Trial bus service costs North Yorkshire taxpayers £4 more per journey to subsidise

An “innovative” bus service in North Yorkshire is costing taxpayers about £4 per passenger journey more to subsidise than traditional timetabled buses, it has emerged.

North Yorkshire County Council’s executive member for transport Councillor Keane Duncan said the latest available figures for the authority’s Yorbus demand-responsive pilot scheme, around Ripon and Masham, showed a “financial mismatch”, despite successful efforts to increase patronage.

Ahead of reviewing data from the trial the council believes there are about ten zones across the county where a Yorbus-style service would be viable to operate.

A meeting of NYCC’s executive was told Yorbus journeys were costing between £11 and £13, which compared with £8 to £9 on routes the county council subsidised in the same area.

Despite the figures, Cllr Duncan underlined his intention to continue developing what he described as an “innovative” alternative to fixed bus services, which he said had been welcomed in the trial area.

He said:

“Passenger numbers are up, loyalty is there, people are coming back and using Yorbus time and time again which is a really positive sign for us.

“Conventional timetabled services may have a lower subsidy, but they operate on a fixed timetable. This means they can only benefit those lucky enough to live along a bus route with a bus stop available to them.”

Yorbus has been heralded as the potential solution to the dearth of public transport in rural areas of England’s largest county.

The success of the pilot scheme is being viewed as crucial by campaigners fighting for rural transport services, particularly after the authority’s £116m bid to the Government’s Bus Back Better scheme was last year rejected in its entirety, with Whitehall officials citing a lack of ambition.

Read more:

The meeting this week heard transport user groups had recently highlighted concerns about the lack of transport in rural areas.

The concerns follow the executive last summer approving spending nearly £230,000 of taxpayers’ money on trialling its Yorbus demand-responsive bus service for a further year.

They also come three months after Cllr Duncan warned the county’s bus network was “facing a really grave situation”, partly due to rising costs.

The meeting was told the council had relaxed restrictions on using its on-demand bus service since last summer amid fears restrictions were deterring key potential customers and would make the Yorbus unsustainable.

He said the council had expanded Yorbus’s times of operation, the number of villages to which it travels, and, following numerous complaints, introduced the ability to pre-book journeys.

Cllr Duncan said recent months had seen patronage rise by about 30% on the year before.

However, he said the cost per passenger journey on Yorbus, which has been operating in the Masham, Bedale and Ripon area since July 2021, remained relatively high, even compared with journeys on buses with fixed timetables.

Cllr Duncan said the value to residents of Yorbus was greater than traditional buses as it maximised the number of people who could use it – some 40,000 residents in the pilot zone – and was more flexible.

He said the authority would examine the pilot scheme in the coming months, including how to address the high cost per journey.

Government gives Harrogate district private school £8m a year to educate army children

A Harrogate district private school receives over £8m a year from the government to pay the school fees of children whose parents serve in the British Army.

Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate is an independent boarding school for boys and girls at Thorpe Underwood, close to Little Ouseburn.

The school has a capacity of 1,600 pupils and around 400 are children of people serving in the armed forces. It’s situated about 30 miles from ITC Catterick and 17 miles from Harrogate’s Army Foundation College.

Members of the military are entitled to use the Continuity of Education Allowance grant, which is a state payment that covers 90% of the cost to send a child to private boarding school.

The grant is paid so children do not have their education disrupted when their parents’ army jobs require them to move around the world.

However, it can also be used by troops serving in the UK and many of the families using it are well-paid officers.

One critic of the CEA grant told the Stray Ferret the payments to Queen Ethelburga’s were effectively a “state subsidy of a very large private school” and an obstacle to social mobility.

Long-standing relationship

The Stray Ferret sent a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Defence to ask which private schools in the district have been in receipt of the CEA grant over the past three years.

Other private schools, such as Harrogate’s Ashville College, also receive the grant but not on the scale of QE, whose relationship with the armed forces goes back over 100 years.

The figures show that in 2020/21, QE had 427 children receiving the grant, worth a total of £8.5m.

Over the last three years, Ashville College has received around £300,000 a year for between 18 and 20 children. Ripon Grammar School and Harrogate Ladies’ College also received the grant for a small number of children.

‘State subsidy’

Robert Verkaik is a journalist and author who wrote a book on the public school system called Posh Boys. He is also the former home affairs editor at the Independent newspaper.

Mr Verkaik told the Stray Ferret he was troubled by the amount of money received by QE, which he called “morally and economically wrong”.

Social mobility charity the Sutton Trust has said people at the top of the armed forces were seven times more likely to go to private schools — a situation that Mr Verkaik believes is reinforced by the CEA grant.

Robert Verkaik

Read more:

The journalist submitted an FOI request of his own to the MOD in 2015 that revealed, across the UK, the majority of troops using the grant are ranked officer or above.

These include lieutenant colonels, colonels, brigadiers and generals, who are paid between £75,000 and £123,000.

