The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Caledonian Exchange, 19A Canning Street, Edinburgh EH3 8EG.
Active travel
Walk Wheel Cycle Trust, the charity previously known as Sustrans, has spent decades working directly with communities to make this happen. With funding support from the Scottish Government, we’ve supported thousands of partners make walking, wheeling, and cycling possible.
From supporting volunteers and grassroots groups making National Cycle Network routes safer, more joyful spaces through the Love Your Network and ArtRoots programmes, to co-designing fairer neighbourhoods with the people and local groups who know these places best – the impact adds up to something huge.
Community demand has never been higher. And the evidence showing this work is helping to tackle some of Scotland’s biggest challenges – inequality, child poverty, health and climate - has never been greater. Yet every year this momentum is put at risk.
Annual funding cycles limit ambition. And delays to confirmation and award, often stretching months into the financial year, can undermine the meaningful engagement processes that deliver projects shaped around real local needs.
Community‑led groups, who are already operating in a challenging delivery window, can be forced to operate at risk — delaying work, scaling back ambition or, in the worst cases, folding altogether. For charities like us, this uncertainty creates an annual jeopardy: balancing unsustainable financial risk against the potential loss of passionate, expert staff and programmes that are already changing lives.
Investment in walking, wheeling, and cycling is helping create a better Scotland for everyone. But its true potential will not be realised until the third sector has the confidence to plan beyond a single year with transparent, sustainable, and flexible funding that protects our biggest asset: our people.
Fair Funding would be transformational – the blueprint is there to fix it, so fix it!
“Everyone benefits when more people walk, wheel, and cycle,” states Transport Scotland. “Active travel is good for your physical, mental, and social health, and increased rates of active travel as an alternative to the car brings wider health benefits from improved air quality, reduced road danger, and increased community cohesion.” And through the likes of the Active Travel Framework, bringing together the key policy approaches to improving the uptake of walking and cycling in Scotland for travel, and the Active Travel Infrastructure Fund, it is clear that steps are being taken to realise an active travel vision for the country.
The benefits are, indeed, clear. According to the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust’s Walking and Cycling Index 2025, walking and cycling across Scotland’s eight cities has prevented 4,530 serious long-term health conditions, saved 93,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas, reduced the daily number of cars on the road by 520,000, saved the NHS £53.7 million per year, and resulted in £1.48 billion in economic benefit for individuals and Scottish cities. With impacts as important as these, it is vital that Scotland not only harnesses the skills, experience, and dedication of voluntary organisations providing valued active travel support but also ensures that those organisations have the stability and security to do so effectively.
“We are lucky enough to benefit from some small pots of funding which are given in a way that shows an understanding and respect of our sector,” says a local environmental charity providing support for active travel. “We have benefited from larger contracts in the past but the benefits of more money have been massively diluted by the processes and approaches.”
“The current approach to funding is a nightmare,” explains a UK-wide charity with a focus on encouraging walking. “Funding is largely inaccessible with complicated, time-consuming applications, and when we do manage to access funding it’s usually short-term, delayed, and void of any core funding.”
“We are a tiny organisation, so we don't have in-house bid-writing expertise - it's harder for small, start-up entrants to compete with established bigger charities,” admits a community cycling hub. “We haven't been able to increase staff salaries for a number of years to align with inflation and cost-of-living, despite wanting to, which increases risk of staff feeling forced to go elsewhere in order to make ends meet.”
When the numbers set out by Transport Scotland show both the savings that active travel can deliver to our national health service and the economic boon the sector generates, it should be an obvious aim to ensure that all partners working in this area have the tools to be as secure and as sustainable as possible. But as is consistently the case, this not the reality for voluntary organisations. And it will not be the reality without Fair Funding.
“[Fair Funding] would literally change our society and country for the better,” states the UK-wide charity. “Quite considerably so.”
“[Fair Funding] would enable us to remain an ethical attractive employer and retain skilled, passionate staff,” says the community cycling hub. “[It] would enable us to layout a more concrete business plan, ensuring we can be more ambitious in our work and take action to increase our impact and reach.”
“Fair Funding would be transformational,” agrees the UK-wide charity. “The blueprint is there to fix it – so fix it!”
Women on Wheels
For four years, Women on Wheels has been encouraging women into cycling in Glasgow, while working with the local community to understand the barriers they face and how those can be overcome. Creating an all-inclusive community so that women can cycle for transport and leisure, the organisation provides an array of services, including adult cycling lessons, bike maintenance classes, family cycling, led bike rides, and social cycling events.
Founded in 2022, the organisation initially found it relatively straight forward to successfully obtain funding for its services. However, this success rate has gradually declined and, recently, Women on Wheels has been notified that its main funder, the Scottish Government, is cutting revenue funding by 60%, a move that the organisation describes as “catastrophic”. Furthermore, the organisation has been left in the dark as to the reasoning behind this cut in funding.
In response to this worrying financial drop, Women on Wheels is having to consider potentially reducing hours, and possibly even making some staff redundant, as the organisation now finds itself in a position where there is nowhere near enough funding to carry on in its current form. The plan already in place for the year ahead will now need to be revised, services will undoubtedly need to be scaled back and, while the organisation will explore other methods to generate income, it seems likely that its reserves will need to be used to plug gaps, potentially in their entirety.
The impact of this cut to funding is even more deeply felt by the organisation due to it working within a landscape that has prevented Women on Wheels from becoming more resilient since its founding. For example, its funding has been never timely, with confirmation routinely provided well after the start of the financial year. In addition, the organisation has never received any feedback following unsuccessful funding applications, which would provide valuable support towards strengthening future applications, other than when applying to independent funders. Simply put, the uncertainty and unsustainability of the approaches taken by most funders has created the circumstances in which an unexpected and sizeable cut to funding is made even more damaging and puts the organisation at even greater risk.
Those at Women on Wheels putting every ounce of time and effort into finding an effective way forward find themselves with little capacity to do much else, with all energy devoted to identifying and attempting to access additional funding. And this is not a new development, with the sapping of capacity across the sector being a frequently cited impact of the current funding landscape. But those within the organisation are also clear that, had Fair Funding already been the default approach taken by funders across Scotland, the organisation would have been far more resilient and, therefore, far more prepared to navigate this recent cut.