Official Report 589KB pdf
Under agenda item 2, we will hear evidence from community transport organisations as part of the committee’s community transport inquiry. The call for views has resulted in an extensive response: we have had more than 70 submissions from a wide range of stakeholders. Today’s session will be an opportunity to open up a discussion on a number of the key issues that have arisen from the call for views.
I work for a charity called Badenoch and Strathspey Community Transport Company, which in the community is known as where 2 today? We are based in the Cairngorms national park, and the majority of our work is carried out through a community car scheme with volunteers in their own cars. We have approximately 130 voluntary car drivers and we also have a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. In the rural area in which we work, there are not many such vehicles for people and there is not a lot of public transport, so door-to-door transport mainly for older and disabled people is absolutely vital. We are just about to purchase a 14-seater wheelchair-accessible vehicle as an extension to our project.
WRVS is a volunteering organisation that works across Scotland for older people. Community transport is one of our major areas of activity, although it is by no means the only one. Community transport allows us to spin off positive benefits in other areas, such as onward services or meals on wheels, and we can make contact with service users by providing community transport.
Lothian Community Transport Services operates in three different local authority areas: Edinburgh, Midlothian and West Lothian. We provide different services in those three different areas. In Edinburgh, we have a fleet of eight accessible minibuses that are available for hire on a with-driver or self-drive basis to other voluntary and community organisations in the city. There are about 130 different such groups for which we meet the transport needs. In Midlothian, we have six wheelchair-accessible minibuses operating from Dalkeith, meeting the needs of about 120 voluntary and community groups. We also operate a small network of community bus services under a section 22 permit, which are timetabled services operating on routes in isolated rural areas that do not have such a good public transport network. We pick people up and take them regularly to local shopping centres. In West Lothian, we operate in partnership with the third sector interface to deliver a community driver project in which we recruit, train and then place volunteer minibus drivers throughout West Lothian to meet the needs of local community groups.
I work with HcL, which is a charity based in Edinburgh. We have been going since 1982, helping disabled people. We were set up as a specialist transport service, with minibuses specially adapted for disabled people. We have since progressed, because in the early days we had difficulties with funding. There was funding under the manpower services scheme, but we eventually moved over to grant funding from the former Lothian Regional Council. Now, all the local councils in the area support us, as does the national health service.
I am from South West Community Transport. We are based in South Nitshill in Glasgow and we cover the whole south-west of the city—that is, Govan, Craigton and Kinning Park—more or less from Nitshill to the start of the Gorbals. We have five minibuses, of which we own four, with three being accessible, and one is a minibus from a wee community hall in Pollok.
Thank you.
Yes. Apologies to Peter McColl, because my questions are a bit less relevant to him. They are about capital costs, which are an issue that has been raised with us in previous evidence sessions.
My organisation can no longer access capital funding from our local authority or the NHS. Over the past five years, we have been building up a fund to buy the new vehicle that we are about to get. We applied to various trusts for grant funding to go towards the purchase.
Funding fleet renewal is the biggest challenge that faces my organisation—and has been for some years. We have an ageing fleet, which, as Elaine Murray said, is getting more expensive to maintain and is becoming more unreliable. The funding sources that we were traditionally able to access are no longer available to us and we have to spend a lot of time and effort applying to various trust funds, which is incredibly competitive.
I concur with John Moore. We have 33 vehicles, but they are getting older and have high mileage. Many of them are running 200,000 or 300,000 miles. They are quite difficult to replace, so we have to refurbish them, replacing engines, gear boxes and so on. We can do that, but it is quite expensive.
The buses that we have are really old—we have 51 plate and X plate buses. We had three buses from Community Transport Glasgow on a long-term lease for nearly five years, but about two years ago CTG had to take them back quite quickly. We had already taken bookings for the coming year. We bought a wee bus for £1,600 from another transport organisation in Greenock—that bus has been a godsend. We have two that we bought from that organisation; the other one was £1,500, which is not a lot of money. However, the buses have been run ragged over the past couple of years. They have to be accessible so that people with disabilities can get out. We got one of our buses through community planning for Govan and Craigton for 2008—that is the youngest bus that we have.
As I said, we do not run our own buses, but we sometimes share buses with the local authority. Colleagues have said that it would be useful if local authorities could let us know what buses they have, and if and when we can use them.
There are loads of local authority buses in Glasgow that are not being used during the summer when the kids are off. We could make use of them—it would be an advantage to us even just over the summer—because we are working with children and the elderly, but there are rules and regulations that say that we cannot use them.
