After a year of campaigning for reductions on bus travel rates for children in Bury, the Borough’s young people will be able to save £1 a week on the cost of school travel from next month.

Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority (GMPTA) is introducing a new £6 weekly ticket for three of the school bus services it provides in the borough. It currently costs 70p for a single child ticket. The Bury members of GMPTA are my fellow Lib Dem Councillor Andrew Garner, and me.

The School Saver ticket will be valid on the 799 service to Derby High and the 797 and 798 to St Monica’s RC High in Prestwich .

The new School Saver ticket could save families in the borough nearly £40 a year on school travel costs. I’m pleased we’ve been able to provide the ticket on three of the school bus services we provide in Bury. Unfortunately, we’re not able to extend the offer to commercial services, and of course we continue to campaign for big reductions and more fairness in children’s school bus travel..

The new School Saver ticket will be on sale from Monday 31 March in newsagents, supermarkets and garages across Bury with the Pay Point sign, as well as from the GMPTE Travelshop in Bury Interchange.

Pupils will be able to buy the School Saver ticket up to three days in advance of its start date and will need a GMPTE Under 16 membership card. The card is free and application forms can be picked up from Travelshops or downloaded from www.gmpte.com/under16

Rick

Work has begun to improve the dangerous junction at St Ann’s Road and Bury New Road – home of course to the world’s most redundant and daft set of traffic lights, installed only ten yards from an existing set and presumably designed by lunatics with the sole aim of causing mayhem.

I have been pressing for this for a year, after numerous residents complained, and I was delighted when the Council listened and said that they’d include the repairs in this year’s programme. Hopefully the work will run to schedule and be finished on time, removing the unnecessary and confusing second set of traffic lights, and leaving the junction safer for everyone concerned.

Rick

I often write on here about how the government is changing this country for the worse - ID cards, mass surveillance and an over-reliance on computer databases to access all types of services. It’s done in the name of security, or data-protection, or ID-fraud prevention, or whatever excuse the government thinks of at the time, but it is depressing that I can’t do anything these days without jumping through hoops to prove who I am.

And last night it came back to bite me.

I changed my car in November, after the old one threw a strop in the middle of the M1 and refused to ever work again. That’s the last time I buy French…

So I did everything I was supposed to do, including filling out the form to let the DVLA know that I wasn’t the owner, and that the garage I’d bought my new car from was instead. I heard nothing. Not the promised acknowledgement letter or anything. And a few weeks later I got a tax disc reminder letter, which was concerning since I had told them I didn’t own the car.

So I rang them up, and put the matter to bed over the phone, making it clear that they had made a mistake, and being told that, yes, they had made a mistake. Job done. I didn’t really mind the cost of the phone call or the wasting of my time, because mistakes can happen, and this one got fixed.

Only last night I returned home to discover an £80 fine waiting for me, for failure to tax a vehicle that I have now told them TWICE I don’t own any more. I can’t ring up to appeal, I can only ring an automated line to pay the fine. My right of appeal can be made by letter, but if I say I’ve let them know and have no documentation to prove it, I am still lumbered with the fine.

I have let them know (twice), and because of their incompetence, I of course do indeed have no documentation to prove it. But I am not going to pay this fine. I have appealed in writing, and await a response.

This is annoying (and potentially expensive). But it’s also worrying. Everything we do is now on one government computer or other. They want all of our health records on computer, our fingerprints, our iris patterns, maybe our DNA… And of course mistakes can happen. Computers are run by people who make mistakes. Whichever DVLA staff member dealt with me has inputted something wrong, and now I have an £80 fine to pay which is difficult to challenge, and for which the burden of proof lies with me. How many people, I wonder, are in my position, mistakenly fined? And how many of them are too frightened of the letter shouting about a “criminal offence,” or too unsure what to do, to challenge the fine? £80 is not a small amount of money, and it should be rightly levied against real criminals. But not everyone fined is a real criminal, because computers at the DVLA make mistakes.

Imagine if they make a mistake inputting my ID card data. Someone else’s fingerprints down as mine. The wrong code put somewhere by some faceless bureaucrat somewhere, and me denied access to the NHS. Or you denied a job because of a mistake with a CRB check. Or your children stopped from getting onto a plane because of a mistake in their passports.

