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Libraries, Suffolk Coastal District Council, Uncategorized, Woodbridge Tourist Information Centre

App-trap – why close the Woodbridge Tourist Information Centre?

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What will really, really, really help tourism in Woodbridge? A Tourist Information Centre? Or  a planned app for people with mobile devices that will give them targeted information?

The latter, according to the latest mouthful of lowgrade technological codswallop used by the Suffolk Coastal District Council Cabinet to justify their unjustifiable proposed closure of the Woodbridge Tourist Information Centre, while retaining the ones at Aldeburgh and Felixstowe.

Wait (I hear you say). Aldeburgh has no rail station, a very limited bus service,  a large population of second-home occupancy – oh, and 1 in 5 households in Suffolk don’t have a car… Aha – but Aldeburgh is nearer to Waveney than Woodbridge– and SCDC is in partnership with Waveney. Simples.

The easy way to save money in a hurry is to slash and burn – and now the men with grey suits (and machetes) would like us to think that the number of users of its TICs  is declining. Or anyway TICs are not an essential service and can be cut without too much of a fuss.

To put it another way, they are undertaking a service review which is “focussed on making sure our services are as efficient as possible but also that they are still relevant and needed by our customers. The reality is that the use of our tourist services are changing, with more and more people going online for their information and fewer visiting our offices.” This is according to Cllr Geoff Holdcroft, SCDC Cabinet Member for Leisure and Economic Development, who has conveniently forgotten the 8 million people in the UK who have never ever used the internet.  And the number of people who come to Woodbridge by train and who couldn’t take that train to Aldeburgh.

Talking trains, apparently Woodbridge TIC has particular difficulties in not being done away with, just because of  the time it spends selling rail tickets and providing transport information.  That’s good – it generates income?  Far from it  according to Cllr Holdcroft. He told a packed Woodbridge Town Council meeting last night that every ticket sold by the TIC in Woodbridge costs the council taxpayer £1.  (Personally I would like to see the facts behind and details on this one – given the price of rail tickets these days, the continuing local need and the heavy competition and discounting between the companies ‘selling on’ it would seem an impossible feat without a high level of council incompetence in negotiation or some very sharp means of public accounting.)

Putting that aside we are then presented with another facer. The Council’s other two TICs at Aldeburgh and Felixstowe will continue to provide a full range of services including ticketing and booking facilities, and will offer us  a telephone support and a postal service.  So tickets won’t lose money in Aldeburgh then?

Luckily not all is lost for Woodbridge  “Our commitment to encouraging tourism remains as strong as possible and our modernised service would see us still providing information from a new service based at Woodbridge library, backed up with internet-based information” . This  glib optimism  is not gaining the csupport of those who run b&bs in Woodbridge, or those who rely on the rail ticketing services for travel and for information to get about along the East Suffolk Line and beyond, or those retailers, restaurateurs, publicans and hoteliers who rely on tourists for trade or those who run tourist sites: the huge number of people who use or rely on the Woodbridge Tourist Information centre every day and who would find it hard to do so if it were replaced by a telephone or a postal service from Aldeburgh.  The local economy, in other words.

It also leaves us with a couple of  problems.

For a start,  this proposal concerning the library is a bit like telling your children that you’re not buying them  food because it’s too expensive, but they can go next door for dinner. Has anyone in SCDC actually asked the library about this plan, or have they just assumed they are willing to provide space and staff time? The library has never been owned by SCDC.  And from the 1 August it isn’t even controlled by Suffolk County Council. It is controlled by an IPS. Might the library have its own views on becoming SCDC’s cheap tourist information centre and ticket provider because SCDC is too cheeseparing to run its own? (Especially now the library knows that the ticket sales will cost them £1 a ticket). What’s in it for the library?

Secondly, the TIC looks very nice in its ornate iron-frilled white building. As gateway to Woodbridge its  presence might well be adding to the good impression of our town given to visitors as they arrive by car, bus or rail. And its certainly much easier  for new arrivals to find than the library.