I have made inquiries about the same issue for voluntary sector organisations in my constituency.
The rural community transport initiative fund was a huge benefit. I have been with our organisation for 16 years and my post was initially funded through the RCTI. There were three three-year funding rounds, and the funding was much easier to access than local authority funding.
At one stage, money was available for things such as minibuses.
We used RCTI money in 2004—I think we got £200,000-odd—to buy four minibuses. There were five or six operators in Glasgow at the time, and four buses is not a lot. My organisation had just been set up as a transport initiative, so we were not involved in the distribution of the buses.
We have had experience of the RCTI for one vehicle in East Lothian, one in Midlothian and one in West Lothian, and that funding has continued—we have managed to keep it coming from the councils. There is also an urban scheme under which we are operating in Edinburgh.
A good point about the RCTI and the urban demand-responsive transport scheme was that they had both capital and revenue. We have been fortunate in Edinburgh and Midlothian, as both local authorities have been able to preserve the revenue side of the funding that we used to receive, but the capital has gone, and that is the difficulty. The capacity no longer exists in local authority budgets, whereas with the RCTI and the urban DRT scheme there was an opportunity to look at capital as well as the on-going revenue in three-year funding packages. That was the other good point about both those schemes: they had three-year funding attached to them.
The other alternative—which has been mentioned—would be to lease vehicles. Have you leased vehicles or considered leasing and its pros and cons?
Leasing is just not possible when we are on one-year funding, as nobody would take us on for a loan.
The leasing companies look for leases of at least three years. It might be better to buy a vehicle, because it costs between £800 and £900 a month over three years to lease one, which is a lot of money. It is true that the leasing company will do the repairs and pay the road tax, but it is still necessary to cover the insurance.
We have had vehicles that have been leased by the council, so it has been a hands-off arrangement. In some cases, the leases have run out but the vehicles are still going—I am not quite sure how those arrangements were arrived at. We have resisted going down the route of leasing, for the reasons that Maggie Urie mentioned. The costs are still high, the mileage is limited and, at the end of the day, the vehicle does not belong to us. At least we have been able to keep hold of vehicles and thereby maintain a service.
As Maggie Lawson said, while we are on one-year funding agreements, it is impossible to look at commercial leases, but in my organisation—in much the same way as Wayne Pearson described—we have been fortunate to get a small number of vehicles from the local authority, which are provided through its leasing arrangements. It pays those leasing costs as part of our funding package. Someone has to pay for the leases.
Thanks very much.
I want to clarify an aspect of the RCTI that a number of the witnesses have touched on. My understanding is that the responsibility for funding such transport was transferred to local authorities and that the money was to come from their block grant.
In the Highland area, the pot was initially worth about £350,000. I am led to believe that about 32 projects now receive such funding. Access was provided to funding of up to about 75 per cent of project costs. Over the past three years, our organisation has received about 38 per cent of costs. This year, we face a 20 per cent cut—our funding is down to 18 per cent.
The RCTI money has not increased—we have not noticed an increase in it. The amount that is provided to councils might have increased, but it has certainly not been passed on.
My understanding is that the money that used to be distributed by the Scottish Government was handed to all the councils, on the understanding that they would still use it for community transport. You are saying that that is not happening in many areas—the money has just gone into a big black hole, or a big pot, and is not used for community transport. Are you saying that that devolution to local authorities has not worked?
No, it has not worked.
Our local authority tells us that we should go to other departments within the council, yet when someone tries to go to other departments they just get pushed somewhere else.
So there is no joined-up thinking within the council.
No, there is no joined-up thinking. We still have to achieve the single outcome agreement on health and wellbeing, but doing that is difficult.
Do you find that with the health boards, too?
It is worth saying that there is some good work out there, although some areas are not so good. That is the picture that I have had reflected back across the country. Aberdeenshire is a good example of a place in which the council has chosen to invest in community transport. Other areas have left community transport at a standstill or have reduced the funding year on year. That decision is being made by each local authority.
I do not think that that is so. On the change fund, South West Community Transport managed to secure money in September for our hoppa shoppa service. We got money for a driver to extend the service to Govan. I do not think that the change fund has taken over, as it were—it is just a new pot of money. There is no real evidence of whether it will work. We were fortunate to secure funds. We are submitting our reports and we hope that by September, if the powers that be are happy with those reports, our funding will be extended for a longer time—perhaps two or three years.
