You are all cordially invited to the
FOSBR▸ committee meeting at the Kensington Arms 7.30pm on Weds 23 March. We have decided to hold the meeting in a public space so that anyone who is interested can come along.
The hot issue of the moment is devolution, as per the announcement on Wednesday: it is subject to ^formal ratification^ by the four councils by 17 June, but is as far as we can tell, a ^take it or leave it^ deal.
http://www.westofenglandlep.co.uk/news/devolution-dealHere's the announcement of the devolution deal - a 17 page document very light on detail - all we know is that it is ^30 million per year over 30 years (ie ^900 million, nearly 1 billion) to cover housing, transport (which includes road schemes) and skills (ie all the FE colleges and apprenticeship schemes, for 19+ only). The deal is being presented as "new money" but in fact (as far as we can see) it is replacing streams of capital funding such as the City Deal and wherever the MetroBus money came from (and very likely the existing road scheme funding and skills funding). There is no proposal on how this money is to be divided among these very different areas (or among the four authorities), nor what other streams of money will still be available to bid from. Nor what the scrutiny will be over the Metro Mayor. FOSBR will be pressing for clarification over these issues before we start reaching for the champagne. The Joint Transport Plan and Joint Spatial Plan are cited as feeding into this process, but everyone knows that this is at a very "high level" which has not yet reached any degree of detail which would be enough to unlock funding. We need to think about if there are any "shovel-ready" schemes out there we would want to promote, such as the new Temple Meads Spatial Plan which we are all very excited about, but which has not yet been costed. So, thoughts please on what questions you think we should be asking!
I attach the questions we submitted. None of them were answered and the reply was simply that they were working on the detail.
We^d like to invite suggestions about what you think should be put forward as rail and bus schemes. I attach a table which shows the current spend ^ you will see in the next five years we will be spending ^148m on the whole remit (MetroWest, Weston College, Sustainable Transport, nearly exactly the ^30m x 5 = ^150m devolution funding for that period of time. I^d be very interested to find out which of those schemes would be funded outside the devoution deal and how we are supposed to fund the Combined Authority itself.
I also attach our 2-page current draft of suggestions for the devolution deal ^ the weakness being that there is no business case for any of these stations yet and no costing.
The Hendy review deadline has also just passed ^ attached is our submission ^ very much themed on protecting what we have as well as suggesting new schemes.
Please forward to any sustainable transport friends who might be interested. Tina Biggs
FOSBR
If anyone wants to go along (or send apologies but get involved), let me know and I can provide attachment copies or (better) contact details for Tina - or see FOSBR web site -
http://fosbr.org.uk
