News Cycles and Curveballs
Craig Carey-Clinch – Executive Director, National Motorcyclists Council (NMC)
W
e sometimes hear about the political ‘cycle’, which refers to a period when a party is in power, the time between general elections or between Queen’s Speeches. But there’s yet another one, a period when lobbying and campaigning is more active, particularly as public policy affects motorcycling. This tends to be between New Year and Easter, with things starting to tail off a little towards the summer, enlivened with major campaign events in Parliament in June and July before the summer recess. Summer is the ‘silly season’ where Parliament shuts down and the civil service goes off on holiday. It’s a slow period where the lobbyist catches up with all sorts of background work left over from the earlier part of the year and prepares for the autumn. Politics takes off again after the party conference season, with a spurt of activity culminating in campaigning events in November and December, before all goes quiet again over the Christmas recess.
Better This Way Planning a year and deciding when ‘headline’ activities should take place used to be fairly predictable, but Covid has wrought changes. For example, with no external events taking place in Parliament for such a long period, lobbying has become more fluid. Departmental officials are wary of leaving their Zoom screens and the backdrops of their spare bedrooms, while MPs and ministers have also settled into a routine of on-line working. On one level this has led to much more dynamic working. The 4
Motorcycle R I D E R
yearly cycle of busy and quiet periods has been replaced with a much more even level of activity through the year, as both officials and MPs have become more accessible than the strictures of a pandemic and lockdowns would suggest. Personal face to face interactions (much missed) have been replaced by more dynamic working and in many cases better day to day dialogue. Physical meetings with their long lead times, and time/cost consuming travel, have given way to regular phone conversations and, “shall we hop into a Zoom for a few minutes.” With this more stable way of working and campaigning becoming established, the summer recess this year has been more active than during pre-pandemic times. No talk of silly season in the media nowadays, as officials in particular are unable to hide behind the hinted departmental summer shutdown, despite no such thing ever existing. So although the summer is inevitably quieter due to holidays, the NMC has been able to consolidate several areas of policy work and maintain regular contact with MPs and officials on a range of issues where initial Council successes need to be translated into policy results.
Vision Zero NMC work on a new motorcycling strategy is moving on, and the Department for Transport DfT has been initially receptive to our ideas, but there is some debate about whether new policies should be expressed as a strategy, or via some other means. The NMC view is that as long as we see headline policy parity for motorcycling alongside other non-car alternative forms of transport, the semantics of how this is presented are less important than getting the policies right. To a great extent, our policy calls have needed to run alongside the work the Government has started on a new road safety strategy. That’s because the initial ideas put forward by DfT reached beyond safety into wider areas of transport policy under other objectives such as levelling up. The NMC sees this as an opportunity to make the case for motorcycling beyond safety in itself, particularly as better investment in motorcycle safety relies on motorcycling itself being viewed positively in public policy. As part of this, the NMC is promoting an evolution of the Vision Zero narrative. Vision Zero has many laudable aims, but its promotion has become conflated with active travel (walking and cycling). The result is that most safety investment goes into walking and cycling, while motorcycle safety remains poorly funded. It’s hardly a strategy which will lead to the zero deaths and serious injuries desired by the Vision Zero philosophy. The NMC feels that Vision Zero should be expressed via a ‘welcoming roads’ message which does not discriminate between road user types, so leading to a more even and positive result for safety.
Licensing The UK’s departure from the EU has created an opportunity to reform our motorcycle licensing laws, and the NMC has published a series of proposals. www.britishmotorcyclists.co.uk