Government reliance on computers to be 100% right all the time means that it is now extremely difficult to challenge the mistakes that are sometimes made. Government needs to be less arrogant in its assumption that it is always right. Government isn’t always right, and in my case now it is wrong. The fact that I’ve told the DVLA of a change of address in the intervening weeks between my supposed offence and now is hardly the act of a criminal trying to hide. And yet, despite them writing to me at the new address, they don’t take that into account, because the computers that run Britain can’t be wrong…

But they can, and they are. And how often do they have to be before someone puts the brakes on and we return to a place where we can talk to people face to face, and relate to the government that is supposedly there to help us. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems, has had something to say about this this week, paying particular attention to the mobile phone costs of ringing government helplines. He too is concerned about the faceless bureaucracy which we all have to deal with these days, and which I now have to tackle for the sake of £80.

Rick

This morning I did my overall sex-appeal no harm at all by attending the Transport Network Committee of Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority.

A couple of items may be of particular note to Bury. First off there has been a decision to do away with the X35 bus service which operates more or less non-stop between Bury and Manchester. It isn’t well used, which is the reason for its withdrawal after a trial period, although I imagine that the people who do use it may be annoyed to find that their quick bus service has gone.

This annoyance will be compounded given that the “speedy” alternative to the X35 is to be herded onto a Metrolink tram. Metrolink was the other interesting item on the agenda today, in particular the problems with the ticket machines. No serious twenty-first century transport system has ticket machines which can’t take cards, and of which only about half purport to take notes. Even where machines are able to take notes in theory, I think if a single speck of dust or microscopic crease is found, the note is rejected.

Resultantly there are hundreds of complaints, and passengers forced to hobble around carrying enough change to weigh them down, and then insert it manically coin by coin as the tram nears.

The ticket machines are due to be replaced, but because of works I am struggling to fathom, this won’t be completed for another 18 months!

These ticketing problems, combined with the ongoing saga of getting real time information (technology available in London for many years now) makes me feel that once again the entire Metrolink experience makes us second class citizens to other cities who have managed to fund proper public transport without having to resort to government bribery and congestion taxing.

Rick

Once again last night the Labour party in Bury used their opportunity to question me as Passenger Transport representative to to claim that Lib Dem objections to congestion charging is putting at risk much needed investment in public transport.

And once again I stated the truth in response, which is that Lib Dems support the investment, but not the tax.

Labour Councillors Byrne and Boden suggested in their questions to me last night that it is Bury Liberal Democrat opposition to the congestion charge which is threatening the investment which we have bid for from the Transport Innovation Fund (the TIF bid).

This is simply wrong.

We have always believed that the government should use the tax we’ve already paid to adequately fund public transport, and plug the £3bn gap we’ve all identified.

They won’t, and insist on congestion charging, which we oppose as unfair, divisive and utterly unacceptable.

They are using our tax money for their pet projects – replacing Trident, building new nuclear power stations, and ID cards – rather than for what we want and need – better public transport.

The government have promised us up to £1.2bn from the Transport Innovation Fund if we agree to congestion charging. But don’t be fooled by this spin. This isn’t some special “fund” that’s just been discovered. This isn’t like coming downstairs on Christmas morning to find £1.2bn under the tree. This fund is made up of OUR tax money already, and it should already have been spent on the public transport that the government says is important and which it has had eleven years to sort out.

The remaining £1.8bn needed to plug the gap the government has created through non-investment, is to be loaned to us and paid back through congestion charging. Only Manchester will pay the congestion charge, and it will replace nothing. Not road tax, not fuel duty. Nothing. It will be an extra tax. A tax on going to work.

We are all for the investment, which we agree is needed. But we oppose this tax. This will continue to be our stance, as it has been all along. This isn’t just a party political issue, it’s what we believe is best for Bury. Other parties in other Boroughs are of the same mind – Our stance is also the stance of the Lib Dems in Stockport, and the stance of Conservatives in Trafford and Labour in Middleton. Labour in Bury have not said what they think as a group, but continue to snipe at us.

If, in challenging the government on this blatantly unfair extra tax on Manchester, we put at risk the investment, then it is a principle we firmly stand by. It would be a tragedy to miss out on this investment, but we believe that the government should pay for it using the money that the people of Manchester have already paid. We refuse to bow to the pressure of this bullying government, and feel that when it comes to trams, buses and trains we should tell the government where to get off.

The blame for this impasse lies fairly, squarely, and inexcusably at the door of government.

