The meeting of the Internal Scrutiny Committee last night was well attended and, I think, sucessful. The two topics debated – home to school transport and the Council’s homelessness strategy – were discussed in quite some depth and with passionate and knowledgeable contributions from members of the public, and we made some good progress I think.

The issue of home to school transport is a controversial one. The Council proposes consulting on whether or not to stop paying the transport costs for all children who go to far-away faith schools, and instead to restrict payments to only poorer children, in line with the policy for non-denominational schools.

I am in favour of the plans. I recongise the impact that this will have on some families who choose to send their children to faith schools, but the Council’s plans maintain support for those who can’t afford it themselves, and will bring faith and non-faith schools into line. For both financial and equalities reasons I think it’s the right move.

However, there were some very strong feelings to the contrary at the meeting last night, and I think their arguments are perfectly valid. There was a good debate, at the end of which a vote was taken which split the committee down the middle. As Chair I had the casting vote. My choice was either to allow the consultation to proceed, or to send the issue to full Council for further debate prior to any wider consultation.

My personal view is that it’s fine and should proceed, but since it’s obviously controversial I voted to send it back to Council for a fuller discussion. I thought it more appropriate for all members to have their say on this issue, rather than just a few of us, given that it obviously generates a lot of feeling on both sides. I don’t think it was my job to restrict debate, so I voted for more debate even though I agree with the policy as proposed. Who knows, when it’s debated at full council I might hear something that will change my mind.

On Homelessness the issue was a lot more clear cut. There was general unease that the homelessness strategy presented to us didn’t answer a number of important questions about the future of temporary housing, or give assurances that future provision will meet need. We agreed to set up an urgent working group to advise on improvements before the strategy is signed off.

Rick

It’s rare that I look at the headline in the Daily Mail and think “that makes sense”, but I do agree with their campaign to ban clampers. Personally, I’d like to go further than banning them actually, and instead clamp all clampers to a lamppost and make them wear a giant flashing neon hat saying “clamper” on it, and have people throw vegetables at them until they pay an exorbitant release fee of my choosing.

Sadly the government haven’t listened to my lamppost / vegetable idea, and have simply banned clampers. The press release actually says that they have banned “cowboy clampers”, which makes me think of Marlboro Men affixing things to the wheels of my Peugeot 207 in between herding thousands of cattle across Arizona. But apparently that’s not what it meant.

Anyway, so the coalition, in the guise of Liberal Democrat ministers Lynne Featherstone and Norman Baker have announced that car clamping on private land is to be banned.

This long-standing Liberal Democrat policy and manifesto commitment will be introduced as part of the Freedom Bill this Autumn.

Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone said:

“The Government is committed to ending the menace of rogue private sector wheel clampers once and for all.

“For too long motorists have fallen victim to unscrupulous tactics by many clamping firms. Reports of motorists being marched to cash points or left stranded after their car has been towed are simply unacceptable.

“A ban on clamping and towing on private land will end this abuse and companies who decide to flout new laws will face severe penalties.”

Transport minister Norman Baker, who campaigned to ban private wheel clamping as Shadow Transport Secretary before the election, added:

“The rules governing parking on private land should be proportionate and should not result in motorists being intimidated or forced to pay excessive fines.

“Cowboy clampers have had ample opportunity to mend their ways but the cases of bullying and extortion persist.

“That is why we are putting an end to these outrageous practices once and for all to ensure that drivers no longer have to fear intimidation from rogue traders, allowing the parking industry to begin to restore its reputation with the motoring public.”

Hurrah for that.

Rick

The Bury Lib Dem campaign against congestion charging was finally vindicated today when it was revealed that funding for public transport may be made available WITHOUT the need for congestion charging after all!

A costly and controversial referendum on congestion charging was held across Greater Manchester after local Councils in the city region were the only ones in the country to bid for funding contingent on congestion charging. The proposals were rejected by almost 80% of local voters after a campaign led by the Liberal Democrats in Bury. We called for funding for public transport without unfair road charges, but were told at the time that there was no alternative.

