Ep. 13 – Birmingham 2026: Manifestos reviews

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In this special edition, Chair Martin Price and campaign lead Lucy Caldicott review the various party’s manifesto pledges on transport ahead of the all out Birmingham City Council elections on May 7th.

Key documents referenced:

• Manifesto comparison document
• Conservative Manifesto
• Green Manifesto
• Labour Pledge Book
• Lib Dem Manifesto

Other parties have not published Birmingham-specific literature or is on a ward-basis as they are local independents. Find out who your local candidates are on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk and contact them.

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Transcript

Martin Price (00:00)
the Birmingham mail hustings which happened the other day and during which there was a section on road safety.

and only one party, which was the Greens, raised their hands, rolling out 20 miles per hour eventually to all residential streets. And that was in front of Babika Yahya, a father who lost his daughter to a dangerous driver a couple of years ago now in Highgate in the city centre.

Lucy Caldicott (00:28)
was quite a surprising moment, quite an upsetting moment, I think, in front of a bereaved father, because there’s numerous evidence that proves that reducing speed of vehicles on roads reduces danger.

So we’re just a week out from the local elections here in the great city of Birmingham. And on this week’s Better Streets for Birmingham podcast, our chair, Martin Price, and myself, Lucy Caldicott, the campaign lead, we’re to take a deep dive into the various manifestos relating to transport that we’ve been able to glean from the different parties that are standing.

Martin Price (01:13)
Yeah, thank you. And it’s really important to stress that by the end of the episode that we’re not going to be recommending a particular party or set of candidates to vote for, but hopefully you’ll be better informed on transport policy for when you head to the ballot box. And so I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to just explain why this election is important, not just because of the unpredictable nature of the election, but

because of the transport issues. So we’re a city of nearly 1.2 million, but also have many hundreds of thousands coming into Birmingham for work. And that’s a lot of people to move around quite a wide area.

So the bulk of transport funding is grant funding and there isn’t really a way to raise more money other than to ask the government for it or maybe introduce new charges for people,

West Midlands Combined Authority manages public transport and it’s growing powers with bringing buses and trains into public ownership and that means soon it will be able to define bus routes, timetables, fares and vehicles.

Profit can also be reinvested into the network, but we don’t quite know what this means for rail services yet, which were only recently brought into public ownership. When we think about Birmingham’s strategies, so last updated, it’s transport strategy in 2022, and that’s called the Birmingham Transport Plan. And the main focus of that plan is to reallocate road space, transform the city centre, prioritise walking, wheeling and cycling in local neighbourhoods.

and also manage demand through parking measures. And there have been some different strategies kind of underneath those. Last year we saw the new road harm reduction strategy which replaced an old kind of road safety strategy that the council admitted wasn’t working. And they also declared that they need to change how they approach road safety going forward. There’s also a legal plan that identifies new

routes for cycling and walking in the city and regional plans strategies within the combined authority and something called a local transport plan which is being updated this year. There’s also been some studies for some major routes around the region and to consider what kind of public transport is needed for that long term and there’s a lot of stuff being planned for delivery.

So new bus routes where buses are prioritised, new cycle lanes and new tram extensions. Subject to funding, there’ll also be the first go at large areas of the city having a sort of transport redesign on a neighbourhood basis and looking at how everyone gets around that area no matter the mode of transport. Every single council seat is up for election next week. That’s been the case for a couple of elections now.

and the winning party will control how Birmingham implements transport policy. What I suppose it has less control of is acquiring new funding. Now Lucy, you were previously a councillor and cabinet member for Lambeth Council in London. Could you tell us a bit more about what is expected of councillors and what they are able to do in their role?

Lucy Caldicott (04:32)
Yes, so councillors are elected by the residents of the ward that they represent and the key role of a councillor is to represent the residents of that ward and in Birmingham we have 69 wards across the city and there are going to be 101 councillors ⁓ elected across those different wards. Some of the wards will have one local councillor and other wards will have two.

So I suppose what you’re doing is you’re playing a role in your ward, you’re playing a role on a committee with a subject area.

and you’re playing a role on behalf of the city as a whole.

