Category Archives: Concessionary passes

62a and 62b, Buses, Cabinet, Concessionary passes, Libraries, Rail, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized

Suffolk Buses reach their Beeching moment?

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The First Bus decision to pull the plug on their Bury St Edmunds services and close the depot at the end of March  is a further step in the apparently unstoppable destruction of Suffolk’s public transport services. It is particularly tragic because – after Beeching’s shortsighted and illjudged railway decisions of the 60s – many parts of Suffolk are now not served by rail and have only a bus service to rely on. 
 
Now it’s Suffolk bus services that are at a Beeching moment.  Sadly, many council tax payers are are left reliant on the decisions of a county council administration that doesn’t value or support bus transport and that has made bus services the focus of recent budget cuts (remember, for example the Bury Road Park and Ride closure (details here)? last year’s loss of all evening/Sunday bus services to Woodbridge and beyond (details here)?). Such cuts have little personal impact on any councillor or officer who runs a car, and yet these are the people making the decisions.
 
SCC needs to remember that the impact of poor/non-existent bus services is felt amongst other very real people. People who pay their council taxes and contribute to the community but who also happen to be elderly, or poor, or disabled, as well as others who rely on the bus to reach their college or first time job in order to contribute to the future of Suffolk.  SCC decisionmaking should be addressing these people’s needs as well as pandering to those residents who pay no more tax but are lucky enough to be able to use a car!
 
Of course, we shouldn’t put all the blame on the county council. At national level, the Coalition needs to reverse the iniquitous deregulation of bus services, instituted under Thatcher, and shamefully supported by the last Labour government. Deregulation has left rural communities at the mercy of bus companies with little local interest or management presence, who can run the moneymaking routes as poorly as they choose. The County Council, on the other hand,  is only allowed to run ones that run at a loss.
 
Tell me, is this how the ‘free market’ gives us a better service?
 
Despite this,  SCC could choose to be far more proactive than it has been. It could lobby both Suffolk’s MPs and central government for increased support for rural public transport. It could also show that SCC cares though direct action to preserve scheduled bus services. In July’s council meeting, I proposed a motion to increase support to disabled and elderly bus user (details here) via improved bus pass conditions. This motion was passed almost unanimously by full council and referred back to the Cabinet.
 
Since July, Cabinet has overseen the revision, recasting, re-consultation, decisionmaking and embarkation of their new Library services despite few Suffolk residents wanting any change whatsoever. Many many Suffolk residents want changes to the new terms and conditions for bus pass holders. Has Cabinet looked at bus passes?  Six months on we’re still waiting for a date!
 
By the way, I note with interest that passengers who wish to register a complaint about the withdrawal of the Bury St Edmunds services are ‘advised to contact First buses directly on 08456 020 121’. I suggest that this is precisely what people should do
 
This is a slightly extended version of my letter to the EADT  published today, 18-01-2012. 
Buses, Concessionary passes, Council reports, Council spending, cuts, Libraries, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Woodbridge

September’s report to Woodbridge Town Council

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This month my report is principally to do with bus passes and  libraries. SCC’s county-wide consultation on further cuts is also covered

Interim Chief Executive
Lucy Robinson, Director for Economy, Skills and Environment has been appointed interim chief executive at Suffolk County Council. She had been covering the role of Chief Executive since the previous Chief Executive was put on “gardening leave”. The role is initially for six months, during which time the recruitment of a permanent Chief Executive will take place.  Mrs Robinson has been appointed on a salary of £150,000 pro rata which is apparently the kind of figure Suffolk might expect to be paying for our new Chief Executive’s salary.

 Concessionary Travel: Explore, over-60 and disabled persons passes
After the success of the recent petition, the Explore card cut (together with other obstacles to young persons travel  is currently being investigated by a SCC scrutiny task and finish group. I am a member of this three-person group, and urge anyone who wishes  to give evidence to do so. The committee is taking evidence till half term; the contact is Teresa Harden at SCC.