 Now, that lie has been exposed after it was revealed that money from the Transport Innovation Fund, which was conditional on charging schemes being introduced, will now be made available to all councils – including those in our region – with NO strings attached.

Unsurprisingly lots of people are annoyed that we were lied to, leading to an expensive consultation exercise, loads of money wasted promoting the original TIF bid, and a hugely costly referendum.

The Manchester Evening News reports how then transport secretary Geoff Hoon warned on the eve of the vote that unless Greater Manchester said ‘yes’ it it would get NO extra transport cash. Council chiefs in Greater Manchester – who also warned at the time there was ‘no plan B’ – have since come up with an alternative £1.5bn funding package based on borrowing against future council tax rises.

A ‘discussion paper’ released by the Department for Transport says TIF’s ‘weaknesses’ lay in its ‘too narrow focus’ on congestion and its ‘failure to win public acceptance for the more challenging proposals’.

 Greater

Sean Corker, who led the campaign against the congestion charge as part of the pressure group Manchester Against Road Tolls, called for an inquiry into how much was spent promoting TIF.

“

Remember, the Lib Dems were the only party in Bury against the TIF bid’s proposals for congestion from the start. The Tories signed the TIF proposals, and Labour campaigned publicly for them.

I knew we were right then, and we have been vindicated. It is now up to the government to properly fund public transport in the area without imposing unfair congestion charges on motorists.

Rick

One of the most embarrassing moments in my recent past was when it was explained to me that the term “metrosexual” did not, in fact, mean someone sexually attracted to trams.

To be honest it was quite a relief to discover that there’s not a term for people with these odd desires. But if there were, they would doubtless be excited to hear that there are free Metrolink rides available on two days this month.

Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority (GMITA) is providing free travel on Metrolink all day, from the first tram until the last tram, this Saturday, 14 November, and next Thursday, 19 November, as a ‘thank you’ to passengers for putting up with months of repairs and closures on the line through the city centre.

I think Metrolink has the potential to be an absolutely fantastic system, but is let down by being hugely expensive, unreliable and often unpleasant to travel on. When I was a member of the GMITA a couple of years ago (it was called the GMPTA then), I campaigned for better investment and more of a customer focus for the system. It seems to be happening slowly, with things like this, but it’s not happening fast enough and we still aren’t doing enough to tempt people out of their cars.

Councillor Keith Whitmore, Chair of GMITA, absolutely did not say “Free travel is just about the only thing likely to tempt motorists out of their comfy cars and onto overcrowded, often dirty and sometimes frighteningly yob-infested trams, especially since the rest of the time they’re so laughably expensive that riding one makes about as much financial sense as buying a bank in Iceland.”

Instead, somewhat predictably, he said “We’ve invested a significant amount in improving the Metrolink network this year; projects that will make journeys smoother, quieter and more reliable.

“We’ve completely replaced the city centre tracks, provided high quality new street finishes, upgraded two of the busiest city centre stops and installed the first sets of new ticket machines – major improvements that were completed on time and on budget.

“However, we fully appreciate that passengers were left without a full service while all this work was done, and we want to thank them for their patience and understanding during that time – that’s why we’ll be providing these two days of free travel.”

The city centre section closed in April and services returned on 2 November, closely followed by seven breakdowns in two days whilst Metrolink sponsored the fireworks at Heaton Park instead.

Major overhauls of the St Peter’s Square and Piccadilly Gardens stops – two of the most heavily used on the network – have been completed this year.

The St Peter’s Square stop has been widened and the platform heights modified to allow level boarding for all passengers. The Piccadilly Gardens stop has also been widened and new canopies have been installed to provide better shelter for even more people.

New ticket machines that take bank notes and credit and debit card payments, have also been installed on the two revamped stops. They will be rolled out across the Metrolink network by spring next year, meaning that the network creaks into modern times only ten years after most other cities in this respect. When we’ll have Oyster-style smart cards is anyone’s guess…

All the city centre stops now bear Metrolink’s new identity, which will be rolled out across the remainder of the network.

