Leader defends council tram pass consultation
CAMPAIGNERS SAY THE £3,200 PROCESS WAS A WASTE OF MONEY
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE County Council’s leader has defended spending thousands on a tram travel consultation which campaigners branded “pointless”.
A consultation was announced last year on the future of a scheme which allows the elderly and disabled to travel free on the NET network.
Just over a million journeys are made by those with a travel pass on the tram each year, but the consultation options included withdrawing the free travel scheme altogether.
Following the launch of a campaign against the plan, the council’s leader explained that the scheme would eventually end up being controlled by the upcoming East Midlands mayoral authority anyway.
Given that all the East Midlands Mayor candidates have pledged to keep the scheme, Councillor Ben Bradley now says he does not “envisage tram concessions going anywhere”.
The eight-week consultation cost at least £3,200.
Des Conway, one of those behind the Save Free Tram Travel in Notts campaign, said: “Councillor Bradley in his reply to our campaign is a bit disingenuous, as he implies that the council had no plans for the county to cut concessions due to the imminent transfer of transport responsibilities from council to regional level.
Why did you proceed with a pointless consultation in the first place?
Des Conway
“However, this begs the question of the council leader, if you knew all of the information regarding the transfer late last year, why did you proceed with a pointless consultation in the first place, wasting a small amount of public money in these cash-strapped times?”
In response, Councillor Bradley said: “We have a legal duty if we are going to make changes to tram concessions to consult on that. We can’t do it without consultation.
“Moving the tram concession responsibility from the county to the region, to the combined authority, is a change and therefore we have to consult on what that might mean.
“All of the candidates for mayor have said that they will protect concessions so they’re not going to go anywhere in that context and the budget that we are bringing forward this week continues them for another year, so that we can transition over to the combined authority and make sure that all of that works.
“We’re only really getting to the point now where all of these responsibilities, how things will work, how things will lie in that combined authority, are becoming clearer and clearer.
“Back in the early autumn, we didn’t know that. Decisions were taken on the basis of what we knew, but that information in the public consultation will be really important, because we’ll feed that into the combined authority and assist them in making their decision. It might save them a bit of money in terms of the consultation work that they have to do.”
Pass holders can use the tram free all day on weekends and bank holidays, as well as between 9.30am and 11pm on weekdays.
A similar scheme is also in place at Nottingham City Council, with the authority having also confirmed recently that it will keep the scheme going for a transitional period before it passes to the mayoral authority.