Green Party MEP, Catherine Rowett, has hit back at today’s announcement by the Conservatives that they would invest £4.2 billion in local public transport for some urban areas in England, calling it “cynical electioneering” and “too little too late”.
Under the proposals sketched today, it would be up to the local leaders in the eight chosen mayoral or combined authority areas to decide how the money would be spent.
The chosen authorities include, North East, Tees Valley, West Yorkshire, Sheffield City Region, Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, West Midlands and West of England. Tragically, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority seems to be destined to miss out entirely.
Catherine Rowett, the Green Party’s Member of the European Parliament for the East of England—which includes Cambridgeshire and Peterborough— branded the plans “hopelessly unambitious”, saying:
“The paltry amounts suggested in this manifesto would fall far short of what is required even to reverse the cuts of the past few years, and the chronic underfunding of public transport through a succession of Conservative and Conservative-led governments. What we need is not just to undo some of the past cuts but to inject radical new improvements. We urgently need to make it easy for people to get around quickly and reliably in a more sustainable way.
“In rural areas and in cities such as Peterborough and Cambridge, people are already struggling with unreliable trains, and buses that stop running in the evenings. Nothing in today’s hopelessly unambitious announcement could begin to address these shortfalls in public transport, let alone persuade those who currently clog up our roads in cars to shift to a more sustainable mode of travel.
“It’s tempting to infer that Cambridgeshire is losing out because the county’s parliamentary seats are not top of the list of Tory targets. In any case, the Conservative party seems not to have a grip on the situation. What they are suggesting, even if it were to materialise in reality, would be far too little, and far too late. Indeed, here in the East it appears to be nothing at all!”