A total of 40 new trams have been ordered to provide more room on existing services and to cater for passengers on new lines being built to Oldham and Rochdale, Droylsden in Tameside, Chorlton in South Manchester and MediaCityUK in Salford.

Passengers who have a season ticket which covers the days valid for free travel can claim a refund by writing to Customer Service Secretary, GMPTE, Freepost MR7 116, Manchester, M1 9QL, by 7 January 2010 with their name, address and telephone number.

They will also need to provide a photocopy of their Metrolink Travel Club membership card as well as a photocopy of their season ticket if it is still valid, or the original ticket if it has expired.

Whilst Metrolink is far from perfect, I urge as many people as possible to give it a go whilst it’s free. You never know, you might like it! 

Rick

Overnight work is due on Bury Metrolink line. Residents are being advised of overnight work taking place on the Metrolink line running to Bury next week.

Work is expected to take place overnight at a number of stops along the line between Sunday 1 November and Friday 6 November while the trams are not running. Work is anticipated on the following dates:

Crumpsall – 1 November
Bowker Vale – 2 November
Heaton Park – 2 and 3 November
Prestwich – 3 November
Besses o’ th’ Barn – 4 November
Whitefield – 4 November
Radcliffe – 5 November
Bury – 5 and 6 November
Woodlands Road – 6 November

Metrolink aims to keep any disturbance caused by the work down to a minimum.

Anyone with any queries can contact the Metrolink team on 0161 244 1555 during office hours or email future.metrolink@gmpte.gov.uk. Anyone who wishes to report issues or incidents relating to the work should call 0161 205 2000.

Rick

Last night’s Council meeting was principally memorable for the moment when my colleague and the Lib Dem Parliamentary Candidate for Bury South, Cllr Vic D’Albert, accidentally tipped a cup of water all over me. Suffice to say the evening wasn’t drowning in highbrow debate. 

However, we did use our oppornutiy to question the leadership to some effect. Notably, we uncovered more interesting tit-bits about the costly deal struck by the Tory Leadership on public transport.

Regular readers will remember that last week all of the Greater Manchester councils announced (with full orchestral fanfare) some new public transport funding. I blogged about it then. It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, because it still doesn’t give the region what we need. It’s also absolutely obviously the “Plan B” which everyone said didn’t exist when we sensibly chucked the idea of congestion charging out the window last autumn. But, on the plus side, it’s better than nothing.

Or, is it?

Well now I’ve had a closer look at the agreement that’s been struck, and it looks to me like the Tories in charge of Bury Council have done a pretty rubbish deal for the borough. I did think it was better than nothing, but on closer inspection it might actually BE nothing! Nothing except a whopping great bill for Bury!

Here’s what’s happened…

All 10 Authorities in Greater Manchester (that’s Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Wigan, Trafford, Oldham, Tameside, Stockport, Rochdale and Bury) have agreed to make some sacrifices in order to get government to put in a couple of hundred million pounds to pay for better transport. That’s a couple of hundred million pounds of our money to begin with, which we’re expected to be grateful to receive back. But that’s a side issue. The main issue is the sacrifices. These are:

a) “Top-slicing” some of the local transport fund which is used by the 10 Authorities for local transport improvements like walking buses for schools, cycle improvements etc. The Bury Tories, in charge of the Council and negotiating this deal on our behalf, have agreed that Bury, like the other Authorities in Greater Manchester, give up 40% of this. So that’s 40% of all the local transport improvements gone.

b) An increase in the amount of “levy” that the Councils pay to the Integrated Transport Authority. This auspicious body, of which I was once a member, is nominally in charge of public transport policy in the region. In reality I think its influence is very small indeed, since it operates at the whim of the government on one side and the private transport providers on the other. But we all pay a whacking reat amount to it, and now we have to pay more. Lots more, thanks to the Bury Tories. And it’ll mean bigger Council Tax bills. Quite how much bigger remains to be seen, but it won’t come cheap.

So, we’re paying more tax, we’re giving up almost half of our community transport initiatives, and the government still aren’t giving us nearly enough of our own money back for transport improvements.

