Date published: 2011/08/22
The BBC says:
Cycling generates nearly £3bn a year for the UK economy, a report by the London School of Economics has found.
The figure takes into account factors such as bicycle manufacturing, retail and cycle-related employment.
The report says £51m was raised for UK manufacturers from the 3.7 million cycles sold in 2010 - a rise of 28% on the number of cycles sold in 2009
More than a million people also started cycling last year, bringing the total number of cyclists to 13 million.
Last year more than £1.5bn was spent on bikes and another £850m on accessories, with the LSE estimating that the cycling industry is now worth some £2.9bn a year.
There are now 23,000 people working in cycling, contributing more than £600m to the economy in wages and taxes.
The report also says rising fuel costs, improved cycle networks, concern for the environment, and the pull of the Olympics are all possible factors for the increase in popularity for cycling.
And it says a 20% increase in cycling levels by 2015 could save millions of pounds in reduced congestion, pollution levels and NHS costs.
The report says that regular cyclists take 7.4 sick days per year, compared with 8.7 sick days for non-cyclists, saving around £128m through reduced absenteeism, with projected savings of £2bn over the next 10 years.
Dr Alexander Grous, of the LSE, who conducted the research, said: "The good news is that structural, economic, social and health factors seem finally to have created a true step-change in the UK's cycling scene."
Stewart Kellett, of British Cycling which is the governing body of UK cycle sport, said: "This report is further evidence that when more people get involved in cycling there are measurable benefits to the individual, their family, their employer, the environment and the economy as whole."
This is a typically poor BBC article. The last decade or so the chattering classes have decided that cycling is some kind of holy activity (it is not, it is just another form of transport). Thus we have to have perpetual pro-cycling propaganda in the press, of which this is one example.
The worst thing about this BBC article is that they do not mention that British Cycling helped fund the LSE report. (The LSE press release says: "The study was commissioned and published by Sky and British Cycling.") Instead the BBC just quotes Kellett as if British Cycling is some kind of neutral observer. And because a cycling lobby group part funded the report, nothing about the report should be taken at face value, because the results were almost certainly spun to make British Cycling happy. That's the way this "consultation" business works.
Imagine how little the BBC would trust a report about, say, the alleged benefits of oil to the global environment, if Esso had helped fund it. Yet here the BBC just accepts the LSE report without any critical analysis at all, because BBC journalists accept without question that NGOs are saintly organisations who never spin or mislead to advance their cause.
Even the first sentence of the article is misleading: "Cycling generates nearly £3bn a year for the UK economy". If cycling disappeared tomorrow, that money would not disappear tomorrow, but instead it would be spent on something else. That money was mostly generated by some other activity (i.e. work by people who cycle) and then spent on cycling. And it would be interesting to see how much money the LSE would claim that driving "generates" for the UK economy (if the report was part paid for by the AA or the RAC).
The report claims that there is "a significant relationship between frequent cycling and absenteeism, with regular cyclists taking 7.4 sick days per annum, compared to 8.7 sick days for non-cyclists". Well, what they have found is a correlation, not a causation, and needless to say the LSE has not done enough research to even come close to proving a causation. But the causation is what they want everybody to believe is true, and this is in effect how the BBC spins this aspect of the report. But you could equally claim that healthier people are more likely to cycle (duh), so the causation could easily be backwards.
It really is unfortunate that the BBC continually publishes such misleading articles to spread propaganda for special interest pressure groups, at least when those special interest pressure groups are run by people with the same middle class mentality as BBC journalists.
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