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JOHN LAWRIE: Hello I’m John Lawrie, I’m a pensioner from Hurworth and I am here representing
a number of pensioners in Hurworth and Darlington.
We are concerned about the decision of the council to downgrade the existing scheme on
the implementation of the Government scheme at the beginning of April.
Now the downgrading in question is not allowing travel before half past nine. We are concerned
we are trying to understand the arithmetic and we don’t understand it at all. We have
had statements from various councillors and various sums of money mentioned but no one
has explained the arithmetic behind this.
We have also carried out a small survey and we’ve found the buses travelling before
half past nine are empty and the buses travelling after half nine are full. In fact in one case
I was told out of a full bus after half past nine there were only three people paid their
fare.
Now this confirms our suspicion that the decision is made on forecasting rather than actual
finance. The Government has said that there is sufficient money obviously Darlington Borough
Council feel there isn’t.
RICHARD ALTY - ASSISTANT CHIEF EXECUTIVE, REGENERATION: Yes, ok, if I could start first
of all by talking about the new national scheme that the Government has introduced.
The new scheme is a national statutory scheme and there has been quite a bit of misinformation
around that - in fact there has been some stuff in the newspapers which is just plain
untrue.
I think there have been claims that the Government have actually provided money for a whole day
scheme in fact it is quite clear, if you go back and look at the parliamentary record
and look at what Gordon Brown says, that he has always said what is the case that actually
the money has just been provided for councils to provide free travel after half past nine.
So that is the national picture.
Just to explain to you about the costs for Darlington.
In terms of the Darlington situation the Government has provided another £ 482,000 of money for
the concessionary travel scheme in Darlington which means that in total the Government is
putting about £1.4 million in money and the whole scheme is costing us £2.7 million pounds
in money. So that means that the council is putting in £1.3 million pounds of, if you
like, local tax payers money and that is a choice to be made. If we wanted to fund the
travel before half past nine more money would be required and that could be spent on other
things so it was a hard choice that the council has had to make whether to put money into
the before half past nine travel or other things.
So how did we come up with those numbers was the question.
Yes the estimates that we looked at had to be done on surveys. Obviously we had to make
budget estimates before the scheme came into place and we looked at how people were actually
travelling before half past nine and after half past nine last year. The figure that
has been used is that ten percent of travel last year by people with bus passes was before
half past nine and that is the estimate that has been used.
Now a lot has changed this year. The new national scheme has huge benefits in that people can
travel in different parts of the country so someone from Taunton or Tiverton or County
Durham can come and travel in Darlington and travel for free on our buses and Darlington
Council has to pay for those people even though they are not Darlington residents so it is
quite hard to estimate in advance what travel patterns will be but the estimate we made
was based on the real travel patterns last year of ten percent of travel.
JOHN LAWRIE: Yes now could I follow that up with what you have actually said?
What I would like to ask you is would you be prepared in view of these anomalies that
you agree on that you carry out a review at the end of a period and if the review finds
that what we are saying is correct that you review the half past nine situation regarding
pensioners travel.
RICHARD ALTY: Yes we have said quite clearly that we would do surveys through the course
of the year.
Undoubtedly travel patterns will change throughout the course of the year they’ll have changed
straight away at the beginning of April as people got used to the new privileges that
are available and the new restrictions as well and they will change as people get used
to it over the course of the year so we will do new actual surveys to work out travel patterns
and yes the council reviews its budgets every year so I am sure that this is one of the
things that will be reviewed when the budget is reviewed next year.