That’s pretty rubbish. But I’d be able to stomach it a bit more if we were getting something in return. Unfortunately, Cllr Bob Bibby, the Leader of Bury Council and the man charged with negotiating Bury’s deal on behalf of the 200,000 residents of the borough, has hardly done us proud. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the negotiations have completely failed. Because the list of “Priority Funded” projects that our sacrifices will pay for contains not a single one for Bury.

Oldham and Rochdale get the Metrolink through their town centres. Stockport get a lovely new by-pass. In fact, nine out of the 10 boroughs get at least one priority project. Nine out of 10 get something major and shiny and new. Which one doesn’t get anything? Bury. Thanks Bob!

We’re all paying the same amount more in levy, and all giving up the same percentage of our transport projects, and Bury has less to show for it than absolutely everywhere else. We still have rubbish buses, especially in the north of the borough. We still don’t have the major improvements we need, and we’re watching the rest of the region get better whilst we languish with nothing but higher bills. 

It’s not good enough, and I think the Tories in charge of Bury should’ve done much better in getting us the deal we need.

Rick

I was veryinterested to hear the news that £1.4bn transport investment in Greater Manchester which has been made despite the rejection of congestion charging in last year’s referendum.

The fact that these improvements to transport are happening without a congestion charge finally exposes the pro-charge campaign’s key message as a complete lie. They
said that there was no Plan B, but there obviously was and this is it. 

Bury Lib Dems led the fight against congestion charging, securing Council
backing for our motion rejecting the charge. The whole c-charge idea wasted millions of pounds of public money for absolutely no reason. Not only was the proposal hugely expensive and riddled with flaws, it now turns out to have been totally unnecessary.

£1.4bn into Greater Manchester is great news. But we should remember that this is our taxpayers’ money to begin with, trying to make up for decades of under-investment. This new package still doesn’t give Bury what it needs. We will still have an inadequate bus service, an expensive tram service, and little in the way of incentives for cycling and
walking. The government are giving us back some of our money, but nowhere near
enough.

I also have concerns about the deal that’s been done to get this funding. There
will be Council Tax increases to pay for it, and all local Councils in Greater
Manchester have had to give up a large part of the local transport grant which
could have been directed to local schemes. The government are giving with one
hand and taking away with the other. And none of this has come before Bury
Council for a vote or even a discussion. Once again the people of Bury are being
ignored by the government. Our Council Tax will pay for a bypass in Wigan and a
busway in Leigh, and whilst these are welcome schemes, the Councillors of Bury
have been denied their say once again.

Rick

I think I’m one of the few people left in the UK who likes to stick up for the government and the politicians who run it, oppose it, and generally contribute to it. I think it, and they, can be a wonderful thing. I think that if we keep bashing government and politicians unreasonably, we’ll end up in a worse place than when we started. It’s easy to sneer at politicians, but it’s harder to make the country better, which is what they’re trying to do most of the time.

But there are times when I think that the people involved in running the country are deceitful money-grabbers who need a good kicking provided by me and my steel toe boot-clad size 11 feet. And today is one of those occasions.

It’s not about second homes, or porn films on expenses, or the fact that sorry seems to be the hardest word for Gordon Brown to say (until there’s a story that is a bit embarrassing and needs distracting from. like today). There’s enough people talking about that. My anger today stems from this BBC article, which was also covered in a couple of the newspapers but has attracted precisely zero comment from anyone else anywhere that I’ve seen.

It’s about the introduction of “green wave” traffic lights. This is a system. already in place in other european countries, whereby motorists obeying the speed limit are rewarded with a succession of green lights as they drive along a stretch of road.

Apparently the technology has been around for a while. It is good for the environment, because it reduces the stop-start traffic pollution. It is good for the economy, because it reduces congestion. And it is good for the sanity of people who can be easily reduced to screeching maniacs when confronted by yet another of society’s many hurdles, in the form of lights turning to red just as I get to them. People, in other words, like me.