Rick

Last night was Full Council, when the 51 Councillors from across the Borough come together. It was a slightly unusual meeting in that there were no motions for debate, and so the entire evening was given over to questions to The Leader.

First there was public question time, with questions received about a variety of topics from speed-humps to elderly care. It was great to see that, because sometimes there aren’t any questions from the gallery and I wonder whether anyone knows or cares about our meetings. I was slightly disappointed that the elderly care question was brushed off with a bland “we’ll take your views into consideration” type response. The member of the public asking the question was really in some distress, and I think that it may have been more appropriate to arrange a private meeting for a more detailed discussion on what is clearly a troubling issue.

Normally the Lib Dem group try to ask about five questions to the Leader when members get the chance, and there often are a few others scattered about the place from other members. Last night there were nineteen (!) written questions, including six from a single Councillor, each with at least one supplementary question. There were also about four verbal questions afterwards. The whole process lasted a good hour and a half, and sapped the will from my very soul towards the end.

I asked two questions. First about the promised “deep-clean” of Prestwich, and the general littered natured of our streets. The second was about what powers the Council is using in relation to dog fouling. I wasn’t expecting an answer to the dog question because I gave no advance notice. But the answer I got on street cleaning was very disappointing indeed, and a slap in the face for Prestwich residents who were promised a deep clean which hasn’t happened and which now probably won’t. I was very annoyed.

The final part of the meeting was questions to outside bodies. In the absence of the Council’s Passenger Transport Authority spokesman, I stood in as his Deputy and answered two questions on the TIF bid and congestion charging, and answered a couple of questions on congestion charging, which I will post about in a second.

All in all, an a-typical meeting, but one which covered a lot of subjects, and highlighted the huge agenda which the Council has to deal with.

Rick

This morning I attended a meeting of the (deep breath) Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority Service Improvement Sub-Committee.

There were two main items – First off there was a report and actions list arising from a review of Integrated Social Needs Transport, which basically said that there needs to be more integration and joined up thinking between the GMPTA, Local Authorities and Primary Care Trusts. It wasn’t a particularly good or bad report, and it painted a mixed picture. What is clear is that as a County we sometimes fail the most vulnerable when it comes to transport needs, and this needs to change. What is disappointing is that this particular committee only meets a couple of times a year and so our ability to scrutinise and keep tabs with the agenda is pretty limited, especially for members who have full time paid employment as well.

The second item on the agenda related to performance monitoring, and the rationalisation of performance indicators. There are some new indicators, some revisions, and a fair few things that were being monitored before and that no longer are. A couple of indicators surprised me:

On Metrolink, the punctuality indicator is no longer being measured because, we were told, the reliability indicator is more useful. I disagree wit this because as someone who wants a Met every 6 minutes as promised, I get hugely annoyed when I stand at a platform watching three go the other way and waiting 15 minutes for mine. The system is reliable and there are no breakdowns, but if I want to get into town at the desired time, it’s just not happening. One of the key problems with Metrolink (and there are many) is that the timetable simply isn’t stuck to. And it’s a real shame that it isn’t being monitored any more.

Another indicator which caused some confusion related to satisfaction. Previously, there were three separate indicators asking frequent users their opinions of trains, buses and trams. Now, there will just be one combined indicator reported, although the split will still be made lower down, and we’ll be able to tell should the inevitable Metrolink revolt occur. Last year’s combined figure for satisfaction was 92%, which seems pretty high. However the target going forward is only 91%! In other words, the PTA’s target is to reduce passenger satisfaction! I questioned this and was told that the 92% figure was “a halo effect” and something of an anomaly. But frankly I don’t care, and any target which sees us aiming to lower satisfaction is plainly ludicrous.

Rick

I have once again been in discussions with the Council over their promised improvements to the ludicrous junction at St Ann’s Road and Bury New Road, which would doubtless take home the gold medal in the “Most Ridiculously Dangerous Road Junctions in Bury” competition, narrowly beating the one up the road at Hilton Lane.

As a reminder, this is the junction with two out-of-sync sets of traffic lights within 10 yards of each other, more or less forcing cars to plough into other cars like some kind of Council-sponsored box car derby. God knows why it was put there in the first place, and we’ve been campaigning to get it removed and reduced to one set for the last year. It may indeed be safer for pedestrians, but only because they’re glued to the spot in horror watching the passing cars career into each other.

