During her opening remarks at the transport scrutiny committee’s examination of Birmingham’s bus lane fines fiasco, chairman Victoria Quinn warned members that she did not want a witch hunt.
“This should be a light grilling, not a barbecue,” she said as members sharpened their knives ready for Labour cabinet member responsible for transport, Tahir Ali, and senior officers John Blakemore and Kevin Hicks to explain themselves.
Regular readers of this column will know that an independent tribunal has ruled that warning signs for motorists approaching three out of ten city centre bus lanes were inadequate and that the majority of the 60,000-plus fines issued should be cancelled or refunded.
So far Coun Ali and his colleagues are only prepared to cancel the majority of the 18,000 appeals currently being processed and consider refunds for others who ‘made representations’ at the time but whose appeals were rejected.
The first questions to Coun Ali from Coun Quinn, a solicitor by trade, were around this point – what exactly is a representation? An official appeal? A strongly worded letter or email? A bit of a grumble on the phone to the council’s call centre?
Any of those, suggested Coun Ali, only to be later undone by Mr Hicks who said that only an official appeal counts.
As the contradictions and woolly responses flowed, committee members grew increasingly frustrated – with councillors Deirdre Alden (Cons, Edgbaston), John O’Shea (Lab, Acocks Green), Josh Jones (Lab, Stockland Green) and Jerry Evans (Lib Dem, Springfield) joining Coun Quinn (Lab, Sparkbrook) in the attack.
The committee is rightly incensed because it highlighted issues with the bus lanes in December and was ignored by Coun Ali and his staff.
Those who paid up because, in Coun Quinn’s words they were told officially that they had got it wrong even though they had not, have no chance of seeing their money again. “Those people just pay the fine to make it go away,” she said.
A troubling factor in all this is that there is a 50 per cent no quibble discount on £60 fines which is lost if the motorist appeals. And those with little spare cash are unwilling to risk turning a £30 hit into a £60 one.
Legally the transport department is covered, but committee members said that morally it should make an offer to these people – if only to restore public confidence before enforcement cameras are put up on the remaining 26 miles of Birmingham’s bus lanes.
Coun Alden applied the rule of justice that better some guilty walk free than one innocent soul gets punished with a plea to ‘pay the lot back’.
The leadership is afraid of this approach as the fines have raked in £1.7 million at the last count and as the Cabinet heard this week the fall-out from the bus lanes mess presents potential ‘budget pressure’.
Instead the committee invited Coun Ali to come up with a plan for aggrieved motorists, including those who had no right of appeal because company and lease car owners automatically pay fines and charge the driver.
Coun Ali, hoping to sidestep the minefield this throws up, grumbled that the motorist signs up for this when they lease a car.
The inflexibility left members increasingly angry and fuses became short.
In her anger Coun Quinn even refered to Mr Blakemore as ‘officer’ as he tried to aid his struggling cabinet member.
And Coun O’Shea explained to his Labour cabinet member that they had tried to help him. “We offered you a rope to get you out of the hole you dug for yourselves, and instead you brought a shovel.”
Behind the scenes Coun Quinn is of course the partner of council leader Sir Albert Bore, who appointed Coun Ali to his cabinet two years ago.
After hitting the brick wall for the umpteenth time the increasingly irate chairwoman told Coun Ali to come back to their next meeting with a firm set of proposals.
A diary issue arose and meetings in May or June were mentioned – which is of course after the election and annual meeting... “That pre-supposes he will still be in the cabinet,” quipped Coun Alden. “Judging by the way his own colleagues grilled him you wonder if he will be.”
This gave Coun Quinn the chance to show some allegiance to her Labour colleague Coun Ali, with the comment that “we hope he will take all our guidance forward.”
Woe betide him if he does not.
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Consultation reared its ugly head at Cabinet this week – this time over the subject of cuts to the tower block concierge or security service.
A roving wide area night time service is replacing guards attached to each estate to save money.
But as Tory deputy leader Robert Alden pointed out the only reason residents were in favour of the change in the survey was because there wasn’t an option to keep the status quo.
Seems to me that the city council has been trying to emulate the Crimean referendum where a status quo was not an option.
Vladimir Putin would be proud.
