Plymouth City Council proposes withdrawal from D&CRP

[whole diary]

[Pb_devon]

PCC^▸ (Police and Crime Commissioner) need to close a serious gap in their budget next year. Amongst a wide range of cuts is withdrawal from Devon & Cornwall Rail Partnership. Others are to increase parking charges and cut subsidies for non commercial bus routes.
These items are contained within a consultation page here: https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/we-want-your-views-and-ideas

Sigh…..

[Bob_Blakey]

...withdrawal from Devon & Cornwall Rail Partnership. ...

A saving of £10,000 is really going to help (not) when local authorities should definitely be engaged with organisations that can help make public transport work more effectively.

Perchance they should be looking at the £142,000,000 spend on Social & Child care - maybe they would find a few quid that should be individual financial responsibilities?

[JayMac]

Cutting social and childcare budgets to fund other areas is not the answer. Individual financial responsibilities don't cover those orphaned or in children's home for multitude reasons. Adults with complex mental and physical health and social care needs. Elderly folk requiring complex social care. These essential services have already faced swingeing cuts in recent years.

All those are costly to both the individual and their families. Or impractical to finance if you're a child. Whilst you may be able to "individually finance' these things should the need arise, B_B, please remember the adage, "There but for the grace of God..."

[grahame]

Cutting £10k by withdrawing from the Community Rail Partnership looks like a mean little cut.   For you and me, and for the CRP^▸ (Community Rail Partnership) perhaps, £10k is a lot of money.   For Plymouth CC is isn't.   I note - just one of many line items

Reduce the use of residential care, increase the use of foster care and work to ensure children in care can return to their families or a connected person in their lives £2.275m

Now I'm no expert in this - but my understanding is that residential care should be a last resort. Irrespective of the financial saving, if the council can get more children SAFELY back with a relative or into foster care they should be being asked routinely why they have not been doing it.

If they can save 227 times the Community Rail Partnership money bu doing the right thing for kids, why are they even wasting time looking at the CRP - unless they're looking at that for political or publicity reasons - so they can give their electorate a long and impressive list of cuts made, even if some are so small as to be irrelevant in "the wash" and will do more harm that good.

This reminds me of a YOP (Youth Opportunities Program) apprentice I had working for me many years ago.  We had a piece of software (part of the suite we wrote and sold) that took a long time to run and one day when there was no-one else in the office, our YOP took it upon himself to spend the day speeding this software up.  And he got to run in half the time - 20 seconds down to 10 seconds.  Very proud of himself he was, too. 
"But, Adam, how often do we run that task"
"Oh about once a week"
"How long did you spend yesterday speeding it up"
"Only half the day"
"So at 10 seconds per week it will take us 2400 weeks - 46 years - to get that time back ..."

I would be very interested to hear from our Community Rail members in Devon and Cornwall their thoughts on this ... should we encourage members of the forum to explain via the survey to Plymouth what Community Rail does for them?

[TaplowGreen]

Cutting bus services too........

https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/five-plymouths-worst-performing-bus-7808800

Getting around Plymouth is proving much harder than it used to be - there used to be a plentiful supply of taxis, but Brexit finished that (with some help from the Council) and with the only hospital serving the City and (increasingly) East Cornwall being on the outskirts it's becoming a challenge for many who need public transport most.