Despite being generally wonderful, and supported by drivers, other road users, environmentalists, the transport industry and everyone else in the world, the technology has been actively resisted by the Department for Transport (DfT) until now. You may ask why, but you’ll regret it, because the answer will cause a vein in your temple to throb violently.

The reason is because making drivers stop continually means that they’ll have to fill their cars with more petrol, and thus pay more tax. The government have, until now, been purposefully stopping and starting cars just to rake in more tax. To hell with the damage to the environment. Forget about the stress to the motorist. It doesn’t matter about congestion or being late or haulage companies going out of business because their trucks are stuck at traffic lights. All that matters is lovely lovely government ££££££££££££££££.

Government money which, if we were just allowed to get on with life through green lights, and not stopped every 200yds, would never need to be collected in the first place because we wouldn’t need to spend it on cleaning the environment as much, funding the benefits of people made redundant due to congestion and fuel prices, or providing counselling services to people driven mad with stress.

New government guidance, in a document which should be called “Transport Policy: An end to staggering, cash-grabbing idiocy” but is in fact called “New Approach to Appraisal,” says that it is no longer right to view the additional taxes which come from red lights as preferable to giving the citizens who pay taxes a journey free from unnecessary hassle. So essentially, the document says that it’s government’s job to leave us all alone rather than purposefully take money from us. There’s a novel idea!

I have thought for a while that government transport policy is more muddled than a chimp working an Enigma machine. And this confirms my suspicions. They’ve been trying to annoy people out of their cars, ostensibly to improve the environment, but in doing so have increased pollution by increasing congestion and the need for fuel. Rather than making public transport better, cheaper and safer, which would really make a positive difference by giving an alternative to driving cars, the government have decided that making cars so unpleasant that getting the bus is the only thing that’ll save motorists from a stress-related medical episode is the best way forward.

It’s crazy, it’s about time this policy was reversed, and whoever thought of it in the first place needs to be tethered to a massive helium balloon and released into the air to be pecked by birds.

Rick 

A while ago I wrote to the Highways Agency regarding the air quality in Prestwich. The convergence of three motorways, and awful traffic on several main roads in the area, mean that at times the quality of the air round here is pretty ropey. One of the targets in the Prestwich Plan is to try to improve it, so I wrote off to the Highways Agency asking about what’s being done by them. And now they’ve written back.

It’s a fairly detailed reply, the highlights of which are as follows:

The entire M60 is an “Air Quality Management Area.” This means that there are lots of initiatives being explored at the moment to improve air quality. These include an extra anti-clockwise lane between junctions 15 and 12 (heading towards the Trafford Centre, between the M61 and M62 junctions). They also include “managed motorways” between junctions 8-12 and junctions 18-20, with a commitment to explore managed motorways between junctions 12 -18 (which of course includes Prestwich at 17).

The improvements proposed are designed to increase traffic flow and thus aid air quality. Whilst the improvements can’t yet be quantified due to the early stages of the work, I think these are potentially good developments, even if they are a little bit limited. It’d have been nice to see a fuller commitment to managed motorways throughout the entire western and northern sections of the M60 which are riddled with congestion. But what’s planned is a start.

the Highways Agency also talk about combating air quality problems by reducing car journeys and the need to travel by private car. The Highways Agency can work with the Council on this by ensuring new developments are sustainably planned, promoting planned travel, and so on. Unfortunately the Highways Agency might be ploughing a bit of a loan furrow here. Because whilst their aims are good, the demand for car travel won’t diminish substantially without wider government efforts to improve public transport substantially. This means cheaper, safer, more reliable buses and trains, and the provision of them at the times and places people need. Continuing policies which refuse to re-regulate bus services and allow above inflation fare rises whilst services are cut seem to go against the Highways Agency’s plans, and also go against the wider efforts to get local air cleaner.

We’ll keep trying to find out more information, and pressing for the improvements to happen. Butt he real improvements to air quality locally will only come when there are realistic alternatives to us all travelling in our cars at the same time as one another. And that takes the types of effort which the current government don’t seem to want to make.

Rick