Tag Archives: Buses

Buses, Cabinet, Concessionary passes, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized

STILL waiting for the bus..

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Sometimes its really difficult to admit you have made a mistake, but this is what Suffolk County Council needs to do.

The Conservative majority must face reality and reverse their decision to downgrade the Suffolk Concessionary Fares passes for the elderly and disabled. They need to return this service to the level it was at two years ago before SCC took over the running of this scheme. WHen they took it over, SCC’s Tory leadership justified their position by saying they provided these travel passes at a little more than the ‘statutory UK minimum’. A good excuse but a bad decision. Problems of transport are notoriously more difficult and disabling for those of us who live in rural areas like Suffolk, and most other rural county councils make adjustments accordingly.

It was a whole year back that I proposed SCC’s Full Council that all time restrictions be lifted for disabled pass holders and reduced for those eligible due to age (so that their travel can start at 9 o’clock). This proposal was so sensible and neecessary that it had cross-party support and was voted in by councillors of all parties. (O, and the Cabinet too ). Yet, after a hugely disrespectful delay of a year – presumably to let the fuss die down a bit – Cabinet has turned its back on the disabled and the elderly once again.

What a surprise! Making these changes would cost the Council a whole £489,448 a year (that’s just over a penny a week from every Suffolk resident). This is happening in the year that Cabinet saved only a paltry £13m from this years pared-to-the-bone budget, to stash with the other £140m they hold in reserves.

This cannot be the end of the matter.

Any councillor is entitled to dispute (‘call-in’) this unfair decision – and this is exactly what the Lib Dems have done. Sadly, as the Cabinet member is on leave to the end of July it cannot now be looked at by the all-party Scrutiny committee until the 27 September. This is nearly 18 months after the restrictions first came into force.

Its a long time to keep on putting the pressure on – but its a vey worthy cause. The changes to Suffolk’s concessionary passes have affected 140,000 local people, 7000 of whom are disabled and are causing genuine hardship to people with few if any alternatives. It limits their access to work, health, education, training and social activities.

The Cabinet were fully aware that such a change would cost between £251,000 and £489,448 pa, a small proportion of the £13.1m that the County Council has underspent and entrusted to banks  in this financial year alone. Their decision is frankly unbelievable.

At a time of cuts I would hate to say an expenditure under £500,000 is “peanuts”. But it compares very favourably with other SCC spending decisions such as Suffolk Circle .

Reversing these changes will allow full, affordable participation in society to two valuable and poorly recognised 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. Its all a matter of priorities. Do the people of Suffolk really want the Council to hoard more and more of our money in an unstable banking system – instead of investing in the people of today for the benefit of tomorrow?

Buses, Cabinet, Council spending, cuts, eXplore card, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized, young people

SCC: where does their “Interest” lie?

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 At their last Cabinet meeting SCC’s Tories revealed that they had underspent a total of £13.1m in the last financial year. Much of this money is going into the already large reserves (now standing at £158m).

Yes, you heard me right.

At a time of huge financial stress when we need to make best use of every penny, they quite unnecessarily took more than £13m from our hard-pressed services and entrusted it to the banks. 

They must be the last people left in the country who have any faith left in bankers.

And they put their trust in the banking system at a time when public money is desperately needed to support the local economy. When the community is reeling under the impact of lost public services .

The Conservative administration has told us they’ve cut these services because they were unaffordable. This is how they have justified the huge damage that they have inflicted on Suffolk’s public transport – by tellling us that  “you can’t spend a pound more than once,”(as the Cabinet member responsible has told us rather more than once).

Now it seems clear that the Cabinet just doesn’t want to spend some of these (our) pounds at all.

We live in a time where belt-tightening may be unavoidable, but it is clear that the Conservatives’ cutting has been overly-enthusiastic.  The money they have put into low-interest reserves could better be spent on restoring such valued and socially valuable services as the eXplore youth travel Card, our closed Household Waste Recycling Centres, the Bury Road Park and Ride, many axed bus routes, and those essential and valued walk-in Youth clubs (so useful for those who cannot afford subscription activities) as well as improving the bus pass conditions for Suffolk elderly and disabled.

These were all services that my colleagues and I argued to reinstate at Budget time, but it fell on deaf ears.  More than deaf ears – as I recall, the Leader suggested our budget had been ‘scribbled on the back of a fag packet.’

Better than on the front of a paying-in slip, Cllr Bee!

Suffolk County’s Conservatives would much rather invest our money in banks than in the people of Suffolk – preferring to build up capital than to build social capital.

 

- Cycles and Cycling, Buses, Cabinet, Rail, Transport, Your councillor

Transport of delight? the view’s from the Clapham omnibus

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We’re living through parlous times. The global financial situation grows ever more dire, more and more people are poorer and poorer, jobs are scarce, petrol is more expensive and public transport is becoming a greater necessity. Yet – just as under Labour and Conservative governments – rural buses provide a worse and worse service.  Public transport policy-making continues to be in the hands of  people who (may) intend well and probably think they know what they are talking about, but do not do so from any personal experience!
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This is because the people who make the policy are principally town and city-dwellers. These are  people whose experience of rail closures is restricted to the vanishing of Trafalgar Square tube station, people who expect to walk out of an office and onto a bus, people who have a choice of publicly funded transport options to get them from a to b. These are people who only discover their transport-richness when there is a strike or a breakdown  – and who are then outraged at briefly having to face the same lifestyle as the rest of us. They expect automatically to be able to get on a bus or a tube or a local train  on an evening or a Sunday or a bank holiday when in the city. The countryside?  they don’t need buses to exist outside the M25. You reach your little place in the country by car.
In fact, they don’t know they’re born.
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Maybe its not surprising that such folks do not realise that for many of us outside towns and cities  it is a luxury to get reliable public transport after six pm, on a weekday. (Or indeed to get any public transport at any time.)
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Everyone in Britain helps support these planners’ ignorance of the facts of life, because we spend more on their public transport.  A lot more. A couple of years back, 42% of the UK’s public spending on buses was being spent in London to serve 15% of the population. In the same year (2009/10) each Londoner had £103.43 spent on their bus transport. As opposed to the £13.47 per capita spend we people in Suffolk received.
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So when we country bumpkins come up to London and are impressed by how easy it is to get about, just remember, its because we are generously paying for this out of our own pockets!
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Why? Because decisions have been made for years by a series of governments who are deeply prejudiced against poorer country dwellers, because they either don’t believe in or have no concern for rural poverty, that’s why!
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This being the case, we need to fight for parity. Suffolk would do a lot better if its County Council Cabinet actually lobbied the Coalition government for a more equitable spend on public transport. (This isn’t a matter of party politics but of innate fairness. They didn’t lobby the Labour government either.)  Instead, time and time again, Suffolk’s County Council uses the current  – iniquitous – situation as an alibi for their own lack of interest, or spine.
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In China they have a saying to explain why things are not as they should be  “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away” 山  高  黄  帝  远.
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So come on, SCC’s Cabinet – join us in shouting so loudly that the emperors of transport hear us in Whitehall, and on that pretty red bus in Parliament Square!
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