Most bus fares in Medway to remain capped at £2 until June
Plus Medway Council pulls back from the brink, the Castle Concerts are back, and Medway Light Nights was a thing that happened
Another week, another serving of local news. Some of our regular themes this week, including council budgets, slightly underwhelming events, and one of our old favourites: buses.
If your bus turns up, it’ll be cheaper for a few more months
I write about buses far too often on this thing, so I’ll keep this one fairly brief. But good bus news today as the government confirmed that they will continue the current £2 bus fare cap initiative for another three months.
Since the start of the year, local bus journeys across the UK have been capped at £2 for any single journey. Or at least they are for any local bus operators that have signed up for the scheme. In Medway, that means the cap applies on most Arriva (school services are excluded as kids are rolling in money) and Chalkwell services, but not on Nu-Venture ones.
The scheme was set to finish at the end of March, but it was announced today that it will continue until the end of June. A cynic could raise an eyebrow at this announcement as it’ll take us right through a local election period. That said, the scheme is relatively small scale as government projects go (this extension will cost £75m), but it’s the kind of intervention that will make a big difference to users of bus services, who are often among the poorest in society. So it’s hard to be particularly snarky about a policy that will do good.
And it does seem to do good. The Office for National Statistics highlighted that the cap helped reduce inflation in January. Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham recently shared data that the fare cap in his area, which has been in place longer, has led to 10% more passengers on local buses.
It’s too early to know if the fare cap is leading to increased passenger numbers on services in Medway. Our buses don’t seem to be reliable enough for users to depend on, with constant posts on local social media complaining about buses (usually Arriva) being regularly late or just not turning up at all.
Fare caps are absolutely a good thing, but if we want to maximise the number of people using local bus services, we need more frequent, reliable services that reach areas across our community throughout the day. While we might have the cap, the rest is proving rather elusive.
Medway Council pulls back (slightly) from the brink
Back in November, I covered how Medway Council were on the edge of bankruptcy. This was largely down to increased pressures on local council budgets and a lack of new income to replace it. During initial planning for this year’s budget, Medway Council were looking at a budget shortfall of nearly £29m. Which, when you have £26m in the bank to use as reserves, is not ideal.
Medway Council will hold their annual budget meeting next week to set the figures for the coming year, and thankfully things aren’t quite as bad as they looked back in November.
To be clear, they are still pretty bad. But not apocalyptic. So that’s a big win.
The government has allowed all local councils to increase council tax by 5% instead of the usual 3%, which will see Medway’s council tax income increase from £140m to £149m. This combined with some money-saving across council departments, and slightly increased government grants mean Medway Council looks to only be facing a £2m budget shortfall for 2023/24. Hurrah!
All of which might sound rather positive given the reserve position set out above. Sure, spending £2m from the reserves next year isn’t great, but it hardly breaks the bank either.
Unfortunately, we aren’t done spending for this year:
Medway Council has managed to go well over budget this year, which suggests unless savings are found rapidly (before April), they look set to spend over £17m from reserves to keep the budget on track. That would leave reserves of under £6m for next year, which suddenly makes that £2m overspend seem rather more ominous.
This is not a problem unique to Medway, as councils across the country are struggling to fund essential services with very few resources. It also means whoever wins control of Medway Council in May is going to have to get on top of the local finances very quickly to avoid things spiralling further out of control.
NHS in numbers
Ambulance queues: 5% of patients arriving at Medway Hospital are waiting more than 30 minutes to be handed over to A&E. This is up from 2% last week, but significantly better than the national average of 20%.
Data on A&E wait times, treatment delays, and ambulance response times are published monthly, so they will be featured again once new data is available. The last edition that included these metrics was on Feb 10.
Covid in numbers
Cases: No one is bothering to collect any data now beyond a once-per-month publication from the Office for National Statistics, so who knows?
Hospitalisations: There are currently 40 patients being treated for covid in Medway Hospital, with 2 of them on a ventilator. This is up 48% from last week, and now exceeds the highs of the previous peak, with little signs that the rate is currently slowing down.
Deaths: 1 new death was recorded this week, taking Medway to 1,012 covid deaths in total.
I’m no longer including vaccination figures regularly in this section as the numbers haven’t changed for months now. It’ll return occasionally, or if there is any meaningful new data to report.
Oh good, the Castle Concerts are back
A collective shrug descended over Medway with the announcement of the first two Rochester Castle Concerts headliners. Continuing the trend of booking nostalgia acts rather than anything interesting, this year we are being treated to Nile Rodgers & Chic, as well as Soft Cell. Which, sure, fine, whatever. Not my thing but nice for those like them.
Still, there are at least some improvements this year, namely that the much-derided £110 ‘VIP tickets’ that were sold last year have been abolished. It does mean no one will get that ‘premium toilet’ access, but people will have to just make do I guess.
It does also appear that the exploitative Medway pricing that dominated the event last year has been somewhat reined in too. Ticket prices for Nile Rodgers & Chic (£60.50) are roughly in line with the rest of the country, with the weird exception of Bridlington where tickets cost a mere £42.55.
Meanwhile, while you can in theory see Soft Cell for a rather cheaper £45 or £52 in other parts of the country, you also have to watch Tony Hadley play with them in those locations, so it’s debatable whether that’s a better deal.
Medway Light Nights was a thing that happened
The second Medway Light Nights took place last weekend, following the original event in Rochester last year. Early indications suggest fewer people attended this year’s event if hastily deleted news stories posted earlier today are any indication. While more than 60,000 attended last year, apparently around 57,000 made the effort this year.
That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but given the increased marketing push this year, as well as extensive media placements and coverage in national and regional press, it’s hard to not see the figure as something of a disappointment.
The event felt largely underwhelming to me. The open top park and ride bus there was one of the most exciting parts, but it then dumped you at the end of Chatham High Street between a closed Go Outdoors and an abandoned bingo hall.
You then walk a while down the High Street with very little going on other than a massive queue outside of Nucleus for their performances. Continue on and you find a few interesting displays - the projection on the old Poundworld and the light display on Mountbatten House were diverting - and quite a few that weren’t. Then there were the parts that felt largely removed from everything else, like the ‘large scale’ video game projections (playing pong on a wall roughly the size of a big tv), and an awful lot of fire. Oh, and marbles. For some reason.
As a local event, the whole thing was… fine. It’s an interesting way to spend a couple of hours in our town centres seeing something different. But it’s hard to imagine anyone making the trip down from London (as paid adverts in Time Out suggested) not being disappointed by it all.
Oh well, there’s always next year.
More Authority
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Stray Links
New ambulance station in Gillingham should be open in the summer (KentOnline). The building in Twydall will also include call centres for 999 and 111 calls.
Comedian Joe Wilkinson recently took Match of the Day on a tour of ‘sunny’ Gillingham (KentLive). Football meeting comedy is very much outside of my comfort zone.
Chatham-based songwriter Kid Harpoon won Album of the Year at the BRIT Awards (KentOnline). He wrote songs for an up and coming singer called Harry Styles.
Lordswood Library is set to close until the summer (KentLive). This will allow it to be converted into a community hub, a phrase that is grossly overused at this point.
Berkeley Homes want to open a modular home factory in Hoo (KentOnline). No doubt some residents will be complaining about more housebuilding on the peninsula.
Footnotes
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Music that soundtracked the creation of this newsletter: Ultra Mono by Idles, Return Of The Rentals by The Rentals, Probably Nothing, Possibly Everything by Pat the Bunny, and We Wilt, We Bloom by Onsind.