Council spends £6,000 a week on rail travel
A Freedom of Information Act request to Birmingham City council revealed that the authority spends £6,000 a week on rail travel. Much of it on travel to London, where the majority of Local Government meetings take place. A number of measures have been proposed, although the obvious one of having meetings moved to the Midlands so reducing travel costs for the majority of councils (due to Birmingham’s central location and the fact that the majority of North-South lines pass through Birmingham) seems to have been ignored.
Another fact that seems to have slipped by unnoticed is that the figure works out to be an average cost of 12 pence per employee per week.
Knowing as I do the cost of a monthly 1st class travel pass to London, that doesn’t actually seem like that much money. I think it works out at about 24 people within the council having such a pass. How many people work for the council in total?
There’s around 50,000 people working for the council, not all are full time so I think it works out to equivalent to about 34,000 full time.
The impression I get from the article, others in recent weeks, is that they are concerned about the number of people travelling first class rather than standard.