Council spent £72,158 on school taxis for one pupil in one year
https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/staffordshire-county-council-spent-72158-10702251.amp
Posted by Only-Emu-9531
Council spent £72,158 on school taxis for one pupil in one year
https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/staffordshire-county-council-spent-72158-10702251.amp
Posted by Only-Emu-9531
32 Comments
How would I go about getting one of these council contracts?
How? Petrol, insurance and drivers pay wouldn’t even amount up to that at all
So, the cost for 20 kids to school is £600k at least, in ONE council. And people wonder why this country is fucked.
We need some better options for kids. This amount on travel alone is crazy.
Whilst I have individual gripes with the SEND programmes, it’s clear as day there is almost inconceivable levels of corruption.
Fucking hell, £72,000 for a 5 mile trip 5 days a week, no doubt a relative of someone on the board.
I heard from a taxi driver who regularly takes a special needs pupil across London to school, apparently there’s always a member of staff accompanying him and after hearing a few stories I can understand why. The pupil can get very aggressive, hitting, punching, spitting etc.
nationalise it.
bring the staff in house and local authority vehicles and someone who is a transport planner optimising the routes.
Reword that , corrupt council abuses mates rates with a freinds taxi company to abuse tax payer funds .
Pay me half that and I’d drive a lad 5 miles twice a day Monday to Friday.
I’ve googled this to try understand why it’s happening and one of the top results was this website run by parents of disabled kids calling this out as unnecessary and wasteful:
https://www.specialneedsjungle.com/send-transport-law/#Needlessly_expensive_transport_arrangements
Think about this from the perspective of a parent of a disabled kid. The money available to support them and their kids is limited; it must be so frustrating for them to see so much money wasted like this when they could probably tell you half a dozen ways it could be better spent.
Kids should be able to get to school. Special SEND schools are often far from where the kids live. So providing transport is reasonable.
What is not reasonable is the clearly inflated cost and apparent lack of bargaining skills by the council.
Don’t demonise the SEND child; scrutinise the taxi firm’s quote and the council’s decision to eat it.
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Always wary of jumping to conclusions about stories like this without seeing detailed financial breakdowns.
If this is anything like the similar case in East Sussex, it turned out that it wasn’t a taxi, it was a full private ambulance with two paramedics and a nurse on board or something similar.
Read this number.
Read it again.
Think about how much tax you paid this year – just income tax – and how many hours you have had to work to pay for this.
Now think about what you would have done if you had been able to keep the money, and been asked to solve this problem.
An idea might be – buy a car, and pay someone for an hour or two a day to drive it.
They don’t give a shit about you. None of them give a shit about you – Reform, Labour, Tory – none of them. You are a resource and a tool. That’s it.
OH! Sorry – edit to highlight that not only do your taxes pay for this, they also pay the wages of the moron who decided this was a good idea.
And their boss.
Strongly recommend anyone interested to read Henry Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in One Lesson’. Very accessible.
They are effectively having to pay for 2 x members of staff (Driver + Chaperone) + Transport & the associated costs + the appropriate levels of vetting and checks. It seems borderline high but not excessively so. Also that will be a contract for both for that year e.g. they don’t suddenly become unemployed during School Holidays. Seems like the paper is trying to take a round the houses shot at the disabled and most likely the Council?
This is why our taxes keep going up guys.
Millions of scenarios like this each and every day where the cost is substantially higher than it should be.
Think about it a child in an electric wheelchair is going to need:
Q taxi or vehicle big enough to fit in and turn around in. Some of the wheelchairs are huge. Especially if they need oxygen to literally keep them alive.
And if the CHILD whose legs do not work shits themselves on the way to school what do you expect them to do about it? Fucking Mr Ahmed is going to clean them up. And how will they know how to keep them alive while they’re sorting them sort.
You expect the random taxi driver will know what to do if something happens to said child.
There will be dodgy cases for sure, but I don’t think a lot of you know how I’ll.akd vulnerable these children can be
In this thread:
People that have no understanding of how much it costs to take care of disabled people on a large scale.
People who have no idea how bare bones the support services for disabled people are in this country.
People who are happy to disparage and play down the struggles of disabled people having never experienced anything of the sort.
People who see disabled people as a drain and don’t have any humanity.
Hopefully it’s all bots because the views are disgraceful.
We paid for the son of Katie price and Dwight Yorke to travel 80 miles each way by taxi twice a day.
That’s a household name celeb and a premier League footballer.
We have to start getting real on welfare or we’re totally fucked as a nation.
First up: stop obsessing over billionaires. Endlessly lusting over their wealth will achieve nothing.
The article doesn’t mention what requirements the learner had. Was it an adapted or specialist vehicle to allow a power chair to be transported?
A solution for this would be to have more schools for children with disabilities. A lot of the issue is the kids cannot be educated locally so they have to be transported miles away from home. This increases the transport costs and means parents can’t transport their own child.
My brother was transported 40/50 minutes each day to school. If my parents had to do that, they would have been doing two round trips of 2 hours a day. Both my parents worked, it would have meant one of them giving up their job and having to claim more benefits.
These comments are vile, not to speak of the levels of ignorance. Crazy how instead of attempting to do any research as to why this is the case or what can be done to improve the situation, people will actually just resort to extreme ableism. If you don’t want to take the time to learn things before giving an opinion, your opinion isn’t worth shit.
This cost is either due to distance from the school or/and the medical need of the child and training relating to the health and safety of the child.
The later is the most probable.
Just to give an example (because I have witnessed it while dropping my son in his special need school) severe epilepsy is scary to witness and kills many people, no matter their age!
There is many other conditions, but this one is more known and understood by general public.
There a lot more other deadly medical issues with disabled kids, sadly!
What did parents do before this gravy train came into being? Don’t parents take their kids to school anymore?
I’m not doubting this but article has very little information in it anyone provide any actual facts here?
That’s what, £1.8k per school week? £360 a day? Doesn’t sound right…
It would have been a lot cheaper to hire a private teacher that would go to his house all year
Not to mention SEND provision schools can run as a business and charge upwards of 100k per year PER child and be paid by the local authority and make their owners very rich.
It should be a parents job to get their kids to school. If they can’t, they shouldn’t be having them, and working people shouldn’t have to fund it.
Why is the UK so addicted to unlimited, uncosted entitlements?
“You have a legal right to receive this service no matter what it costs.” That just isn’t sensible. We don’t do it for healthcare treatments so why do we do it for other things?
Why are the parents of these kids taking them to school?
As someone who works with complex needs children – I have had a child out of school for 9 months because the council won’t fund transport. This is a far more common reality for the growing number of children with high needs. The idea that most councils are ferrying all children about, cost be damned, is a wicked distortion. Reform’s grubby fingers are all over this.