Mr Verkaik said:

“Taxpayers’ money should not be used to fund privileged and wealthy families.

“The grant is an obstacle to social mobility. What happens with the CEA is that officer families receive the bulk of the subsidy. So all you’re doing is promoting the education of already very privileged children”.

State boarding schools

Whilst the CEA grant covers most of the cost for children to attend private boarding schools like Queen Ethelburga’s, 10% of the fees are expected to be paid for by the family.

But with boarding fees of between £11,214 and £14,012 per term at QE, Mr Verkaik says a lance corporal earning under £30,000 would not be able to afford the 10% termly contribution, which still equates to thousands of pounds a year for one child.

He believes children of people serving in the forces should go to state boarding schools instead and save the taxpayer millions.

“The children of non-officer ranks don’t benefit to the same extent. It’s exacerbating the hold a narrow group of families have over the education of children.”

QE response

Queen Ethelburga’s said the college provided a “secure and supportive home from home for students whose parents may need to travel or live abroad for work”.

The school did not respond to our questions that asked what rank the armed forces personnel who send their children to the school hold, and how many are based in the UK.

Dan Machin, Queen Ethelburga’s principal said:

“Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate (QE) has a long-standing relationship with the British forces, welcoming students from forces military families for over 100 years.  QE is CEA-accredited, which means that forces families can use the Continuity of Education Allowance offered by the Ministry of Defence to assist with the funding of a boarding place for their child, at any school of their choice. The aim of the grant is to provide continuity of education for forces children.

“Across the collegiate there is an understanding of the importance of providing a secure and supportive home from home for students whose parents may need to travel or live abroad for work. Staff strive to create the right learning and living environment in which every one of the students at QE can thrive.  QE also has two specialist forces liaison officers, a keeping in touch club for students, and support clinics.

“In these sessions, staff help students to contact parents who may be deployed abroad, chat about issues that are important to them and anything else that they might need help and support with. Our forces children contribute significantly to our QE community with their approach to their education, boarding and activities. They are a valuable part of our QE family.

“In addition to being CEA-accredited, QE is signed up to the Armed Forces Covenant to further our commitment to families, particularly by offering the possibility of employment opportunities to veterans from all branches of the armed forces, to whom we all owe a great debt.  QE also has its own Combined Cadet Force, bringing together an army section (Yorkshire Regiment) and an RAF section. The CCF offers students the chance to develop real life skills that will help them achieve success in life and in the workplace.

“This holistic approach to supporting forces families makes QE a very popular choice.”

Dan Machin

A British Army spokesman said:

“The Ministry of Defence provides support to eligible service personnel with school age children in order to help them provide the continuity in their child’s education that can be difficult to achieve within the state education system, due to the inherent mobility of service life.”

“Continuity of Education Allowance is one of a range of measures for service personnel of all ranks and their families to allow greater parental choice in providing a stable education for their children.”

 

Council’s decision to give tenants rent-free period cost £200,000

Harrogate Borough Council’s decision to give its commercial tenants three months rent free is set to land local taxpayers with a £200,000 bill.

A report to council leader, Richard Cooper, and Cllr Graham Swift, executive member for economy, at the authority’s urgent cabinet meeting in March detailed the cost of the decision before it was approved by senior councillors.

Since then, the authority has seen its debt from the coronavirus outbreak spiral from an estimated £10 million to £15 million and is now considering furloughing staff to address the shortfall.

While most local authorities decided to defer rents for local companies, the borough council opted to wave them completely for its tenants.

Unlike other businesses, council tenants have had a double dose of public money with many applying for emergency government grants on top of a rent free period. It leaves the authority facing questions over whether the decision was a good use of taxpayer money or not when the cost of the pandemic is revealed.

One council tenant, who did not wish to be named, said that they knew of at least one fellow council tenant which was still operating and that most of the smaller businesses will have applied for the government’s £10,000 grant.

They said they were given no advanced notice of the decision until they received an e-mail to inform them of the rent free period.

They said: “I was shocked and could not believe it, nobody asked for it.

“Obviously I am pleased, but I wonder if it might have been better if they found out those businesses who cannot get the grant and supported them.”

At the time of the decision, a joint statement from Cllr Cooper and chief executive Wallace Sampson said the authority wanted to encourage others to offer support.

It said: “Our commercial tenants will be offered three months’ rent free and we’ll be doing all that we can to encourage other landlords in the district to consider what support they can offer their tenants.”

Earlier this month, some landlords described the decision as “unnecessary” at a time when the council is considering furloughing some of its staff in the future to help make ends meet.

Meanwhile, Pat Marsh, leader of the Liberal Democrats group on the council, said she felt the decision was rushed.

“I think in hindsight it was maybe a decision which should have been tempered,” she said.

“For me, I think it was a bit of a rushed decision that I wish I had given more thought.”

Harrogate Borough Council has been asked whether it intends to extend the rent free period, but had not responded at the time of publication.