Tag Archives: Colin Noble

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

'Divesting' services, eXplore card, New Strategic direction, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized, Your councillor

Suffolk Politics and the English Language

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I’ve just come back from Suffolk’s latest full council meeting – the centrepiece of which was a debate on the administration’s  Update to the New Strategic Direction ( click here: its the last document on the list).  Many of the Lib Dem and other opposition members, including myself, laid into this  incomprehensible  piece of bureaucratic gobbledegook.

In return some, but not very many, members of the Conservative majority reproached us for using unkind words. (Oh, and for writing nasty blogs which criticised them.)  They suggested, cynically, that we Lib Dems were being cynical and destructive of  the Administration’s  highminded efforts to listen to the residents of Suffolk. “We want to free the people of Suffolk from the chains of excessive bureaucracy, and give them what they truly want”, they claimed.

They might have convinced me if it weren’t for all those emails I’ve been getting these last months from Suffolk people  facing the prospect of being without buses, without bus passes, without explore cards, school crossing patrols, libraries, care provision, respite provision etc etc. All of whom complained that they HADN’T been listened to, and WEREN’T getting what they wanted.

Other Tory councillors – the  numbers of the disaffected raising daily – were ‘layin low and sayin nuffin’. It didn’t stop them voting with their peers, though.

Dante MUST have reserved a circle of hell specially for those who lack the courage of their convictions!

I didn’t bother explaining why the Admin’s take on libraries is wrong, their take on transport is wrong, their take on the explore card is wrong . I have said all this before to much jeering from these highminded listeners to the people of Suffolk. Instead, I concentrated on how they were hiding behind incomprehensibility. I said:

I have endeavoured to read this document,  I have really really tried. And I’m good at reading: I have an MA from Oxford (English Language and Literature). Last year I worked on the great Oxford Historical Thesaurus – which covers all the meanings of all the words that have been used in English over the last thousand years.

I have even managed to read and enjoy the collected works of Walter Scott!

I would suggest that if there is meaning to be taken from a piece of writing I am the very person to take it.  However –

THIS piece of (for want of a better word) writing,  has done what Walter Scott, Beowulf , even John Milton, couldn’t do. It has defeated me utterly.

I can only conclude that the reason no meaning can be extracted from this piece is because there is no meaning to be extracted.

Is this accidental? Is this deliberate? Who can tell? As George Orwell puts it “what looks like an unclear expression of a clear thought might actually be a perfectly clear expression of an unclear thought.”

However, from reading this, one thing does become crystal clear. Either you don’t know what you want to do, or you don’t want to tell us.  Come on,  Cllr Pembroke can you give us your plan in words people can understand, so we identify clearly what action IS being recommended!

Cllr Noble attempted a comeback by trying to explain that the NSD WAS rather a ‘complex’ idea.  (The implication being that maybe it was a little bit too complex for lesser minds to comprehend in all its glory.)

Cllr Noble: complex and unclear are two very different words:

  • Complex implies that something has many separate aspects, which are necessary but difficult to understand;
  • Unclear denotes a muddle!

Complex or unclear? Gentle reader, I invite you to click on the link above, read the ‘Action Recommended’ section on the first page and judge  for yourself.

Cabinet, Council spending, cuts, Lollipop patrols, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized

Pretzel maths from SCC

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One of the things that is so remarkable about the leadership at Suffolk County Council  is their perverse combination of parsimony and prodigality.

On the parsimony side, they stand up straight, cross their fingers behind their backs  and declare straightfaced that they simply haven’t the money to spend on inessentials like road crossing patrols and libraries.

Yet it was just before Christmas that they spent literally hundreds of thousands of pounds on setting up Suffolk Circle, a membership-based social enterprise that had apparently worked well in Southwark.  (Where, I would suggest,  there is less sense of social cohesion and a greater turnover of population than in Suffolk).

What none of Suffolk’s Cabinet seemed to have asked, of themselves or of anyone else  was “Is this necessary?”

Kathy Pollard’s blog makes clear this is a question that should definitely have been asked:  Suffolk Circle is currently offering services that were already available free in Suffolk!  And, when SCC spent £750,000 on Suffolk Circle, this really means that every man woman and child in Suffolk has been asked to subsidise this social enterprise to the tune of £1. Without consultation. Perhaps they might have decided there were other services they preferred to spend their money on? (Update:  April 2012 we currently believe the  sum spent on Suffolk Circle to be ‘only’ £680,000)

Suffok’s leaders seem genuinely confused about the value of our money, letting it flow through their fingers like water  on inessentials  yet defending core cuts as unavoidable.   “Do as I say not as I do”  is their mantra over and over again.  It’s as if they genuinely cannot tell the difference between right and wrong decisions!

Nine months ago  – just as the cuts began to bite –  our leaders decided to allow the Chief Executive to spend £122,000 of public money (thats sixteen pence from every Suffolk resident)  on unspecified ‘services’  from three consultancy companies : Fields of Learning, Scintillate and DNA.   This decision was voted through at the May 2010 Council meeting, by the Conservative majority  after an earler attempt to to slip the decision through Cabinet without further publicity was called in by the Lib Dems.  We said that this was a grossly inappropriate use of public money at a time of belt-tightening.

Deputy Leader Jane Storey’s response?  “This is a tiny proportion of the county council’s budget!”

I kid you not.  I wrote down these words as they dropped from her mouth.

It is a tragedy that SCC is being run by people who consider £122,000 a small sum of money to spend without further authorisation of disclosure on ‘consultancy’ , £500,000 a sensible amount to ensure closed mouths for former council  employees, £750, 000 a reasonable sum to  set up  ‘pay-for’ friendship groups in a county where  friendship and support groups proliferate and for free – yet think £150,000 a good sum to save by closing the Bury Park and Ride and £174,000 to abolish our School Crossing Patrols.

As many members of Suffolk will remember, one of the above consultants, Bedfordshire-based  Fields of Learning had previously been used by Suffolk County Council – who spent nearly half a million pounds of Suffolk taxpayers money in 2009 on  “neuro-linguistic programming” courses for the deputy leader and her colleagues.  Yet, if you google ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ you will discover it described as one of the 10 most discredited forms of intervention in published research – on a par with ‘equine treatment for eating disorders’ and ‘dolphin assisted therapy’.

What on earth is the Tory leadership  doing spending public money on  such things while insisting  that the rest of us have  to tighten our belts so dreadfully?  Come to that, why do they pay for meeting rooms in Ipswich when Endeavour house echoes with underused space? Why do they get so antsy when we suggest they cut their own  mileage bills by 10%?

Back in November, Colin Noble,  Portfolio holder for Adult and Community Services  disclosed  his difficulties  on his blog when he wrote  “as I get older I realise I know less and less about more and more.”

I think that says it all.

Chinese saying of the day:

朱门 酒 肉 臭， 路 有冻 死 骨 (zhu men jiu rou chou lu you dong si gu)

behind the doors of the rich meat and wine go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of the frozen