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

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) not just on securing this important debate, but on the powerful way in which she opened it. It can be described only as a sobering debate that requires the Government’s full attention, and that must come not just from the Department for Transport but, as others said, from other Departments, too.

I thank the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) and for North West Leicestershire (Amanda Hack) for sharing their personal experiences. It is completely unacceptable that anyone should have to face what they described on the streets of this country.

I equally agree with the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) that so-called low-level offences should be stamped down on incredibly forcibly. He is right—I have long argued along similar lines—that it is essential because so-called low-level crimes lead to more serious and potentially fatal crimes in the future. It is therefore absolutely essential that they are clamped down upon incredibly hard.

The method by which anyone, and particularly women, chooses to travel should not be dictated by how safe they feel. Everyone should feel safe walking, running, cycling, wheeling, driving or riding a horse—we had a good debate about horse riding last week, and it should have been added to the title of this debate, because it is incredibly important in rural communities such as mine.

It is clear that the challenges of securing women’s safety are an obstacle to an array of activities that women might want to do, but feel unable to do so. It is incredibly concerning that, according to Cycling UK, 23% of women cite harassment or intimidation as a reason not to cycle. The data on running is even starker. Research published in 2023 found that almost three quarters of women in the United Kingdom change their outdoor activity routines during winter, with many doing so because they feel unsafe.

Separately, survey data from SportsShoes.com, which is not a website I was particularly familiar with until I began my research for this debate, found that 48% of women had felt unsafe while running, compared with 36% of men. Similarly, 70% of women had experienced an intimidating incident while running, including 22% saying that they had been followed and 21% reporting that they had been beeped at by someone in a car. Such behaviour on the streets of this country is deeply unacceptable.

Even though it is challenging to point to a single source, data from a variety of organisations highlight that a considerable number of women experience behaviour that is not acceptable—indeed, it is clearly despicable—in our society. The idea that someone who is merely trying to run or cycle should be followed or harassed is clearly wrong and must be stopped.

Therefore, to address both the safety of women while cycling, wheeling, walking or running, and concerns about harassment, we must make sure that we embed enforcement as the underlying principle of safety strategies. That must involve having sufficient numbers of police officers located in the areas where women feel most unsafe. That is a challenge, given that we are currently seeing a reduction in the number of police officers on our streets. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) gave a particularly stark example. The thought that a park such as Richmond Park, which is so suited for walking, running, cycling and all sorts of activities, is no longer to be policed should horrify all of us in this House, no matter what political party we belong to.

Improving the safety of women should also involve following up on incidents properly. For example, a small minority of drivers demonstrate truly unsafe behaviour and put women at risk. We have strong rules about what constitutes dangerous driving, and those rules must be enforced where people have broken the law. However, the rules for dangerous driving must apply equally to those who behave in an unacceptable way by verbally abusing people, beeping their horn or whatever it might be.

To do that, we need effective funding for our police forces, which is why my party has specifically said that we would provide £800 million to deploy 10,000 new police officers in hotspot areas where crime is most likely to occur. I appreciate that hotspot policing might be less impactful for groups such as cyclists, who travel much greater distances than other people, but in urban environments or in places such as Richmond Park, which we have already heard about, there are often particular locations and areas that dissuade people from running and walking. The more we can do to target those locations—where crime, particularly crime against women, is more likely—the more we can instil trust and a sense that such activities are safe.

Therefore, can the Minister say what cross-Government work has been conducted by her Department to prioritise the safety of women and girls when they are engaged in active travel and to feed into the Government’s strategy on preventing violence against women and girls? Also, can she make a commitment that her Department will engage with local police forces to ensure that they are monitoring areas where women feel most unsafe?

Also, I understand that the consultation for the third cycling and walking investment strategy says that

“Investment in well-lit, safe, high-quality walking, wheeling and cycling routes increases feelings of personal safety, as well as improving road safety”.

I think we can all agree with the sentiment and the principle that we want particular areas to have improved lighting, in order to improve safety. As with many aspects of road safety, targeted measures that focus on the most dangerous areas will rightly have support from Members across this House.

I am aware that issues such as improved lighting form part of the much broader calls for clear targets on what organisations such as Cycling UK describe as high-quality cycling infrastructure, which are made alongside calls for appropriate levels of spending. That is all important. And from our time together on the Transport Committee in the last Parliament, I know the Minister is a long-standing supporter of active travel in general and of cycling in particular.

There is always a difficult balance to be drawn between making our roads safe for cyclists and making them too difficult for other modes of transport to use, or even prohibiting other modes of transport. Nevertheless, I hope the Government can find the appropriate balance by making cycling safer for women without making it more difficult for those same women to use their cars for other journeys.

One request from Cycling UK and a range of other road safety organisations is to improve understanding of the 2022 changes to the highway code. These organisations have been clear about welcoming the changes as an important step in improving the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and other road users, but the knowledge gap remains in the public’s awareness of these changes.

All in all, as I said at the start of my remarks, this needs a whole-Government approach. The safety of women cannot be put on the back-burner or into a footnote; it must take centre stage across multiple Government Departments. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s commitments this afternoon on how she will be leading that in the Department for Transport and across the whole of Government.