Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans (LCWIPs)

A Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan sets out, for one town or area, which walking and cycling routes would benefit most from improvement and in what order those improvements should be considered. Each plan is built from local knowledge – what residents, councillors, schools and businesses tell us about the journeys people actually make, and where those journeys are difficult or unsafe today.

The plans matter for three practical reasons. They give us an evidence base, so that where money is spent it is spent on the routes with the strongest case. They allow us to bid for national funding that would otherwise be allocated to other counties. And they strengthen our position when negotiating contributions from new developments, because we can show exactly which routes a new development should help pay for.

Our approach follows from the adoption of our:

What a plan does

A published plan is a strategic document. It does not commit to building anything, it does not allocate any money.

Before any individual scheme in a plan could be built, it would go through its own design process, its own funding, and its own public consultation, with any changes to a road would go through the usual approval process.

The plans will then become an evidence base for the Multi-Modal Area Investment Plans, a key part of the Local Transport Plan 4.

We have separated the two jobs. Plans prepared under our current approach identify the routes that matter most and the kind of improvement each one needs, but they do not contain design drawings for individual schemes.

New national design guidance for rural areas and smaller market towns was published in July 2026, five years after the guidance the earlier plans were drawn to, and schemes designed from these plans will follow it.

What the LCWIP documents carry is the evidence: collision records, the routes children take to school, where new housing is being built, and where people already walk and cycle, or tell us they would if it were easier. That evidence sets the priority order, and it gives a firm basis for seeking contributions towards the routes that development sites will depend on.

Current and future plans

These are the areas we have currently progressing plans for and the completed or planned completion dates:

Completed plans

Three plans are now published in full, each including the evidence behind it and the routes it identifies: Loughborough, South of Leicester and Market Harborough.

These plans set out the vision and priorities for cycling and walking improvements in each of the areas to create convenient and practical cycling and walking networks to help and encourage people to travel more actively.