Scottish MTB Strategy – Submit your views

Anyone else get a 403 Forbidden message when trying to click on the Draft Strategy Document?

@stwhannah

Same here – 403 message

probably IP blocked to anyone outside the tweed valley

🤣

The link that Hannah posted above works

Is there an option for stop spending all the budget on strategy reports?

I’m not as familiar as what’s happening with mountain biking in Scotland as I once was but has anything really changed in the last ten years?

What Dick says.

I am wondering what this strategy has to do with me – someone who rides his bike in the local woods and hills several times a week.

Also very unimpressed with “Multiple world champions …. every mountain bike discipline”.
Really ? That should be the last thing you focus on.

Nothing about getting kids out there and enjoying riding bikes (several local schools do a fantastic job with this).

Facilities? We have the most relaxed land access laws in Europe and countless miles of tracks and paths. We don’t need to propagate the myth that mountain biking needs some special arena, likely centralised in one location (like Glentress) thereby putting it outwith the ability of many to access.

Peebles MTB strategy more like.

That is part of the problem though…apparently this is all tourism…so what do the locals do as they don’t count for tourism?
It is all wrong as it needs to be pitched as health and well-being with tourism as an additional benefit.

You can’t hold MTB races on bridleways

We don’t have bridleways and tracks already get used for events.

Umpteen squillion DMBinS strategy reports ago there was a goal of providing transitional/educational options so that folk would be encouraged to venture away from trail centres. I could be completely selfish and say thank god that didn’t happen but I’m not the gatekeeping type.

Weird document – not really strategy, not really a set of targets or ambitions, not a pipeline of schemes…

Almost like it was conceived purely as a consultancy exercise in order to spend some money.

I can only echo these sentiments. As a Strategy document, it falls well short. It has a stated vision but what is lacking is a clear articulation of what the strategic drivers for success are and the priorities for action. This feels an awful lot like an attempt at justifying the continued funding of DMBS in the face of the challenge of it not being self funding and relying on Scottish Government to pay for it.

Fundamentally, the focus of it seems to disregard the vast bulk of the population who live in the central belt of Scotland. The comment about it being a Tweed Valley centred document feels right.

I think the authors would benefit from looking at what a good strategy document looks like such as the Scottish Forestry Strategy and consider how they might replicate the thinking. As currently drafted, it is a muddled mess. If I was the one controlling the funding, I would be seriously considering pulling it. I am sure the authors are well intentioned and passionate about what they do but if you are trying to develop and deliver a strategy for mountain biking in Scotland, it has to be an awful lot better than this.

Cheers

Sanny

Looking at the big players involved, it’ll be funded despite the lack of detail or real thought – forestry, tourism and Scottish Cycling all play a large part of this. Although is a part of cycling, it is a very small part in the grand scheme of cyclists…and yet we have a strategic document that wants us as champions at various levels/disciplines – that needs Scottish Cycling to step things up significantly for off-road stuff, but they won’t as they really only care about track and road.
Forestry are wanting this to remain as it gives a convenient shield to hide behind to keep controlling development – one of the reasons Glentress/Tweed Valley gets so much money spent on it – the forestry want it as the place where people in Scotland go mountain biking.
Tourism – a great mouthpiece for all the money these MTB tourists bring to places (which also helps drive up costs for the tourists) – great for the locals who benefit though.

Then there are the people who just want to go ride their bikes…it really doesn’t seem to cater for them, in fact it doesn’t seem to really cater for people looking for development locally to help improve the range of biking that can be done.

This won’t have funded stopped as it seems to tick many boxes for the main players…but it does appear to be just creating words with very little on-the-ground to support it.

I’m sure I’ll have more rants but I’m trying to keep calm about this as although I’ve more than a passing interest, it hasn’t stopped me doing what I want to do (which also evidences how narrow this is aiming at)…

Not sure I would agree with this being a convenient shield for the Forestry to hide behind. Funding for the next phase of the Tweed Valley developments comes via the UK Govt Borderlands Growth Deal. That funding simply isn’t available for use outwith the Borders.

