Save the planet or . . .

I for one am really pleased that efforts are being made to reduce emissions in public vehicles. We now have electric buses and I love them. Quiet and non fumey. There are also new electric council vehicles but there is some grain of truth in the concerns about supply of electricity. The electricity company can't supply the level of electricity needed to charge all the vehicles overnight at the new depot. They need to up their game. In terms of financing, grants were available to the bus companies and I expect to the council too.

Buying not being

The latest is the NHS is being EV ambulances.

I have a friend in the fire service who tells me they can put out a fire in an ev only for it to reignite a few hours later.

Mollygo

Sitting next to a lady in the doctors yesterday we were discussing the imminent price rise in rates. She asked me why, if we are so short of money, our council just bought a whole new fleet of electric vans.
I know the answer, and so did she but I thought it was a fair question?

If your local council needed new vans, then they were right to buy electric ones, and indeed it may even make sense financially speaking even if the vans they had could still be used.

From the eviromental viewpoint it is obviously a step in the right direction.

We all know this. What would the person you were speaking to have prefered the council to do with their money?

My 'flash-harry' BIL thought he was the bees knees getting an electric car but when he realised that he couldn't get from South Yorkshire to Cornwall without 4 charges he was rather embarrassed. We estimated the journey would take around 16 hours!

The vehicle is on Mobility so seemingly he is stuck with it now and rarely attends family events although we are all only around 20 miles away.

Wake up people.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england

Let’s hope Marjgran doesn’t require one of the services her council no longer provides - perhaps because it’s blown the budget on evs.

Marjgran

What weird comments! The improvement in air quality (bad air kills) plus less carbon - good for your council! And they dare to keep plugging the arts? Guess some think only hair shirts will do. Goodness, try running something as complex as a council or an NHS trust…

Do you have experience in management of any gov. dept. Marjgran?
Perhaps you could inform this thread?

Urmstongran

Wales?
Labour run?

Sheesh.

Unlikely. Electric vehicles aren’t popular in Wales - it’s the mountains you know.

Georgesgran

Maybe an Urban Myth, but a friend was telling me that a local council bought a fleet of electric vans to trial, but hadn’t realised the workmen
would need home charging points - an extra outlay.
I understand Durham Constabulary bought an electric BMW - it couldn’t manage enough charge to get it from one end of the County to the other, if it was fully loaded with equipment.

I read that when they test how many miles electric vehicles will do on a single charge they test them on a flat circular track in optimum conditions and with no passengers. I can’t imagine going in a long journey and not knowing how far I can go without having to stop and find a charging point.

Unfortunately a lot of elderly people who might find some of the service information and phone numbers helpful don’t have the internet.

Snap GSM.

PS. This is getting to be a habit - I'm a little worried

Germanshepherdsmum

We have received two of these glossy magazines just this week - one from the county council and the other from the district. They contained very little useful information. I can’t imagine what they must cost to produce and distribute (via the postman - I doubt the PO provide the service for free). The useful information - phone numbers for different services - could have been put on a black and white A4 sheet.

Or simply send information by email? When we moved here and went online to sort out our Council Tax our local authority encourage us to sign up to updates from their website so that they can keep us up to date on information. This is really useful, for example for bin days on bank holiday weeks, information on events that the council are holding, or financial support that they are offering.
Many of us now are on local WhatsApp groups and if just one person is on the council's email update list they can post the information on WhatsApp.
I agree that it is ludicrously expensive to send out these costly printed magazines.

Nannan2

Our council tax is a huge bill of which over more than half goes to lancashire county council and yet our little valley gets bins, rents, roads,bus passes, blue badges etc all run by very small nearby town-we get NOTHING from L.C.C.- so why is a huge chunk of my council tax going to fund a council i get nothing from?while our small town council gets £234 out of it- and local parish get only £24? Its bl**dy daylight robbery is what that is. Even buses & trains in our area (of which there are very few) are under the 'greater manchester' umbrella not L.C.C. so why are they getting a lot of our cash?

Lancashire County Council is responsible for:

Child and adult social care
Public health
Fire and Rescue
Road maintenance and safety
School transport
Planning applications
Libraries, archives
Consumer goods
Community safety and emergency planning

... plus more

granfromafar

Oops daisy- why would they catch fire? Petrol/diesel cars are more likely to catch fire than evs. Sounds like a good move to me.

This is just not true I'm afraid. We heard the other day about an EV being involved in an accident and the fire service said how difficult it was to get people out of the cars or move them because of the risk of fire.

An elderly neighbour told me that if 3 people in our close all charged their evs overnight there wouldn't be enough electricity for the rest of us!

Seems to me that local authorities suffer from (1) elected councillors of all parties who are lacking in knowledge (except how to sound good to get elected), (2) officers who are poorly educated in how to run services, (3) underfunding by central government, and (4) difficulty in balancing short term needs against long term needs (e.g., adult social care against climate change).

Just as we have a poor cadre of national politicians of all parties at present so we seem to have a dearth of really competent people at local level.

Probably this is in part due to a decline in the number of workers but perhaps also to a failing educational system at primary and secondary level.

Outsourcing services to the private sector does not seem to be a success in general though our bin collection is pretty good.

LCC are the authority responsible for education, highways, social services, libraries and many more things throughout the county. Maybe you don’t make use of all those things but others do. You can’t pay only for the services that you use. Your ‘little town’ is actually a district council responsible for other services on a more local level.

What weird comments! The improvement in air quality (bad air kills) plus less carbon - good for your council! And they dare to keep plugging the arts? Guess some think only hair shirts will do. Goodness, try running something as complex as a council or an NHS trust…

Our council tax is a huge bill of which over more than half goes to lancashire county council and yet our little valley gets bins, rents, roads,bus passes, blue badges etc all run by very small nearby town-we get NOTHING from L.C.C.- so why is a huge chunk of my council tax going to fund a council i get nothing from?while our small town council gets £234 out of it- and local parish get only £24? Its bl**dy daylight robbery is what that is. Even buses & trains in our area (of which there are very few) are under the 'greater manchester' umbrella not L.C.C. so why are they getting a lot of our cash?

£10k is a five figure salary. Did you mean six figure? I agree that there are too many managers but you need to pay well into six figures for a good manager.

Of more concern is the latest wheeze by ‘our’ ever surprising NHS to introduce electric ambulances and the £3m bill for staff to implement it just for starters. The implications for charging times, greater delays etc is very concerning. Until these obstacles are addressed, not to mention the waiting lists, staff shortages, lack of hospital beds, A&E waiting times, failing Trusts and all the other multiple problems the NHS is facing, I wonder if this is a priority? Better to cull those in five figure salaries and meaningless managerial roles, I think!

Glasgow City Council brought in uULEZ requirements and started fining people if their vehicle weren’t compliant only to discover most of their own vehicles weren’t compliant

We have received two of these glossy magazines just this week - one from the county council and the other from the district. They contained very little useful information. I can’t imagine what they must cost to produce and distribute (via the postman - I doubt the PO provide the service for free). The useful information - phone numbers for different services - could have been put on a black and white A4 sheet.