awjreynolds

Dan, where’s our money?!

I have to be careful here so I’m going to set out the facts as far as I know it.

We have been waiting to know what Active Travel Fund Tranche 4 schemes will be built in Bath and North East Somerset. The answer is none. We will get 20ish Bike Hangars but that’s it.

The crux of the problem

Active Travel England gave West of England Combined Authority an indicative allocation of £3.3m. It was a per head of population allocation, so £3.50 per head (941,752 WECA population). Ergo BaNES share is £677k (193,282 people).

WECA got awarded £3.6m, so OUR share is £740k. What we actually got was £0 (well we got some bike hangars).

No more money for BaNES…ever

Why? Because WECA then prioritised funding for schemes using additional deprivation criteria. The big big big issue with this is that S Glos and BaNES will never get any funding. Bristol has much much bigger deprivation issues BUT this is also down to exceptionally poor political leadership in this space under Marvin Reese with almost a decade of underinvestment in walking, wheeling, and cycling in Bristol.

Why are we having to compensate for Marvin’s failure in leadership?

Now what I do not know is whether or not Active Travel England denied any BaNES or S Glos schemes. If they didn’t then fair enough. You don’t fund poor schemes. If ATE did approve BaNES/S Glos schemes then WECA and, particularly, Dan Norris are likely to cause an uproar.

Money was awarded on per head of population basis

Stealing it from one authority to fix issues caused by lack of long term poor political leadership is not the great, particularly when selection criteria effectively excludes whole swathes of the region from ever getting anything in the future.

It doesn’t help when Bristol Labour Councillors start claiming that they got all the money for Bristol with the help of the Metro Mayor. You have the beginnings of a political scandal which I suspect is unfair to WECA officers, but then again so is putting in extra deprivation criteria that excludes some of your Unitary Authorities from ever getting Active Travel Funding.

Questions that need answering

  • What schemes did Active Travel England approve?
  • When were council officers told schemes would be prioritised using deprivation criteria? Changing the rules after submission would cause a huge political row.
  • Finally, why do campaign groups and communities only ever find this stuff out after the fact? We should *know* what schemes were submitted and what the submission criteria is! We have multiple forums (Journey To Net Zero, and various area forums) where this stuff can be shared and worked on.
  • What measures were in place to guard against Bristol over submitting schemes knowing they can take all the per head allocations of BaNES and S Glos?

Assuming all schemes have been approved, the only fair way to fix this to allocate funding to each Unitary Authority based on population AS Active Travel England have done. So BaNES gets £738k, S Glos gets £1010k , and Bristol gets £1,770k.

FOI has been submitted to get to the bottom of it all.

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