I will give you an example. My organisation lost funding for a community transport scheme in Fife. We were given funding to wind up the scheme, which we stretched to last for 12 months, although it was a six-month wind-up. We were able to get funding from the People’s Health Trust to keep running that service and we are now looking at applying to the change fund to keep the service going. That is a de facto replacement of local authority funding with change fund funding. I do not doubt what Maggie Urie is saying, but the picture is different in different areas.
That is probably right. Even in Glasgow, although the money is from the change fund, it is like a transition fund. It is a new name, but it is still the same money. We have got a year to make our project work, if the funding is to continue in years to come.
I was listening intently to what Maggie Urie and Peter McColl were saying. What Maggie outlined is very much what the change fund was meant to do, which was not to replace existing funding but to provide additional funding for current services. I am concerned about the evidence that we have heard from Peter McColl. The committee will want to reflect on that and perhaps pursue the matter with local authorities and the Scottish Government. My understanding is that that situation should not be happening.
The funding that we received helped to get people out of their homes and out and about. That helped to ensure that people could stay in their homes and not go into care.
I want to explore a specific issue of which I was completely unaware until we started taking evidence for this inquiry, although many people have raised it. I refer to the licensing requirements on many bus drivers. Older drivers have the D1 entitlement on their licence automatically, but many younger drivers simply do not have it. That could already be a problem, which is likely to build. I ask anyone with the relevant expertise to give us some background on that problem and on how you are dealing with it.
The difficulty is that the pool of drivers who are eligible to drive minibuses is getting older and smaller. It is to do with European Union driving licensing legislation, so we are unlikely to be able to change it. That is an issue not just for the community transport sector, but for local authorities in finding new, younger drivers to drive their vehicles. The cost of getting the D1 entitlement on someone’s driving licence depends on how much on-road training they need, but it could easily be between £800 and £1,200. It is not cheap. The difficulty, particularly if many volunteer drivers are used, lies in where the investment will come from and whether the people concerned might use that qualification to go and get employment somewhere else. That will be good for that person, but not for the organisations that invested in the training.
That would be typical of what happens in such areas.
The D1 requirement is a necessary thing for the industry. It represents an improvement in driver standards, and it professionalises the work. We try to run our service as closely as possible to being a passenger-carrying vehicle operation, although we are not a PCV licence holder. All our drivers have a minimum D1 licence, and many of them have full category D licences. That professionalises them. Either we invest in their training, or the drivers come to us with one of those licences.
There are some exceptions, and the rules can be worked around to some extent. Is the list of exceptions right? Is there any way in which it could be changed so as to improve your experience with the legislation?
You mention exceptions, and volunteers can still drive minibuses, but as far as weight is concerned, the vehicles have to be 3.5 tonnes or under. People must be volunteers in order to drive without a D1—no one can be paid to drive a bus if they do not have D1 on their licence. As well as being volunteers, drivers must be over 25, in our case.
Is the list of exceptions of value to you? Could changes be made to it? Do you view it as a challenge that you simply have to master?
The list of exceptions is not very helpful, because of the weight issue. That is the key factor, especially for people who operate accessible minibuses. Given the latest access and safety requirements, it is very difficult if not impossible to find a vehicle below that weight. There is a real pressure to trade off on the access and safety design features of the vehicle in order to come below that weight, meet the criteria and get an exception for the D1 licence. There is a tension there.
From what has been said so far, I get the impression that you feel that you have to bite the bullet and that there is no way of backing down from this responsibility. Is that correct?
It is too expensive for us to put people through their D1 test, but something has to be done. Our young drivers are 25 years old. We could possibly use them on accessible work, but we cannot afford to train them.
The issue does not particularly affect us, partly because we do not own our vehicles and partly because our volunteers tend to be over the age of 33. There might be an opportunity to fund the qualifications as part of a broader skills training programme for younger people, or through other methods; that might be the way in which we can begin to solve the problem. As Wayne Pearson said, licensing is a good thing. We simply need to find ways of funding people to qualify.
Given that the organisations that are represented here are vital to many public services, is it time that services such as the NHS and perhaps even Transport Scotland did something to assist organisations with training?
Yes.
What kind of assistance would you require—grant or practical assistance?
Targeted grants, specifically for training in the driving area. Given the work that drivers will be doing, it is critical that they have skills that are of a higher standard than those that are needed to get a basic driving licence.
If there were targeted £1,000 grants to help volunteers get their D1 licence, what would stop your organisations becoming, in essence, training bodies that people use in order to get a career driving a bus for a bus company? Would you have a training bond?
