9 February 2012
February 2012 Newsletter
Budget victory secured
In yesterday’s announcement on the Scottish Budget, Cabinet Secretary John Swinney made sustainable transport one of the key policy areas where concessions were made.
In announcing an additional £13m over three years, the government went a long way to reversing the cuts to the active travel budget announced in September's draft plans. This U-turn followed a strong campaign by ourselves in alliance with Spokes, other members of the Active Travel Alliance (Cycling Scotland, Living Streets, Paths for All, Ramblers and Sustrans), and with Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.
In getting the government to make a U-turn, we led evidence in the parliament and secured endorsement of our views by the government’s transport (ICI) committee. We also took a leading role in organising the demonstration of January 11 at St Andrew’s House. This was part of our continual focus on maintaining pressure on the government through the media and in political lobbying.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to all those who helped in achieving this significant concession from the government.
... but SNP still failing on manifesto promise
However, while the U-turn on active travel is undoubtedly good news, other forms of sustainable transport modes haven’t fared as well. Buses face significant cuts to their funding (20% cuts expected for Bus Service Operators Grants), as well as real terms reductions in the rail and ferry budgets. The already small Freight Facilities Grant has been cut to a tiny £750,000 over the next year. This will make it even more difficult to shift freight from road to rail.
Despite the good news on active travel, the government also announced a further increase in spending on new road schemes. The £72m for new road schemes dwarves the £13m investment in sustainable transport. This is on top of the already large (15%) increase in the roads budget announced back in September. This means that the SNP have even more comprehensively failed to meet their May 2011 election manifesto promise to increase the share of all transport spending that goes into investing in sustainable transport.
The government clearly felt that it could take money out of sustainable transport in order to subsidise its destructive road building programme -- so it’s good news that at least some of this has been reversed. However, before too long, the government will be starting to prepare its budgets for the next financial year (2013/14) -- so it’ll be important that we always keep up the pressure to ensure it doesn’t continue its failure to meet its manifesto commitment on sustainable transport.
Other Transform Scotland news
Following our successful members’ session last Friday, we are now in the process of finalising our response to the Rail 2014 consultation and will be publishing this at the start of next week. The deadline for this is February 20, so if you haven’t already done so, we strongly encourage you to send in your own views. We’re also now working on our response to the ferry services consultation for which the deadline is March 30.
We’ve just added a new volunteer to our ranks, Sandra Wechner. Sandra is with us on an internship until June and will be putting together a report providing an overview of the state of sustainable transport in Scotland. I’m sure she’ll be in touch with many of you to get your views.
Please let us know what you'd like in the next issue
This newsletter has been put together by Zoë Blah. Please feel free to email me with your suggestions for content for next month's newsletter at zoe.blah@transformscotland.org.uk.