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Bradford (CC BY-SA 2.0 licensed by Neil Turner:Flickr)West Yorkshire gives free bikes to job starters
West Yorkshire is to spend a portion of the £2.8 million it was recently granted from the Government’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund on supplying bikes to jobstarters who are coming off the dole and have no other way of getting to work.
A spokesman for Metro, West Yorkshire’s transport body, told the Telegraph and Argus: “We will be funding a further 150 reconditioned bikes and sets of cycling accessories for jobseekers, who have a job start but no means to get there.
“Bradford JobCentre Plus will be allocated a proportion of these, so jobseekers attending the JobCentres in Bradford, Shipley and Keighley will be able to access these for ‘wheels to work’.
“This funding will also support NEETS [young people not in employment, education and training] and apprentices.”
The bikes will come from Bradford volunteer organisation Cycle re Cycle which has already supplied 100 bikes in an earlier, smaller incarnation of the programme.
The grant will also be used to fund cycle training to help parents ride to school with their children.
However, most of the funding will be spent on public transport including a free MetroCard to help people with new jobs travel to work, and expansion of the region’s smart card programme.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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13 comments
Getting people onto bikes is great but loans and grants for transitional costs for jobseekers should be funded from back-to-work budgets - there are arrangements in place for that.
Presumably there'll be some follow up so that the bikes aren't sold or kept on if/when the new employee becomes a new jobseeker?
Sounds a perfectly good idea to me.
Note that there's no such thing as 'the dole', it's been Jobseekers' Allowance / Income Support for well over a decade.
Been a similar scheme in Derby that was covered by the Beeb a couple of weeks ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-27407345
Sounds like a good idea to me - especially the side of giving people the skills to re-condition the bikes.
1) We will be funding a further 150 reconditioned bikes and sets of cycling accessories for jobseekers, who have a job start but no means to get there.
2) However, most of the funding will be spent on public transport including a free MetroCard to help people with new jobs travel to work, and expansion of the region’s smart card programme.
So the choices are work (sorry pedal) to work, or use a bus free of charge.
Wasn't he a commercial airline pilot too? Quiz nights of yore...
Norman Tebbit was born in Ponders End and flew Meteor and Vampire jets for the RAF.
Just saying!
In theory, great idea. There's always potential for a novel scheme (and I don't think this has been tried before) to go wrong but cautious optimism eh?
What was it Norman Tebbit said?
Die pauper scum?
Norman Tebbit was German??
"Don't worry Jimmy, we'll keep it all quiet."
"Great oaks from little acorns grow"