We are fortunate in being able to keep our staff for a long time—many of our staff have been with us for 20 or 30 years. However, that is also a problem for us, as it means that we have an ageing workforce. We build into our provisions of service the notion that someone who leaves within a year will have to repay half of the cost of the training, but that is up to each organisation. That has not been a problem for us, because we have found that people tend to stay with us. However, it could be a problem, particularly with volunteers because they will leave after giving an organisation a certain amount of time. Organisations have to value and nurture their volunteers, but they will come and go. However, volunteers’ skills will become an asset in the community and they will go on to another community organisation or be of benefit to the country by joining a private organisation.
Maggie Urie said that her organisation had received training through another organisation. Coalfield Community Transport in Cumnock said that it could provide some of the training for other community transport organisations at a lower cost than the training that is provided by professional organisations. Is there scope for that to be done?
In Glasgow, there is the North Area Transport Association, which gave one of our drivers D1 training. There is also Coalfield, which did a lot of our training when we were set up. If such organisations could provide D1 training at lower cost—while we covered costs and expenses, or whatever—that would be beneficial, because £1,000 is a lot of money to ask for as a grant. That would ensure that we had more people with the right accreditation working for us, and that there were more qualified people working outside the community transport area, too.
I think that some of the cost comes from the need to have a supervisor and a bus—
You have to pay for fuel and the trainer’s time, and I think that it can take five to seven days, depending on how quickly the driver picks it up.
There is not a lot of difference between the cost of training for the D1 and D licences, but the D licence gives better entitlement, as it allows a driver to drive a bus. We therefore tend to put our drivers through the training for the full D licence. If someone has only a D1 licence, that is not a great asset—the full D licence is the asset. With the introduction of continuing professional development, there is on-going professionalisation of the qualification. There is not much difference in the cost, but the full D licence has a lot more value.
I understand that, at present, community transport operators are eligible for the concessionary travel scheme if they operate services under a section 22 permit. Does any of the witnesses directly operate that type of service? If so, what is your experience of that?
We operate five community bus services in Midlothian, on which 95 per cent of the passengers are concessionary card holders. The challenge is that the costs of participating in the scheme have been transferred from Transport Scotland to us as the operator. That is becoming increasingly onerous. For example, we will eventually have to bear the cost of replacing the ticket machines and the depot reader. We are already bearing the cost of repairs when machines break down and, in our experience, they are not particularly reliable. There is also the cost of the dedicated line to Transport Scotland for the back office. All those costs are coming to us, and we expect them to increase, which is a concern.
What is your estimate of the cost to your organisation of replacing the ticket machines? How many ticket machines do you have?
We have four ticket machines and one depot reader. We understand that, if we had to replace them all now, it would cost more than £5,000 and possibly up to £10,000.
Does anyone else have experience of operating section 22 permits?
We tried to get on board the concessionary fares scheme when it first came out, as we felt that it was not fair that the general public could access public transport for free but our users, who are often unemployed or on low incomes, had to pay to get on specialist services. We tried to go through the hoops that are involved in joining the concessionary fares scheme, particularly for our dial-a-bus service, which kind of suited the scheme. However, certain aspects of the scheme are difficult. One is that the operator gets back only a certain percentage of the fare—originally, it was 80 per cent, but it has changed since those days. That means that the operator has to generate the additional income that they would have got, by increasing numbers. That is fine for operators that have empty seats or more vehicle capacity, but those that do not will not generate income; in fact, they will lose income.
I agree that we have to consider the whole issue. A number of local authorities throughout Scotland provide local concession schemes. For example, Scottish Borders Council has a pilot scheme for free transport to health appointments for people who hold a concession pass; Aberdeenshire Council provides a local concessionary scheme that has been running for the past 10 years for scheduled dial-a-bus services; and the City of Edinburgh Council has recently announced that it will run a local scheme for the Edinburgh trams system. There is a lot of scope for local authorities to do more. Would that not be the better route to take, as you would not be involved with the traffic commissioner and the other issues under section 22 permits, or even section 19 permits, if the scheme was brought in house?
I think so, but sufficient funding is not coming into services such as dial-a-ride or dial-a-bus to reduce the fare costs. Grants have been lowered over the past few years, and we must have a break-even budget or slightly above that. Often the only way to break even is to increase fares or reduce services; we cannot run at a loss. Unfortunately, costs have had to be passed on to passengers, who are now paying pretty high fares that some of them cannot afford. Instead of going out twice a week, they might do their shopping one day a week; previously, they had the option of going out a second time for a cup of coffee or just for an outing. Such outings are important for people to get involved in their communities and to get out of their four walls. Many people have had to reduce their outings because of the increasing costs to them. It has been a hard road for that element of society.
