We have now completed Stage 1 Feasibility for the project in April 2024. This is the first stage assessing where paths should go and where they could go, along with a lot of technical surveys and assessment of permissions required. We have plans for town wide network of paths for walking wheeling and cycling. These enable us to discuss the proposed paths in more detail with stakeholders such as landowners, the Local Authority, and the community.
We are planning community engagement activity, including an event later this year to discuss this and the rest of the project with the communities on the route.
We continue to work with landowners to secure agreement for the proposed path routes.
In February this year, Transport Scotland announced a decision to wind up the Sustrans Places for Everyone funding programme over the next year and a half, finally closing in September 2025, and not providing any new construction funding from now. Transport Scotland’s replacement is a new construction fund that will be distributed direct to Local Authorities only and not community organisations. We think that is a pity because community organisations have a much greater focus on working for their local community.
Our concern is that communities will loose control of their project, because essentially we do the design, and then hand it over to the Council to do the construction. It risks our project not being near the top of the Council’s large pool of projects. And it is subject to other political and budget factors outside the community’s control. Our approach is to liaise closely with Council officers to ensure they are stakeholders in these design stages, and that local support means the project has to be considered seriously for construction.
We applied in May 2024 to our funder Sustrans Places for Everyone to move to Stage 2 Concept Design, which is the first stage of creating design drawings and working out the details. We expect to hear about the result of that funding application in late June or July, and we will update when we do know. We understand that it will be a competitive round, so fingers crossed.
