Bradford College is celebrating after winning a cycling silver for being “bike friendly.”

The college has just earned a silver accreditation in the Bike Friendly Business scheme. The stamp of approval was granted by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s CityConnect Team, which rates the county’s businesses on the basis of how well they encourage and support staff to cycle to work and offers employers advice and small grants to help them embrace commuter cycling.

Andy Welsh, chief executive officer of the Bradford College Group and keen cyclist, said: “There are great health and well-being benefits to biking and cycling to work helps reduce demand for parking and alleviate traffic congestion and pollution. We are proud to have earned the silver rating and will be considering the feedback and recommendations from the assessors to see what we might do to make the college even more bike friendly for staff, students and visitors and hopefully achieve gold status.”

The college, which has more than 1,200 employees and around 20,000 students, was praised by assessors for its ‘plentiful high-quality bike parking’, discount offered at local bike shop, information on biking provided to staff and its Cycle to Work Scheme where the college buys a bike on the employee’s behalf and they pay back in stages, with tax benefits.

Securing the silver status allows the college to apply for a grant of up to £5,000 to carry out further improvements for cycling facilities.

CityConnect, which is funded by the Department of Transport, aims to create increased levels of cycling and walking through improvement to infrastructure and activities that will enable more people access to a bike.

The purpose of the Bike Friendly Business grant scheme is to enable organisations to capitalise on this new, welcoming environment for cyclists and to lead by example for other organisations in the region.