Martin Price (05:14)
So we’ve had some hustings now because we’re very close to ⁓ election day now. And

one of the standout ones recently has been the Birmingham mail hustings which happened the other day

What did you think about that, Lucy?

Lucy Caldicott (05:33)
was quite a surprising moment, quite an upsetting moment, I think, in front of a bereaved father, because there’s numerous evidence that proves that reducing speed of vehicles on roads reduces danger.

And this is why several cities and also devolved nations have rolled out measures to reduce default speeds in residential roads to 20 mile per hour. And we’ve seen ⁓

strong evidence to show, you know, really big reduction in the severity of accidents and reduction in number of deaths. So it was surprising that the panellists either didn’t know that or, you know, didn’t feel able to support that. I think the other surprising element was that the local authority that’s in power at the moment, the Labour Party, has, as it stated, an aim road danger reduction strategy.

a policy of implementing ⁓ default to 30 mile an hour and also 20 mile an hour in residential streets. So why that wasn’t supported by the party in power also seemed a surprising and upsetting moment to me.

Martin Price (06:44)
Mm.

Yeah, it’s been their policy for over a decade now and even at one point they were asking the government, please could we, the then government rather, could we put signs that the entrance points to the city and kind of say this is 20 miles an hour unless it’s got a different speed limit sign to try and heavily reduce the cost of rolling it out. And they were really keen for that and it’s really interesting to see that that doesn’t appear to be a policy right now.

especially given that it’s been kind of restated and restated in different strategies that have come out since, like you say, and also something that was a bit confusing and I’ve seen a bit of an argument online about potentially it’s because it was a yes or no question, but it is within the Lib Dem manifesto to, which we’ll get onto, to implement 20 miles an hour on residential roads. They have a bit of a caveat around kind of where

is locally supported, but I think it’s really key to remember that the average speed of an A-road in Birmingham is 16.1 miles an hour and that’s going down year on year. So this policy really doesn’t impact anybody’s overall journey time at all, as in you could have it as 16 miles an hour and it wouldn’t be impacting people’s journey time. So it was a really strange moment, I suppose, to see.

people look around even and hesitate before picking their hand up.

And also part of the ⁓ same panel discussion was the question that Babica put to John Cotton and the leader of the council and also the other party leaders around what we do to make roads safer for the city. And there was this real split that you could see where some consider it an enforcement issue.

and solely an enforcement issue and others consider it an enforcement and design matter. And of course with the safe system, enforcement is very much just ⁓ one part of it and also puts ⁓ an equal weighting on various other ⁓ aspects of using a road. And just emerging in the last couple of days, I suppose, is some local hustings where…

There’s some material discrepancies, I suppose, between party policy and local policy and even between neighbouring candidates for the same party around things like low traffic neighbourhoods, which is a really, really interesting development. Unfortunately, we’re still talking about some of these schemes four years later, but I’m sure we’ll come back to that in a bit. So now onto the manifestos. We don’t have

any local pledges from Reform or the Independent Candidate Alliance or the Workers’ Party. We have been trying to keep an eye out for them ⁓ on social media and also ⁓ on things like electionleaflets.org. But if you live in a ward where they have a candidate, you will need to contact the candidates to find out their policies and you can look up your local candidates on whocanivotefor.co.uk.

and you just pop your postcode in and it will show you exactly who’s standing in your ward.

Sorry Lucy, we’ll go in alphabetical order, but you’ve got the most detailed one to go through which is the Conservative, sorry.

Lucy Caldicott (10:26)
No, don’t apologize, that’s fine. I’ve got the bullet points here from the conservative manifesto and the relevant ones to transport. So on walking and cycling, what they’re pledging to do is to build cycle lanes away from roads and connected to canals and parks. They want to pedestrianize Station Street in the city center.

On buses, they want to trial solar panels on bus shelters, pilot shuttle buses for hospitals, On rail, quite a lot of big pledges here, so they support the Camp Hill codes, they want to build stations at Castle Vale, The Fort, Sutton Park, Warmley and Borsal Heath.