At  the last Full Council meeting the Liberal Democrat Group submitted a motion recommending that concessionary bus pass holders should be allowed to travel from 9am instead of 9:30am whilethose who hold concessionary bus passes due to a disability should have all time restrictions removed. The motion was passed with a single amendment , so this decision will be now referred to Cabinet.  In the meantime I have set up a petition to highlight  public support.  You can find the epetition on the SCC epetition website http://petitions.web-labs.co.uk/suffolkcc/public/Bus-Passes—we-need-to-travel-before-9-30- , while a paper  version of the petition can be downloaded from: http://carolinepage.blog.suffolk.libdems.org/2011/07/15/bus-passes-new-hope-for-the-elderly-and-disabled-of-suffolk/

Libraries update

Future: the administration has put forward a number of different options for the future structure of the service, and the options below will go through a ‘best value’ evaluation. I asked  for the parameters of ‘best value’ to be made very explicit;

  • A Council Business Unit
  • A Council owned company/enterprise
  • Independent Company/Enterprise

This will be reported back to Cabinet on the 8th of November. The Council has also moved to set up pilots for community run libraries at:

  • Aldeburgh
  • Bungay
  • Eye, Debenham and Stradbroke
  • Sudbury
  • Thurston
  • Wickham Market
  • Gainsborough, Chantry, Ipswich, Stoke, Rosehill and Westbourne – working together.

These projects will begin in April 2012, and will look to increase the amount of local decision making, fundraising and activities and look to include more public services under one roof.

Local news: I am funding the children’s writer and illustrator Jonathan Allen to come and cartoon at the Woodbridge Library on Sunday – the day of the Reading Scheme presentation awards.

Mobile libraries: theres  a consultation  running until 14 October on plans to move from fortnightly to monthly or four-weekly stops and  to remove all stops in communities that are served by a static library. We are told this would would save an estimated £225,000 a year, while maintaining the mobile library service to those communities that do not have a static library.

SCC Consultation  on further budget cuts 
As suggested by the Lib Dems last October,  SCC has decided to undertake a major budget consultation exercise with Suffolk residents, businesses, partners, the voluntary sector and other stakeholders. The idea is to get  people to tell us which  services matter most to them and to share their ideas and suggestions on how the Council could save money or improve services.  I urge everyone to make their opinions known. This is the only democratic way to arrive at necessary cuts   www.suffolk.gov.uk/WeAreListening

Public Questions at Full Council & Cabinet
As usual members of the public can ask questions to the administration at both Full Council and at Cabinet. Your question must be submitted by 12 midday, four days prior to the meeting.  This means that questions to Full Council, which takes place on the 22nd of September, have to be submitted by the 16th http://www.suffolk.gov.uk/CouncilAndDemocracy/DecisionMaking/PublicQuestionTimeatMeetingsoftheCountyCouncilandCabinet.htm

Locality budget
I am wanting to  fund  more bike racks in the Market Square, outside the Community Hall, and down by Cafe Nero. Hoefully this will encourage greater bike use – essential in a town where parking is so short

Buses, Concessionary passes, eXplore card, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Transport, young people

Bus passes: new hope for the elderly and disabled of Suffolk

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I proposed a motion as opposition Transport spokesman at yesterday’s full council meeting. It was very simple. It asked the Council to revisit  their decision to provide little more than the bare statutory minimum for travel passes. This is because the current situation – so much less generous than the situation when  the money was channelled through District councils – is causing genuine hardship to many people, who often have few if any alternatives,

i)   recommending that those pass holders eligible due to age, shall be able to travel using their passes from 9 o’clock throughout the week,
ii)   and removing all time limitations on buses for those pass holders eligible due to disability.

This was passed, hoorah! My speech (below) proposing the motion was supported by  members of all the other parties, with very little demurring, (although Cllr Noble had considerable difficulty recognising his own Cabinet’s proposed figures on the subject),

An extraordinarily funny moment came when Cllr Newman, portfolio-holder  for Children, Schools and Young People’s Services put forward the  argument that poor college-going teenagers (here he instanced a young relative of his own) might have problems getting on a bus to college  if  OAPs crowded it at 9am. This was terrible, said Cllr Newman,  considering how much the young person in question was having to pay to get to college by bus . And he seemed genuinely surprised by the response – loud cries of “You should bring back the Explore card!” which immediately came from the opposition benches.

