber of Commerce members who are retailers say they have seen a decline in business as it is now done in towns with functioning banks.”

I would argue that Haltwhistle as a town has been and continues to be let down by the Conservatives. This is a stunning indictment of policy failure. The businesses that want to drive economic growth are being hamstrung. In some cases, shops have stepped up by offering some elements of consumer banking, such as cashback services and having ATMs in store, but they should not need to do so. Businesses should not be deprived of business banking when, ultimately, it is they who are the engines of our rural economy. We need to move away from the significant economic disruption that towns such as Haltwhistle have experienced for 12 months, since August 2023.

I was incredibly proud this summer to be asked to become a patron of the Northumberland Domestic Abuse Services. Speaking with the staff there, I mentioned that I had secured this debate and was told that access to in-person banking services can be a lifeline for victims of domestic abuse. In a rural setting in particular, this can be absolutely vital. I urge the Minister to consider introducing plans for banking hubs in Haltwhistle in my constituency to ensure that residents can access in-person banking services, and to work with organisations to explore the impact that banking deserts can have on acute domestic violence.

I was proud to stand for election on a manifesto prioritising rolling out banking hubs to banking deserts, but banking hubs should not be seen as a replacement for bank branches. They should not be seen as an opportunity for bank branches to be shut down, leaving others to pick up the pieces in our communities. When decisions are made far from the communities that they impact, those decisions are inevitably worse. One of the most meaningful ways that we can support towns to grow economies, and provide opportunities for young people and security for elderly residents, is to make sure that, at the very least, they have a banking hub in place—one that does not just serve one town, but that serves communities across the rural hinterland. I ask the Minister to ensure that the Treasury strongly considers and prioritises Haltwhistle as a location for a future banking hub, to reflect the opportunities and investment that that could bring, and to provide the opportunity for businesses to grow.

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

I represent a thriving market town in Somerset called Frome, and even there it was announced in May that we would lose our last bank. Given that banks play such an important role in our communities and our businesses, does the hon. Member agree that there should be some obligation placed on banks to ensure adequate provision across communities in any given constituency? We can see from the discussion this evening that it is critical to so many aspects of our public life that we have proper banking provision.

[Joe Morris]

I agree with the hon. Lady. It is important that banks recognise the almost unique role that they play on our high streets as anchor institutions; they need to be far more responsible when conditions dictate that bank branches need to close. This is not about asking them to play a charitable role; it is about asking them to play a responsible role in our economy and our society. As an MP for many picturesque market towns, I recognise the problems that the hon. Lady is having in her constituency.

It is important that we represent the impact that the infrequent availability of post office services has had on individuals in my constituency, and in particular on elderly customers, who now have to use the post office as their primary banking facility. It would be great if the Minister could join me in encouraging the Post Office to expand its participation, particularly as I know that the Government are looking to expand the pension credit take-up campaign. Finally, will she comment on how the Government are working already, and will work in future, with our fantastic North East Mayor Kim McGuinness to improve economic prosperity across some of the most rural and remote areas of our incredibly proud region?

Public Spending: Inheritance

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Monday 29th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary has agreed to meet all MPs affected and will, of course, also be talking to people who run our health service, to make sure that we can put right the mistakes made by the previous Government.

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

Constituencies across the south-west, including my own, have waited years for final confirmation of plans to improve the A303 with a tunnel, a vital piece of infrastructure for our local communities and our regional economy. We now learn that, due to mismanagement of public finances by the previous Government, those plans are under severe threat. This is a hammer blow to our constituents, who have waited so long. Will the Chancellor meet me, my regional Lib Dem colleagues and the local communities who will be affected by this news?

[Rachel Reeves]

I understand the hon. Lady’s frustration and anger on behalf of her constituents that today we had to be honest about the scale of the inheritance we face. There was no money allocated for the A303 by the previous Government, despite their saying that it was going ahead. That is the state of affairs that we inherited. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary would be happy to meet the hon. Lady and colleagues to discuss the matter.