We were promised that the work would be done to rectify the problem by the end of the financial year, but on chasing this up last week I was informed that the Council now  only “hoped to start” the work by the end of March. Let me say now that any delay to this work would be utterly unacceptable. The people of Prestwich suffer enough with filthy streets and pot-holed roads as the forgotten back-end of Bury. I am not going to let lethal road crossings join the list of Prestwich projects on the doomed list. I am sick of Council officers sitting idly on their thumbs as far as Prestwich is concerned, whilst I say the same things to them over and over again.

This junction should have been altered months ago, but was put off whilst they cancelled all road schemes for the duration of the Met line closure. That was fair enough, but you’d think they’d prioritise the backlog, would you not? Well, the line has been open for four months now and we’ve still got nowhere. I challenged the Council on their latest back-track, and am told that they do in fact hope to have contractors on site by March. But this really does need to be prioritised because it’s been put off long enough and I don’t want one of my constituents to be the next person sideswiped by a driver utterly flummoxed by the world’s most idiotic set of lights.

Rick

The cost of some Metrolink season tickets will go up from Friday 1 February, following the increases in single and return fares just two months ago. Weekly tickets will rise by up to 60p and quarterly tickets by up to  £7.  

Metrolink management claim that these fare rises are fair, and that the Metrolink offers good value for money. But once again they show just how out of touch and wrong they are.

The new increases means that it now costs £21.80 a week to go from Bury to Manchester, and £232 a quarter. This is more expensive than a number of city centre car parks, and despite the fare rises the quality of service provided by Metrolink is, in many aspects utterly woeful. 

I have said it before, and I’ll keep on saying it – there are too few trams, they are frequently late, almost always disgustingly dirty, and too often a Metrolink journey is disrupted by rowdy passengers unsupervised by police and unwatched by security. It’s a thoroughly nasty experience, and it doesn’t tempt anyone out of their cars except those forced to weigh up the general unpleasantness of the Met with the equally unpleasant congestion.

We have a third rate system in the Metrolink. The experience is nothing compared to the London Underground, itself hardly a paragon of virtue. Once again we are let down by a government intent on talking the talk on public transport, but not matching rhetoric with money. Fares go up, passengers get angrier, and the service doesn’t improve fast enough.

This isn’t good enough, and I will continue to campaign for better central funding, better services and more realistic fares for Metrolink until they come our way.

Rick

Greater Manchester’s Yellow School Bus services are reducing congestion, improving pupil behaviour and boosting school attendance, according to the latest report heard by transport bosses.
Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority (GMPTA), on which I sit and represent Bury MBC, now funds the services to 22 schools, providing safe and reliable journeys for more than 2000 pupils.
Councillors heard that the Yellow School Buses have made a major impact on the school run, taking more than 265,000 car-miles off the road this school year.

And antisocial behaviour on school buses has reduced by 75% at schools that have the yellow buses. Schools have also praised the services for improving attendance records.
One Yellow School Bus currently runs to Bury Church school and the scheme has proved a hit with pupils and parents.
My Lib Dem colleague Cllr Andrew Garner is the Bury spokesperson for GMPTA. He  said: “Yellow School Buses are a safe and reliable way of getting pupils to and from school. We already know from anecdotal evidence that they are popular, but this report really highlights the benefits of the service.
The services are really helping to tackle local congestion caused by the school run, as well as offering a safe travelling environment for pupils. I’m sure other road users appreciate the services too as they take so many cars off the road each morning and afternoon. We have bid for government funding to buy more Yellow School Buses and reports like this really illustrate what a strong case there is for expanding the service.”
Pupils using Yellow School Bus services have to sign up to a code of conduct, use the same seatbelt-equipped seats every day and have regular drivers to help build a good working relationship.
All Yellow School Bus drivers have undergone an extensive training programme run by GMPTE, which includes training in customer care, first aid, disability awareness, health and safety issues and conflict avoidance.Two more vehicles are due to be introduced at schools in Wigan early in the new year, taking the number of Yellow School Buses in Greater Manchester to 36, running to 22 schools. Yellow buses are something I and the Bury Lib Dems give our full support to, and have publicly backed in Council. We will continue to press for more of these buses, funded in the proper way.
To find out more about Yellow School Buses and for a full list of services visit www.yellowschoolbus.info