Quite possibly when it is £70,000 blown on first class train fares for councillors and senior staff. As the Blackpool Gazette reports of its Conservative-controlled council:
BLACKPOOL Council has spent more than £70,000 on first class rail travel in the past 18 months.
The figure – today slammed by one senior councillor as “astonishing” – was revealed amid claims some councillors and senior officers were wasting taxpayers’ cash on expensive “jollies” to London …
The Gazette highlights the spending today as part of our It’s Your Money campaign to investigate how public cash is spent – and sometimes misspent.
Liberal Democrat councillor and former mayor Robert Wynne said first class tickets should be axed at a time when many taxpayers were struggling to cope during the recession.
He said: “I’m astonished and appalled by the amount being spent on first class rail travel. I don’t think the people of Blackpool elected their councillors just so they could go on jollies.
“Every penny of council tax-payers money is vital.”
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Next question?
Mark,
Norman Baker has an interesting press release on train fares; it seems you can save quite a lot if you know your way around the tarifs.
Trains are so expensive that perhaps, instead of making a fuss about first class fares which are out of the reach of most people anyway, we should look at ways of making rail travel possible for people on low incomes.
As a pensioner I really can’t afford rail travel; but by some curious discrimination I am allowed to travel on buses free. Why buses? I suspect it is because their funding is in the hands of LAs whereas rail is commercial; but rail has a huge public subsidy and therefore could be leaned upon to offer concessionary fares.
One of life’s luxuries for me is to visit my three children in different parts of the country once a year. Rail is too expensive, even with a railcard.
If I went by linked free local bus routes it would take days to get to any of the three destinations.
So I end up using my big old polluting car as the cheapest way of doing these trips.
I wonder what the party is doing about levelling the travel playing field, and I wonder if you would consult Norman as he doesn’t seem to have an email address on the Party website.
It’s not a case of “wasting taxpayers’ money when there’s a recession on” it’s case of “wasting taxpayers’ money at all“. Is there any good reason for taxpayers to pay for local councillors to travel first-class anywhere, ever?
Ah, I recall the debate years ago when we tried to get our Council (then Labour) to opt for Standard Class travel.
“It would make us second class people” opined one doughty Labour councillor [representing one of the poorest wards in the borough]