We would be anxious about an extension of the existing concessionary fare scheme to the community transport that we provide. We would find that quite difficult to implement, because we use volunteer cars and we would therefore have to have more than four ticket machines. We are convinced that extending concessionary fares is the right and just thing to do, but we would want to ensure that the system could work for community transport as well as for the existing larger-scale providers.
On a practical basis, how do you see the incorporation of section 19 services into the national concessionary scheme, given the nature of the reimbursement formula that is in place, which depends on a standard fare being charged to the public? Operators that take part will get 60 per cent of the standard fare. How do you see those services being incorporated if you do not carry fare-paying passengers? Many section 19 services are hired out to local organisations, which take passengers from their groups to day centres or on day outings. Is there a practical way of incorporating those services into the national concessionary scheme?
It would not be practical for group travel under section 19 to be part of the national concessionary fare scheme, because it involves hiring a vehicle for a group activity. That is different from the main purpose of the scheme. It might be more appropriate to look at other community transport services that are operated under section 19, which Wayne Pearson described, entering the scheme, but they would get only 58.1 per cent of the fare. Whether there would need to be a different way of calculating the reimbursement for those section 19 services would have to be looked at, otherwise the operation would have no incentive, as it would lose money.
What are your views on Age Scotland’s still waiting campaign, which aims to extend community transport? I assume that you support it, but where do you see the practical difficulties?
Age Scotland identified that community transport operators would need to get 100 per cent of the fares, because we could not afford to get 60 per cent. That is what CT operators are looking for. If the CT operators are brought into the concessionary travel scheme, we will need that money to keep our businesses afloat and to keep our buses on the road. It is okay to give 60 per cent to First or whoever, because they have backup. We have five buses and 60 per cent is no good to us—unless we put up our prices.
If I understand the reasoning behind the 80 per cent and then 60 per cent payment to transport operators, it is because it is anticipated that they will increase the volume. If you have a bus with 60 or 80 seats, you can afford to fill more of those seats. With the schemes that we provide, we are only ever going to carry one passenger at a time. There is no real way that we could increase volume and therefore it would have to be at 100 per cent in order that we could reclaim our costs and make it worth while for ourselves. There is no feasible way that we can increase volume on the trips that we do.
In our area, because it is very rural, the passengers we pick up are the most vulnerable and they are very elderly and disabled. Able-bodied people will not book on to that bus that goes via so many places. They want a direct route so they will go to public transport. It is very unlikely that we would make up the difference in additional fares. That is the problem.
Am I right in saying that it is obvious that you need some support to address social exclusion issues but that the national concessionary scheme is not the right vehicle because of the additional costs involved, the unreliability of the equipment, and the fact that you are not carrying the public on the same vehicles and you are not getting 100 per cent of the fare? However, there should be something in place to support community transport. Do you agree with that?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Thanks for that. Peter McColl talked about car-based services earlier. How can we support car-based services in terms of concessionary travel? If we need a new scheme rather than a national concessionary scheme, how do you see us moving forward to try to provide support for car-based services?
We already have a charging model in place that allows us to identify what the cost is per mile. We would still need revenue costs in order to provide the support to make the transport demand responsive. We would need somebody at the end of a phone to book a journey. I assume that that would require additional funding, but at the moment we could easily provide the charging details for what we have done to Transport Scotland or to another agency.
I should say for the record that the Health and Sport Committee is looking into that part of community transport for us and it will be feeding into our report.
I return to financing. You have given the committee a good understanding of the impact of local authority funding, or the lack of it in some cases, and you touched on the other sources that you are trying to tap into. Will you expand on that? I am not excluding you from talking more about local authority funding, but I would like to get an understanding of how else you are making the finances stack up and what the impact of finding that funding is on your resources, such as staff and time.
Our organisation was lucky enough to get a Big Lottery award five years ago. It was a grant over five years, which has allowed us to develop the social side of the organisation. Transport was the core, but we have done lots of development on the social side. That funding runs out next March. We have our one-year local authority funding, but if we do not find a major funder or more sustainable funding, we will not be able to operate next year at all. It is such a big issue. With community transport you are not allowed to make the profit margin that you would need to invest back in. We are very restricted in what we can do. There is not enough to sustain us. Given what we have built up over five years on the social inclusion side, we have made lots of changes to people’s lives, so there would be a huge knock-on effect on the health side for both volunteers and clients. We find that the volunteers are every bit as important to invest in as the clients, because they sometimes have as many needs as the clients. It works both ways.
