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Cambridgeshire Future Transport

The problem

The idea

Future funding for public transport will be significantly reduced and demand will increase, due to demographic change and population growth. This means that provision will have to be better targeted and service specification locally influenced with co-production in local communities. Cambridgeshire Future Transport is a project addressing the needs of people who require support to access public services. In particular, the project is focusing on education, social services, health and community accessibility. We have identified a collective budget of £33.5m across Cambridgeshire’s local authorities and health services which is spent on transport. We are exploring how this budget might be better deployed to mitigate the impact of reduction in public transport and improve accessibility to services. We are exploring new models for supporting passenger transport that passes control of service delivery to community-led enterprises, and re-defines the role of statutory organisations as strategic commissioners. Communities, local authorities, health services and transport providers have come together to design innovative and community-led solutions. Through this new approach, strategic commissioners would identify the core outcomes they require from their funding, e.g. transport children to school and patients to hospitals. Local bodies, in the form of social enterprises or other similar models, would then be commissioned to provide these outcomes for their area, giving them discretion over how transport is provided and how services are accessed, provided statutory obligations are met. These enterprises would have a strong incentive to achieve value for money because they would be set up to retain a share of any efficiencies they generate. A proportion of this profit, generated with a strong social purpose, could be re-invested into local transport or service provision for their communities.

What we need

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NESTACC

Cambridgeshire County Council