In February 2025 Newcastle City Council announced it was to become a Marmot City in an effort to improve public wellbeing.

The term Marmot City or Marmot Place is named after Professor Marmot who carried out the Marmot Review after being asked by the Secretary of State for Health to chair an independent review to propose the most effective evidence-based strategies for reducing health inequalities in England from 2010.

In becoming a Marmot City Newcastle has committed to following eight principles which are:

1. Give every child the best start in life.
2. Enable all children, young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives.
3. Create fair employment and good work for all.
4. Ensure a healthy standard of living for all.
5. Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities.
6. Strengthen the role and impact of ill health prevention.
7. Tackle racism, discrimination and their outcomes.
8. Pursue environmental sustainability and health equity together.

What does all this have to do with cycling?

Announcing a commitment to a set of principles is a good thing to do, but to be effective it has to be followed up by some actions and those actions need to be planned and implemented to see any worthwhile results.

Cycling, and active travel more generally, can play a huge part in helping the Council to make progress towards all the points set out in the Marmot principles.

It’s no coincidence that one of the other Marmot places is Waltham Forest – one of the areas to benefit from a mini Holland scheme.

For example cycling can be a great way to give children an active start in life. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), in its public health guideline PH17, recommends that there should be national campaigns by authorities to target young people and their families which “convey that physical activity can involve a wide variety of formal and informal activities such as play, dance, swimming, the gym, sport (including street sport and games) and physically active travel (such as walking, cycling and wheelchair travel)”

and that physical activity

“can (and should) become a regular part of daily life and that small lifestyle changes can be worthwhile (for example, active travel to school, the shops or the park, using the stairs and ramps instead of lifts and helping with housework)”

It’s no good just targeting people and telling them something is good though. The Council need to enable people to lead more active lives by ensuring the city allows people to move about easily and safely.

Safe cycling infrastructure could play a huge role in ensuring safe routes to school giving children the opportunity to walk or cycle helping them to be active as part of their daily routine. It could also allow older children to travel more independently which would allow them to have much more control in over their own lives.

Across the city as a whole around a third of households don’t have access to a car. This increases to well over half of households in some areas, so providing safe cycling infrastructure could give many more people the opportunity to travel safely, conveniently, and cheaply.

This would enable people to have much more control over their own lives, allowing them to travel safely and freely when and where they want, without needing to rely on other people or be restricted by public transport options and the costs of using those.

Benefits for Work and Employment

One of the Marmot principles is about fair employment, and in order to be fair employment opportunities need to be accessible to everybody. This is something else that safe cycling infrastructure can help with.

Having a job shouldn’t be predicated on having to spend a sizeable proportion of your wages on owning and maintaining a car, but without safe cycling routes to employment sites, people without cars can be put at a disadvantage. Cycling particularly can widen the travel horizons for disadvantaged people, allowing them to access opportunities that might be out of reach of public transport or walking, or making it easier to access public transport further away from home that does link to employment.

Benefits for health and the environment

Two of the Marmot principles focus on the health of people and the environment.

While any form of active travel, including cycling, can have large positive effect on the lives of people who need to make a journey somewhere, there are other benefits too. Government statistics state that a lack of inactivity is associated with 1 in 6 deaths in the UK, and that the population is around 20% less active than in the 1960s – a number which is getting worse.

If the Council wants to be true to the Marmot principles this is something that is going to have to be reversed.

With the latest figures showing that the number of vehicles registered in the city is continuing to rise and the number of miles driven in the city has reached record highs there’s a danger that without action inactivity is going to continue to increase to the detriment of Newcastle people’s health while also damaging the local environment by contributing to poor air quality, noise and other pollution associated with motor traffic.

What will happen next?

In the years leading up to the announcement the Newcastle was becoming a Marmot city the Council had announced and carried out a number of activities that aligned perfectly with the Marmot principles. School Streets were announced, low traffic schemes were implemented in Fenham, Heaton and Jesmond, and protected cycling infrastructure was built in some places, showing that there was an appetite for making things better by making changes that have worked well elsewhere.

However, before the Marmot City announcement was made the Council also stopped implementing School Streets, removed all the low traffic schemes it implemented and is currently more than a year behind on one scheme to implement a cycle lane along a 200 metre stretch of Pilgrim Street and doesn’t appear to have any current plans to implement additional protected cycling infrastructure that has already been designed and has funding available.

To live up to the standard that it has set itself, the Council is going to have to do many things – and not just cycling related. Most of all the Councillors running the Council will need to show some leadership and ensure changes are made that make Newcastle a better city to live and work in.

We think that better cycling infrastructure can play an important role in that.