One of the advantages of our sector is that we are mostly charities or not-for-profit organisations, so we are able to look outwith traditional sources of funding. We either work in partnership with other charities or actively look for sources of funding that might not otherwise be available. We have for example worked with the Order of St John in Scotland, which has given us some money towards our revenue funding and recently indicated that it would provide funding for a new vehicle for us. We have also developed work with the local NHS in providing an ambulance service, for which we charge the NHS on a per-use basis. Any residue from that is used to help us with our transport for the disabled. That has been a very useful source of funding for us.
We rely entirely for our core funding on the grants—although they are not always called grants—from local authorities. However, a number of years ago, we set up a wholly owned trading company that provides training throughout Scotland for other community transport, local authority and even private sector organisations. We provide on-road driver training and training in emergency evacuation procedures. We have provided disability awareness training for taxi drivers in Edinburgh for more than 10 years.
We have gone to all the places that you would expect. In addition to local authority funding, we have looked at funding from the NHS, the change fund, the People’s Health Trust and the lottery. All those sources have been highly competitive and, if they existed before, have been getting much more competitive.
As I explained before, we had no funding over the past four years, so we were self-generating until last year, when we managed to set up the pilot for the car scheme. This year, we have managed to secure a year’s funding from SPT and we have some money from the integrated grants fund from Glasgow City Council.
Thank you very much for that. Does anyone want to put on record the impact that that situation has on staff time and the real cost, particularly to small organisations? Is it onerous? I have no idea. I am involved in a voluntary organisation and it takes that organisation an awful lot of time and energy to find money. Does anyone want to comment on that?
We are a membership organisation. Although people do not need to be a member to use our organisation, they need to register with us. We have a core of about 500 members, who renew their membership annually and elect a committee at an annual general meeting. Many of our members give of their time voluntarily and put their own money into the organisation. We get a lot of donations outwith that, but many of the members form general purpose sub-committees to try to raise money.
Something that vastly increases the time spent on fundraising is the practice of one-year funding, which is now very common, unfortunately. Over the past three, four or five years, a range of our projects have been funded on a roll-on of one year. That requires a lot more staff time in reapplying for the funding every year, and it creates attrition among our staff, because we have to issue a redundancy notice every January. At some point, people will think, “Maybe this year I will go and find something else to do,” so that also requires more recruitment time. There are other problems for lease arrangements, as it is not necessarily possible to enter into a lease arrangement if we have only one-year funding.
I have another question on an issue that was raised earlier. Maggie Lawson and Peter McColl mentioned that most or all of what they do involves volunteers using their own vehicles. For my own knowledge rather than for the committee’s benefit—I am ignorant about this—are the volunteers paid back a mileage expense?
Yes, our volunteers are paid 43p per mile for every mile that their wheels turn from when they leave home.
Is there any organisation—for example, the Community Transport Association—that provides advice and assistance on how to access funding, or do you do all that yourself?
The CTA is hugely supportive in Scotland, but its funding has been cut this year, unfortunately. Our representative’s post has now been cut to half time, but she still has to cover quite a bit of Scotland and a large number of groups—there are 32 groups in Highland. She is just really stretched. The CTA staff do not know what their future holds now, as there have been so many staff pay-offs. Over the years that they have been in post, John MacDonald and Sheila Fletcher have been a huge support to us in providing advice and information, but they are finding it difficult now.
Is that your main source of advice on how to access funding?
We find the CTA really good. As an umbrella body that covers not just Scotland but the UK, the CTA provides advice lines, holds conferences and offers training and the like.
I think that the CTA offers a lot of support across Scotland to grass-roots community transport providers, but it does not have the resources to come in and help you look for the funding that you need on a one-to-one basis.
What it has been good at is representing the sector in the Scottish Parliament. That has been very useful, because our time is precious; we as individuals do not have the time to do that. The CTA has been useful in approaching the Parliament and raising issues that we might not have been able to raise ourselves.
How much experience do your organisations have of accessing public sector contracts?
We actually have experience with service level agreements. Community Transport Glasgow gets SPT money and NHS money for the likes of hospital visiting. We have the SLAs for the transport to therapeutic and falls classes. Through the urban community transport initiative, we have been funded for a driver for 16 hours a week for the past six years with DRT money. That is most of what we get at present. Community Transport Glasgow seems to take on the contracts and distribute the work.
Do any of your organisations access the public sector for any tenders?
