Halesworth Area Community Bus has been invited to take part in consultations over the reinterpretation of Section 19 and 22 Transport Act 1985.
Those tasked with managing the consultation processes have been given a very restrictive brief to enable imposition by statutory instrument of how current accepted working practices can be amended to protect the Government from being fined by EU for failure to comply with Regulation 1071/2009.
The action proposed by the Government is to reduce the risk of being fined over a technical breach.
What the Government has failed to take on board with this quick-solve solution is the total cost of reducing its risk, as compared to the costs and effects of closing down most of the voluntary sector provision of low-cost essential public transport.
Strategically this means:
- Depriving large portions of the voting public of any kind of social mobility
- Loss of Income to small businesses in rural areas
- Loss of necessary links to commercial public transport (buses and trains), as no other feeder options seem to be afforded as commercially viable should the statutory instrument be implemented
- Loss of potential transport solutions for people needing to attend regional institutions, such as hospitals
- Increases in small vehicle traffic overall (e.g. delivering school children) and the attendant costs of managing such traffic increases
- Increases in drink-driving infringements and the costs of policing them
- Reduction in mental and physical wellbeing, plus an increase in demands on community clinical teams to access those who can no longer access public transport and disabled accessible vehicles.
Furthermore, if the Government does have a strategy to overcome the above issues, has it been costed in comparison to the millions of pounds value currently given by voluntary organisations?
And if all the current volunteer drivers, management groups and administrators are made defunct in the near future, how soon could the Government replace the void caused by imposing this restrictive statutory instrument?
Doug Gray, Secretary, HACT
