STATEMENT for Future Council Scrutiny Committee, Dudley MBC on 15.7.21
Your predecessors, sixty years ago completely destroyed the tram network. Only 20 years later, by 1981, they were planning to rebuild it but, on the railway network that you were also closing and thinking it would never again be needed. So about 100 Kms of railway lines were also completely destroyed and used for everything but the kitchen sink. Because you thought that hotels, homes, cars and offices were meant to run down railway lines.
Metro started in 1981. Not then or, in any single year since, has there been any debate and vote as to whether converting the bus and part of the urban railway network into a tram network was a sensible thing to do.
Two or three years ago, Midland Connect and the Black Country Chamber of Commerce got into the papers about their campaign to have the 87 Kms and 8 lane Western Orbital Motorway built through Worcestershire and Staffordshire. But no discussion, debate and vote in even their own organisations! No consultations even with councillors, let alone the general public. Still to this day.
Metro and Motorway get foisted on us with no consultation, let alone debate and vote in any of the seven constituent councils of the WMCA.
Scotland does things democratically, fairly and correctly. Edinburgh City Council had meetings to discuss whether or not to go ahead with their tram. Then, a debate and vote. On both occasions, Edinburgh Conservative Group was strongly opposed on grounds of cost. The Green Party and the LibDems joined the SNP to get the tram construction through instead of arguing for Fare-Free Public Transport that is always much better value for money to entice motorists out of their cars.
They knew that in 2015 when they reopened the 50 Kms Borders Railway from Edinburgh to Tweedbank, it cost £7 m/Km to rebuild.
The Conservative Group leader, at the time, wrote to me:
"The first section was completed at a cost (as you indicate) of £55.43m/km (that opened in 2016). The proposed cost of the extension is £87.01m per km before overruns and before the ‘lessons learned’ enquiry by Lord Hardie has reported." Cameron Rose Conservative Councillor, Southside & Newington ward 4 March 2019
You Conservatives are in control in Dudley, in Walsall, in Solihull and you have a Conservative CA Mayor, Andy Street who is even more irresponsibly extravagant and financially foolish and wealth flaunting, with his vanity project to impress and attract foreign tourists. This, by spending £15 BILLION to 2040, at £750 m every year to get 150 miles of underground and overground "bus on rails" trams on railway tracks on roads to replace and duplicate electric buses directly on roads without the railway lines. This, imposed on you with no consultation even, let alone a single debate and vote in any of the seven council chambers!
This is the biggest financial and transport scandal in the history of the UK. And you all sit there and let it wash over you!
What is worse, you have been lied to with the immortal words, "Light rail investment provides the basis for restoring heavy rail services at the appropriate time" on the UK's very last principal, mainline railway from Derby to Devon via Dudley. And that appropriate time never comes, of course.
SOURCE: Tom Magrath, Passenger Services Director, Centro in a letter to me, dated 18 September 2000.
And, you have been lied to by the Interim Chief Exec of the WMCA, Laura Shoaf who said on 'Midlands Today', to reporter Peter Plisner, that "passive provision" would be built in to the Dudley tram line to allow for the return of passenger and freight trains. Even a child knows that trams, trains and goods trains all on one set of double tracks is an utter impossibility. Laura Shoaf is so desperate for trams, she is prepared to lie as Tom Magrath did 21 years ago.
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