We have registered, but we have not taken any up. We are looking at health ones in particular. We do casual work with the NHS at the moment, but we would like to formalise that with contracts, which would mean that we could allocate resources and have a fixed income, which would help the organisation. It is quite difficult to do that, but it is something that we should actively look at, because it could supplement our income streams and we could probably provide services of good quality at a reasonable price.
We are a small organisation, but ideally we could get some small school contracts. You have to get someone to come into your organisation to explain how the tendering process works and how you fill in the forms. You are taking the community out of community transport if you go to big organisations to look for work. You do not want the people who use the transport to lose out—it is community transport after all—although we do need to generate money to keep us going.
West Lothian had a problem getting visitors to the Edinburgh royal infirmary. We piloted the health link service from St John’s hospital to the royal infirmary—one bus five days a week. That developed and the private sector took it over. It was put out to tender and a bus contractor took it over and now the service operates seven days a week with several runs. We started something that went on to the private sector. I felt that we could have carried it on, but the political decision was taken at that time to move it on from our control.
In order to access various contracts and to put in tenders, you need staff who have the right experience. Do any of your organisations have anybody with that expertise?
We tried a couple of times to go through procurement processes for contracts for a special needs school and social work, but we were up against lots of taxi operators, which pay someone all day anyway. We have to submit the price that it would cost us for the small amount of time involved, but the taxi operators are paying someone anyway, which makes it very difficult for us to compete. It is quite a process to go through, given all the paperwork. For small organisations, it is very difficult.
I suggest that it would be worth your while going on to the website of the supplier development programme, which runs two-day courses for organisations on how to put in tenders. There is a technique and a knack to it.
On Maggie Lawson’s point, if an organisation has the capacity within current resources to submit a tender, will it stop doing its core business to do something else? Organisations have to understand the impact on their core business of submitting a tender. Alternatively, are organisations looking to set up in a trading company environment to do additional business in order to fund their core business? If so, it is a question of the size of the market and what part of that market they have to capture to meet their objectives. I think that the answer will be different for different community transport groups in different parts of Scotland, and I do not think that it is a panacea for the funding of community transport.
That is right. Charities must consider whether something falls within their aims and objectives and section 19 operations. I agree with John Moore that we must be cautious about the commitments that we take on, because they might be too much for small charities. Committing to providing a tendered service might be an opportunity, but it might also be a millstone.
It could be the tail that wags the dog, if you like: the commercial tail wagging the charity dog. If a charity has a contract that it must deliver, would it cancel a group hire for a local voluntary organisation to deliver that contract? Such issues must be considered.
If it does not deliver, there will be penalties.
Exactly.
As a larger organisation, we tend to deal a lot in this area. I understand what has been said, but our anxieties are less about that area and more about building up big contracts and letting those nationally through groupings such as Scotland Excel. Although not a community transport initiative, there was a Scotland Excel tender for meals on wheels that functioned in a way that made it almost entirely impossible for us to bid for it. We would have had to put in infrastructure in 27 local authority areas, and then the local authorities would have had the opportunity to opt out once the tender had been let. We would have had to put in kitchens in each of those 27 local authority areas, and the local authorities could then have said, “Actually, we don’t want to use that service. We’re going to use another provider.”
You might want to watch out for the procurement bill. It will come to this committee in the autumn, and you might want to submit some evidence to us on that.
I want to ask about a national community transport strategy and the co-ordination of community transport, which were highlighted in evidence to the committee. The submission from Lothian Community Transport Services states:
I will start with the last part of your question. The benefits of Scottish Government leadership on a national strategy would be that it would give local funders—whether local authorities or others—a framework and a context. The development of a strategy would provide an opportunity to look at the barriers, including, in particular, the lack of capital funding so that we can better understand how that issue might be addressed. We could also look at the barriers to participation in the concessionary fares scheme and perhaps get a better understanding of the nature of the community transport projects that could access the national concessionary fares scheme, but which are not accessing it at the moment.
Okay. Would having a national strategy equate to centralisation? What role do you see for national organisations such as the Community Transport Association and Transport Scotland?
I do not think that having a national strategy would equate to centralisation. Community transport is local—it operates at grass-roots level on a bottom-up basis. The CTA supports that process, and it is unfortunate that it has lost funding at a time when the CT sector across Scotland needs more support. If Transport Scotland and the CTA were to work together to develop such a strategy, to unpick some of the issues that we have talked about and to identify practical solutions to the barriers that exist, that would be extremely helpful to the wider sector.
Do any of the other witnesses want to talk about the barriers to the sustainability of community transport and the benefits of a national strategy?