My speech:

Colleagues, since April, those people in Suffolk entitle to use concessionary travel passes by virtue of their age or disability have suffered a reduction in the terms and conditions of these passes. They can now no longer use them before 9.30 on weekdays.

This impacts on 140,000 people – just under 7,000 of whom require the pass on the grounds of disability.

Suffolk County Council are keen to say that they are actually providing enhancements  to the basic statutory national minimum.  That is, we provide the option of getting an ungenerous annual £50 in travel vouchers for those unable to use the bus, and allow cardholders to use a pre-9.30 bus if there IS only a single bus in the morning and it leaves pre-9.30. So much for the enhancements.

The County Council say  that ‘to extend the scheme would involve extra costs and would have been at the expense of other council services’.

So what exactly are these costs?

The national minimum scheme is currently costing  about £8 million for Suffolk.

The council tells us that the cost of including free travel between 9.00 and 9.30 would be an additional £180,000 a year.

They do not itemize the cost of providing 24/7 free travel for disabled people but we can easily extrapolate it from their figures. Do you know how much it will cost? An additional  £23,000 a year.  £23,000.

This is a tiny figure set against the harm that this cut has caused – the additional difficulty and expense of getting to work/school/training/social enterprise on time.

The additional difficulty to living a life that you and I take for granted.

We counld make a real difference for £23,000. Instead we are adding another hurdle for disabled people to overcome.

I must remind Cllr MacGregor that he, like I, answered live questions from disabled people at an ACE conference only last month and this change to their travel conditions was the subject generated the most concern. Can I repeat that the cost of solving it is £23,000 a year. Come on!

Let us turn now to the elderly people of this county. It is very easy, particularly if you have a car and your transport is paid for out of the public purse, to see no difficulty in this reduction of transport rights. It is, after all, the government’s statutory minimum. And what do old people do all day, anyway?

Well, let’s look around the room – what do you do? Plenty of people in this room are over 60. But you have active lives, you have things that you need to do, you are clearly continuing to contribute to society.  You would be irritated to think you could be put into a special category of people who don’t need to be there on time, whose priorities can always wait for the rush hour to finish, who are just not quite as important as other people. After a lifetime of paying taxes and possibly fighting wars for us.

£180,000 is not a large sum of money to ensure the full participation in society and in daily life of our senior generation.

Which brings us to the lack of a full ‘Equality Impact Assessment’. Again. What is it with these EIAs and Suffolk County Council transport? Again, a pre-assessment  judged that an EIA was “not necessary as long as specific measure were considered to meet the needs of people disadvantaged by remoteness or disability”. Well, Duh!

However even that is in debate. West Sussex council concluded, for example – with the same assessment – that implementing the statutory scheme may lead to “the council not fulfilling its duty under the Equality Act, 2010” and concluded that “to be genuinely useful, free travel would have to be all day for people with disabilities due to start-times offered by care-providers”. Were Sussex lawyers trained at different schools from Suffolk’s lawyers? Or is the council just a bit more caring and responsive in Sussex than we are?

Oh, and by the way West Sussex actually provide ‘companion passes’ too.

For this motion to be supported would cost the county council an annual £200,000, which is around 25p per year from every resident.

At a time of cuts I would hate to say “this is peanuts”. But it compares very favourably with the £750,000 we were happy to put into Suffolk Circle to support older people. With the £10 million which we are putting aside for rural broadband.   And we mustn’t forget that so far this year SCC has managed to underspend on our budget by £3.5 million, by prioritising spending cuts over frontline services and social exclusion.

Our proposals will allow full, affordable participation in society to these two valuable groups of people: those who do not want to let their disability stand in the way of their achievements and those who do not want to let their age confine them to home.

For all these reasons, I urge councillors to support this cheap and deeply effective motion.


STOP PRESS:

Owing to demand from various organisations and advocacy groups we have set up a petition to urge the Cabinet to agree these recommendations . You can find the details and a downloadable paper form here