- Increase vehicle tax to £500 a year and use the income to take rail fares down to Italian levels
- Integrate rail and bus service timetables
- Legislate to make the companies that own pubs allow their tenants and landlords to buy them at market rate as a right
- Legislate to allow private tenants the right to buy, with the same discounts allowed council tenants, paid for by a tax on landlords who provide substandard accommodation (which of course requires intrusive local authority inspection)
- Introduce a new zero-business-rates regime for bookshops, butchers, grocers, fishmongers, ironmongers and hobby shops in town and city centres paid for by increased business rates on out-of-town shopping complexes.
All right, none of it will happen, but ...
4 comments:
Integrate bus and rail (and other public transport as well) timetables? Yes, a good idea. You are writing from London, and from here in Manchester, it may be hard for you to believe, but even the amount of integration of public transport you have in London looks utopian. Travel on the continent indicates that there is no reason why we can't get this right. And prices? The bus prices in the Greater manchester area are absolutely scandalous and in some ways amount to a form of social apartheid.
Actually, I'm writing from Ipswich, and my enthusiasm for integrating public transport is down to the experience of trying to get around Suffolk. As I discovered just before Xmas, getting to Southwold from here most times of the day by public transport now takes two hours or more, most of which consists of hanging around waiting for buses that don't meet trains -- and don't get me started on fares!
OK, at the risk of sounding like a whishy washy reformist, integration isn't so simple unless you contemplate increase the subsidies to the system (ie it's no longer no cost).
Integration means ending competition, which means paying rent (in the Marxian sense) to contractors.
Not a reason not to do it, but it's not cost free.
Incidentally, who gives a toss about city centre retailers? Long live cheap food.
Bus service contracts are a matter for local councils, and they can set pretty tough rules if they want. And they should.
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