There are some good examples of community transport, but that is not the case throughout Scotland. That is where a national strategy could help—it could help areas in which community transport is poor. I agree with John Moore that such a strategy need not be centrally directed. The replication in other places of good examples and their encouragement would benefit all of Scotland, not just certain pockets.
I think that opportunities exist to deliver the services that I have talked about, such as patient transfer and the transporting of people to GP appointments. The creation of a national framework that would give statutory agencies and GPs a level of awareness of such services would be welcome. That is not about centralising things; it is about raising awareness and creating a situation in which people are aware of what can be provided and how transport can be integrated into other services.
What would such a national strategy look like? How would it be different from what we have at the moment? I am struggling to grasp what it would mean in practice.
It would help to identify the role of community transport in the shared services agenda, for example, which we feel is quite difficult to engage in at the moment, and it would highlight the need for funding to be provided for more than just one year, so that we could engage at that level. Those are some areas that I see a national strategy focusing on. Those are reasons for having such a strategy.
I think that a national strategy might also contribute to health and social care integration. Transport has not been given particular consideration as part of that process, but we see it as being fundamental to achieving a shift in the balance of care from acute services to care in the community. Allowing people to have transport that they can rely on is extremely important. That is not really a transport issue; it a health and social care issue.
I will play devil’s advocate. If there was a national strategy, it might act as a straitjacket. John Moore said that community transport was inherently bottom up. It responds to needs, depending on whether there are volunteers around to provide it. There are gaps—that is why we are holding our inquiry—but I am not sure that a national strategy would allow the witnesses to get what they want. I hope that our report will highlight good practice throughout the country and will identify where there are gaps.
Part of the answer to that is that it would capture all that diversity and identify where good practice exists. There is a bit of a postcode lottery across the country when it comes to community transport provision. A national strategy would provide a framework for people to better understand how community transport can contribute to the meeting of local outcomes.
But you are almost saying that you want a statutory body to fill the gap. You might find yourselves competing with that statutory body.
I am not sure. Excuse me if I do not understand some of the jargon, but we are maybe looking for a committee that would act as a back-up, like CTA and Transport Scotland—maybe a committee that we could go to for help in securing funding or downloading work that we could do for the NHS or for Glasgow City Council, for example. The committee could supply the work that it felt that we could do in our various areas. It would mean having somebody to go to. We all have a board of directors, who come along and help us, but having an official body would help.
Is that not what the CTA does?
The CTA does a brilliant job, so maybe something like the CTA and Transport Scotland—but not another board of directors. The CTA benefits all of us. If we have any problems at all, we just lift up the phone, and if John MacDonald can help, he will. He has the right experience, and there may be somebody from Transport Scotland who also knows a lot about this area. Really, CT organisations just need back-up.
Maggie Urie and some of the other witnesses mentioned what happens when an organisation’s vehicle goes off the road. There is no vehicle for it to use, but it knows that other voluntary organisations and charities in that community might have a vehicle that is used only at night for youth groups, for example. Is there a need for a vehicle pool so that organisations know that they can use vehicles during the day that other groups use at night?
When we were set up, we put out a certificate of acknowledgement to the wee user groups in our area because we did not have any buses. In fact, I was brought in to set something like that up. We utilised the buses in the area and then gradually buses were given to us, but using buses from other groups is like using the council buses: loads of buses sit there and do nothing all day, so surely there could be some arrangement.
We have not touched on the integration of transport and the trips themselves—the movements that people want to make. Our chairman and I went to Holland a couple of years ago and looked at the set-up there, which involves disabled users, other groups and the Government coming together to say, “Right, people need to travel and they have a right to a trip within a certain time.” That approach is resourced right through the country. There is a central booking system and all sorts of operators go into that pot—taxis, ambulances, local authorities and the voluntary sector and volunteers. From that central point, decisions are made about the appropriate means of transport, who is the closest and who is available to do it, and trips are recompensed nationally.
Are there any other issues that witnesses think the committee should address during the inquiry that we have not already covered this morning? We have been right round the houses.
I agree with you, convener—one size does not fit all. If it is a choice between national or local, I always like keeping it local because the population in Highland is quite dispersed and we sometimes have to go huge distances just to access another accessible vehicle. Even then, although the care homes have accessible vehicles—there are two that we can access—we cannot use them because of insurance and legislation issues. There are other minibuses but they are not accessible, and 95 per cent of our clients need accessible vehicles with low steps or lifts. Grass roots up is always my policy.
I thank you all very much for taking the time to come and answer our questions—it has been very helpful. If you think of anything else on your way home that you wish you had said, just write in and let us know.
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