SCHOOL TRANSPORT
CORNWALL COUNCIL ADMITS THAT IT PAYS SCHOOL TAXI DRIVERS TOO MUCH
One of Cornwall Council’s most senior officers has admitted that the authority is paying school-run taxi drivers too much money. The matter arose during a discussion about the council’s finances which have been hit by a £16m overspend so far this year. HST for pupils in Cornwall is one of the council’s biggest expenditures and has led to a £5m overspend during the first half of the financial year. By the end of Quarter 2 (Sep
2023) the council’s total overspend was £14.9m, which a meeting of the customer and support services overview and scrutiny committee on 5 December, heard has now increased to £16m. The council’s chief operating officer, Tracie Langley,
told the scrutiny
committee that HST for SEN children is particularly expensive. Cllr Mike McLening said: “I get the feeling that we’re not as harsh as we should be when negotiating
prices. You say about the taxi drivers ... ‘do we let them get away with a bit on pricing?’” Ms Langley responded that he was correct, adding: “We will do our best to negotiate the right price and put the right caps on our dynamic purchasing systems.” It came to light earlier this year that taxi drivers from as far away as Essex and Shropshire were driving to Cornwall to carry out school runs for Cornish pupils.
BANKRUPT BIRMINGHAM COUNCIL SHOULD EXPLAIN £116M BLACK HOLE IN SCHOOL TAXI SPENDING
Questions continue to be raised over the £116m spending black hole in Birmingham City Council’s school taxi bills. Council records show the values for all 163 four-year school transport contracts are exactly £64,938.27, around £10.5m in total (plus £1.5m for recently published contracts), around ten times less than the £128m the council paid out from 2020 to July this year, according to MailOnline analysis of invoices data. The £64,938.27 figure was just low enough to avoid publishing trans- parency data, raising renewed questions over awarding millions of pounds of school transport contracts to Green Destinations Ltd (GDL) - owned by Jameel Malik - which charged more than £200 a day to take a child three miles to school and back. This comes as opposition Tories at the troubled Labour-run council renewed calls for an investigation and the publication of internal
PHTM JANUARY 2024
audits, after education director Sue Harrison promised the committee their release on 25 October. Conservative deputy leader Ewan Mackey said MailOnline raised ‘very serious questions’, adding: “Labour should publish the audit reports in full, as well as answer the discrepancies highlighted”. The council has since added that a comprehensive spend report is being produced but it is yet to be released. The council has previously refused FoI requests from MailOnline for the investigation report, saying the ‘information was given in con- fidence’. The Information Commis- sioner is now deciding if the audits should be released. When asked by audit scrutiny committee chairman, Labour’s Cllr Fred Grindrod, to explain why all 163 school contracts were the same value, procurement head Mike Smith said ‘for the purposes of our transparency
requirements’ he
effectively took the total estimated cost and divided it by 163 to get an average contract value. Tory Cllr Meirion Jenkins blasted the explanation, telling Mr Smith: “In terms of understanding the point of the transparency, an averaging across the whole thing is pretty meaningless.” Referencing the MailOnline investigation into GDL, Cllr Jenkins asked internal audit boss Sarah Dunlavey: “Does £200 a day to take a child three miles a day to school seem like a reasonable taxi fare?” “It hasn’t been considered to be fraudulent, no,” she replied. Cllr Jenkins also asked her for any investigations into the service to be made available to the audit committee. Ms Dunlavey replied: “We have been in and looked at accusations against various pro- viders and concluded that, as far as we can tell there was no systematic or deliberate over- charging.”
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