The Seven Stanes was the happy product of european funding monies. It was a classic case of build it and they will come. The real challenge has been in the cost of maintaining the network of trails as a recurrent revenue cost. When I was with the Forestry, it didn’t wash its face in terms of income v expenditure. I suspect it still doesn’t and never will. The building was the easy part. The trails are an integral part of the strategic vision of improving health, well being and life chances as articulated by the Scottish Forestry Strategy. However, from an expenditure perspective, replicating the model of trail centres across the country is not economically viable in the current model.

I would dearly love to see a Central Scotland trail centre a la Glentress but the money simply isn’t there. It would not make sense for the Forestry to do anything other than consolidate what they already have. But then that is another story.

No one is getting rich off mountain bike trails here in the UK. If you look at Bike Park Wales, their cash balance dropped £169k to £139k in 2021 and they have £5.194 million in long term loans and bank loans to service.

Cheers

Sanny

I put more or less exactly that ^^ into my response.

This always annoys me with grant funding stuff – even today, where I work has been identified as one of the top areas in the country for X so we’re getting loads of extra money for X. In spite of the fact that we’re already good at it and don’t really need the money, what we need is for everyone else to have the money that we had (possibly along with our expertise) and then to do X as well as we did.

The areas that are bad at X or have not delivered very well on it get reduced funding leaving them even less able to do X in future.

Catch-22.

It’s why we’ve ended up with “Levelling Up” to attempt to fix decades of uderinvestment but I can see the MTB Trail Centres going the same way. Glentress gets millions for new cafe, maintenance, events etc while Drumlanrig ends up with a few quid for a new signpost or something.

I live down in the Tweed Valley and I’m always surprised to hear that there’s millions
of pounds of funding going to Glentress and Innerleithen. If you ride here a lot you’ll see
that there’s no evidence of that money being spent. The trails at Glentress have barely changed in the last 10-15 years and have very little maintenance. FLS do what they can but they just keep the trails clear of danger and try and stop too much erosion. All the wooden features get taped off once they fall into disrepair. There’s no evidence of multi million pound spending going on. The Peel centre went in about 2011 and that’s the last major investment I can think of. I know there is work ongoing now due to the world championships so yes in future it will be better. Innerleithen has had no paid for development. The trails are pretty much maintained on a voluntary basis although I believe FLS go in and sweep the trails and remove fallen trees etc when required. The golfie is all done by volunteers.

National Access Forum is a bit of a strange one, and certainly not something I would boast about. My perception of the NAF is that it is landowner-led and influenced. It was created by Nature Scotland, who have many vested interests in keeping people out of places – I’ve experienced 1st hand how they abuse their power. The main output of the NAF has been a landowner-serving ‘guidance’ document on access issues. The primary function of which seems to be a move to enshrine a right for landowners to charge for access (esp. for “events”, which are also heavily defined by NAF for no obvious reason – SOAC has workable guidance on all of this). This is the opposite to the actual legal position in the Land Reform Act/SOAC, which specifically rules out charging for access.

NAF appear to have the objective of eroding hard won access rights. Approach with caution.

Without the volunteer trail builders, the recently voted best trails in the UK would be nothing, but government agencies and funders are falling over themselves with self-congratulations over its success, and spending money moving the carpark back to where it was before…

This is a perception I’m picking up more and more when it comes to DMBINS promotion of Scotland as a tourist destination (see recent videos with Scotty Laughland touring Lochaber, Perthshire, Tweed Valley etc). A lot of these places rely solely on volunteer trail build crews, so when you promo them as ‘destinations’ without the prerequisite infrastructure or forward plan for that increased traffic – where does the buck fall? Well at the moment it falls squarely with those volunteers and their spare time to maintain trails, and, who at the moment seem only to be lightly supported if at all.

The strategy does mention supporting trail associations in accessing funding, but in my view they should be leaning heavily into supporting these groups as a strategic priority (with the view to developing areas for the longer term).