London Banter - View Single Post

[email protected] · June 16th 10, 10:35 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In article
,
(Mizter T) wrote:

On Jun 15, 6:56*pm, Paul Terry wrote:

In message , Graham Harrison
writes

If I (with a Somerset County Council pass) travel on a London bus
using that pass, who pays?

The London boroughs. In the same way that if I used my London Freedom
pass in Somerset, then Somerset County Council pay (although local
authorities get quite a substantial government grant towards the
cost).

It's your local District Council in Somerset that pays, not Somerset
County Council. The grant formula is seriously problematic. Apart from
areas with lots of visitors mentioned below, it also means that councils
with few bus services get far more money than they need (which they can
and do spend elsewhere) and transport hubs of all sorts get clobbered. One
of the worst hit is Chesterfield, hardly a tourist honeypot but a major
bus hub for surrounding districts.

Based on what happened to me when I did it the driver made no attempt
to determine where I was from and unless he was Superman I doubt very
much if he was able to read the pass given that it was in the bit of
my wallet with a little window which obscured the pass enough for him
to see it was a pass and the date on it but not much more. * Oh and I
didn't go out of my way to shove it under his nose I just flashed and
he seemed quite happy with that.

In London, the London Boroughs agree a lump sum with TfL (£251 million
for the current year, of which the bus element is £188.6 million).

This payment covers the use of both Freedom passes and National
Concessionary Permits throughout the area. I imagine that it is
reckoned that use of National bus passes within London roughly
balances the use of Freedom passes outside of London, so there is no
clearing house system of passing relatively small amounts of money
between councils for "out of area" use of passes.

AIUI there isn't any sort of 'clearing house' system in operation
anywhere in England - local authorities have to stump up for ENCTS
pass usage in their area regardless of where the pass holder comes
from and there's no system of recompense from that pass holders own
local authority.

The only clearing house system is between the London Boroughs, AIUI. I
don't know how the London costs are divided between them, though.

I'm no expert at all but I understand this led to problems in tourist/
well visited areas, an example that was cited being Blackpool where
lots of non-locals were making use of the free concessionary travel,
with Blackpool Council being landed with the bill. I think things were
tweaked so local authorities in areas where this happened (such as
Blackpool) get more money from the DfT to help them out. (Not a
clearing house system, more a recognition of need/demand.) Others here
will be far more expert on all this.

It's a surprising selection of councils that have been hit by the funding
formula. Cambridge is a member of the million pound club, a number of
small authorities which have been hit with unfunded expenditure increases
of over a £ million.

While that is a relatively small amount alongside a London Borough or big
city budget in the hundreds of millions, it's a huge proportion of the
total Council Tax income of a place like Cambridge whose net revenue
budget is only about £15 million.

Worse still, this problem was quite foreseeable before the national scheme
started. The last Government did announce changes to improve the grant
distribution but that led to hysterical claims of cuts to concessionary
travel from London Boroughs.

I've always assumed that the National Concessionary Permit scheme
works similarly outside of London - local councils agree a lump sum
with the bus operator(s) concerned. No doubt this is verified by means
of sampling, but I doubt that it would be worth collecting data on
every individual journey in order to calculate the precise sums
involved.

Haha! Bus companies try to get away with as much as they can. It's a big
part of their income in some places now.

--
Colin Rosenstiel