A film delivered to the Department for Education calls for more support for public transport. Buses should be a positive transport option now and in the future
By Alice Ridley of the Campaign for Better Transport
Today a group of young bus users will deliver a film to the Department for Education calling for more support for public transport. The film’s message is clear: young people want buses to be a positive transport option now and into the future.
Campaign for Better Transport brought together a coalition of organisations including Association of Colleges, British Youth Council, Kent Youth County Council, National Children’s Bureau, UK Youth Parliament and the University and College Union (UCU) to produce the film and speak up for young bus users.
The vast majority of sixth form students catch a bus to college, but services are facing deep cuts with networks retracting and fares set to rise above inflation. Some school and college buses have already been removed, and there is nothing to say that timetables will not change mid-school year.
While all the political parties promised to protect concessionary fares for older people, younger people’s concessions are non-statutory and therefore not protected. As council budgets are squeezed these are now being targeted, with some councils considering imposing annual fees of £600 per student or scrapping post-16 travel support all together. We still do not know what the EMA replacement scheme will look like, or if it will include specific support for transport.
Young people from low income families living in rural areas will be hardest hit as quieter bus services that currently rely on public subsidy are often the first to go. Similarly evening and weekend services are vulnerable, meaning that part time jobs to help students get by are more and more difficult to get to.
We are calling on the government to open its eyes to the combined impact of the decisions being made on education and transport funding, because cuts to young people’s bus provision could seriously obstruct access to training and education.
This project gives young people a voice, not only to spell out the negative impacts of cuts, but also to say loud and clear that young people want to see bus services getting better not worse. It’s about looking to the future, something that comes naturally to young people but is all too often missing in council meetings and in the halls of Westminster.
19 Responses to “Yet another hit for the jilted generation: How bus cuts undermine students’ education”
Selohesra
Yet another project requesting ‘other peoples money’ is spent on it. Actually I think it is a worthy cause but that the campaigners should also identify what spending should be cut to compensate. Endlessly taxing the richest few % is not really an option and just encourages irresponsible spending.
UKYP North East
Yet another hit for the jilted generation: How bus cuts undermine education: http://t.co/jAEvF7U by Alice Ridley http://fb.me/t2gqGGuU
CYWUnite
Yet another hit for the jilted generation: How bus cuts undermine education: http://t.co/jAEvF7U by Alice Ridley
cim
the campaigners should also identify what spending should be cut to compensate.
You’re assuming that providing/subsidising bus services is a net negative financially. One of the major problems with government finances is that things with direct costs and indirect revenues are often up for cuts even if they’re actually profitable – because of the difficulty of quantifying indirect revenues.
So, yes, subsidising the bus services will cost a certain amount. Not subsidising them also costs money:
– if people can’t access training and education, and can’t get a job either (quite likely right now), then they’ll cost the government in benefits instead. There may well be long-term as well as short-term costs here.
– if they get a lift in by car instead, that’s got much increased environmental costs, road maintenance costs, public health costs from road fumes, etc. over bus transport.
– providing the buses for student transport generally also makes them available for other users too, if entire bus routes would otherwise disappear, so the benefits of lower car use could be even bigger
– if students can’t get into college, that might mean redundancies in college staff too: more people claiming benefits rather than paying tax
– and, of course, the drivers and support staff for the subsidised bus services get paid, and that pay gets taxed, so some of the money spent comes right back to the government almost immediately
Working out how much the subsidies actually cost – and they might even be profitable – is a really difficult task. It seems rather unreasonable to expect campaigners to have sufficient economists on staff that they can do this calculation when it’s actually beyond the government’s practical capabilities to do it in-house.
Ed's Talking Balls
I think that what Selohesra was getting at was that there are a number of good causes which people are understandably protective of, but at the same time there is only a finite amount of money.
If someone is in favour of X, he must be aware that, in the current climate, Y will have money taken away from it.
Labour seems to want to have its cake and eat it too: oppose every cut, claim you wouldn’t have gone this far, this fast, and then refuse to tell others what you would have done. That’s disingenuous in my view.