“Tourism remains a key part of our local economy and we are confident that potential visitors to our district will continue to get the information they need to help them choose to come here and enjoy all our district has to offer. We will continue to offer fresh innovations to attract tourists such as our joint working with Waveney’s tourism service and with local tourism businesses and partnerships to offer a better service, our Suffolk Coast website and a planned app for people with mobile devices that will give them targeted information” says Cllr Holdcroft.

So that’s all right then.

But  I’d like to know who  are the confident we? We in Woodbridge are not confident!

If you wish to contact SCDC to give your views before their Cabinet makes its final decision on November 6th, contact the portfolio-holder via this link

Rail, Your councillor

Fair rail fares – have your say!

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There is two more weeks to reply to the DfT’s consultation on Rail Fares. Please do so, via this link so that there is a chance (however faint) that rail fares could start going down rather than rocketing. As they have done for twenty years and more.

Dear Department for Transport,

My name is Caroline Page, and I am the County Councillor for Woodbridge in Suffolk – which is in  a beautiful rural location. We are lucky in Woodbridge to have one of the few rural stations left in Suffolk after Beeching’s cuts.

Rural public transport is very important for those people who can’t, can’t afford to, or are prevented from driving by age, ill health or ethical considerations.  Like many others in rural Suffolk,  I use the train a lot: I regularly  visit elderly parents in Cambridge, a student daughter in Sheffield, and go to London for specialist appointments and so on. I also use the train for work, and social activities.

If you don’t have a car, rail fares are very important – as is the need to travel on a train at a moment’s notice. We are lucky that we have ‘walk-on’ discounted fares within our  portion of East Anglia, but the moment that we step outside, ticket pricing becomes unaffordable. In the past I have needed to get to places such as Liverpool, Sheffield, Portsmouth and Coventry for crises and bereavements at  a moment’s notice  and the cost of such rail travel has been outrageous and (frankly) extortionate and added greatly to the stress of the situation.  I once had to make a trip to Liverpool because of a bereavement, and same day rail travel actually cost practically the same amount as asking a taxi to drive me there. Can this be reasonable??

I am asking you to remember, and consider that  people who need to make immediate, on-the-day, rail trips are often  poorer or less able than others – who have the option of driving. What can be the rationale for discouraging off-peak travel by charging such appallingly greedy and inappropriate ‘walk-on’ fares when trains are so empty for so much of the day ?

Additionally many people would like to travel at weekends,  and on bank holidays to visit family or tourist destinations. The train would seem ideal. Oddly enough however, customer demand is not seen as a reason for the train companies to encourage us onto trains by good service and special fares. Instead it is seen as an excuse to charge us a high price for the shoddiest service I have ever experienced in a life of train-travel. I was talking to some railworkers, as we stood nose-to-nose on a late, diverted train to Cambridge over a recent bank-holiday, and they said they found it a very hard and unsatisfying  element in their job to be working to the demands of share-holders rather than travellers (or customers as we are so uncharmingly called) and providing such a service at such a steep price.

The rail fares review could be the biggest shake-up of our fares system for decades. At a time of belt-tightening, and peak oil, the country needs to have a reliable affordable rail service to encourage and support non-driving.

We  therefore  need to make sure that this review – an opportunity for cheaper, simpler, fairer fares –  is not wasted. UK rail fares must start going down not up. The cost of train tickets in the UK is already eye watering – far higher  than in other parts of Europe. Last summer I travelled in very pricy Norway, and was astonished to find that while a pint of beer was several times more expensive than in the UK, train travel was much cheaper (as well as better integrated and more frequent). Yet Norway is even more rural than the UK.

Government fare hikes mean prices for most tickets in 2015 will be 24% more expensive than they were in 2011. This is unreasonable and inappropriate : rail should be a public service not a ‘rich man’s toy’. Most particularly it should not pander to the requirements of people travelling ‘on expenses’ at the expense of those needing transport for the most basic reasons.  Trains are a vital link between people and the places they go to work, study, relax and spend their money. Both people who already use the train and people who are occasional users should have a stake in having a fit-for-purpose, affordable railway. If we actually ensured it was, we would have much better usage in ‘non-peak’ situations and help support the largely overlooked rural travellers (such as my constituents), as well as those in city termini.

 

- 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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