They support the remodelling of King’s Norton Station and they prioritise rail over bus rapid transit. So that’s the sprint programme and they want to accelerate the electrification of trains into Birmingham Quite eye-openingly, they want to ⁓ start a feasibility study into a large scale Birmingham underground and

On park and ride, they support new park and ride schemes and they want to ensure that park and ride schemes remain free. They want to scrap plans for parking charges at destination parks, trial solar panels on car parks and offer some free parking in local centres. On traffic reduction, they want to scrap the Kings Heath Low Traffic neighbourhood.

and keep the A38 tunnels open to private vehicles, is an interesting contradiction which I’ll come onto. On-road safety and driver behaviour, ⁓ a lot of measures on enforcement, so cracking down on unlicensed and uninsured drivers, introducing noise cameras and average speed cameras, increased the ward-based highways budget of at least £150,000 per councillor.

and introduce a measure to ban begging at junctions. introduce a lane rental scheme to reduce roadworks times,

And on school journeys, they want to integrate ⁓ school transport with a ring and ride services on a regional basis. So I think there’s, ⁓ as I say, internal contradictions in this. So they talk about wanting to reduce car use, but then they’re talking about also scrapping measures to reduce car use, like low traffic neighborhoods. And they also talk about pedestrianizing some

streets which is almost like an even more low traffic neighbourhood version of a low traffic neighbourhood. But there’s a kind of interesting dichotomy there for me which is really interesting and I’m very supportive of more pedestrian, know, more street space being devoted to people walking ⁓ is a good thing. ⁓ I think ⁓ the notion of building cycle lanes away from roads is

You know, it sounds nice, know, some sort of idea of leafy cycling and, but as cyclists know, those sort of cycle lanes away from roads aren’t necessarily safe because they’re not necessarily well lit. And so that restricts the use of them. So for example, we do have, you know, we’re fortunate to have wonderful canal tow paths around the city, but after dark, those don’t necessarily feel very safe for cycling because they’re dark and you’re also right next to a big body of water. So.

So I think that that sound, it’s something that sounds nice, but you know, maybe in practice isn’t, ⁓ isn’t the thing to be prioritizing. ⁓ The rail and underground proposals like really big ticket items there and also prioritizing tram over bus. Trams are very expensive. Trains are very expensive. And I’ve no idea how much an underground ⁓ would cost in Birmingham.

even if it was feasible and I think there’d be many studies over many decades that would show that the geology of this part of the country means that it would not be a viable plan to implement. And I think the other thing, back to my points about local councils kind of powers, that those high ticket, big ticket items would need support from…

government, you you would not be able to fund those as an authority on your own. So whilst it might sound, you know, really exciting, something to aspire to, ⁓ that, you know, would, help those. So these are, you know, not within a council term by any manner of means. think, you know, the thing that’s absent is, is vision zero. Like we, I, I do not accept that any death on our roads is, is, is inevitable. So

I would want to call for all parties to be working towards eliminating deaths on our own, danger on our own. So I see none of that within that manifesto. So I’ll let Martin come in if there are some other things that you’d like to draw out.

Martin Price (15:33)
one of the key bits is around the financing of this. So we have about 80 million a year to spread between seven authorities and I think that ⁓ black country councils might be quite annoyed if we started hogging it to build a couple of meters of underground

of course we should be aspiring to having ⁓ really great rapid transit where you turn up and you go and you don’t have to do much planning at all to get around. But we don’t have that money right now. And if we wanted to generate money, we’ve got options available to us like the workplace parking levy, which wouldn’t cover it, frankly.

but also an option which was suggested by a government body which was maybe these cities should introduce congestion charges. Now, I don’t think that the Conservatives are trying to suggest here that they would introduce a congestion charge, say, in the city centre, but it starts to become a point of you’ve done a feasibility study relatively recently which came out…

to a recommendation by this very party that they would pursue street running trams. And there was quite a least ⁓ defined vision for a network under the Street administration, the combined authority that just kind of hasn’t, it’s not around anymore, but was a starter. And you just wonder whether that might have been a more sensible approach here to say, we’ll take this further and prioritize it.

Something that also strikes me is there’s not really anything in here if you’re a bus passenger, your bus journeys won’t get better. In fact, if you look at the background against national new policy from the same party, they’re really looking at making some bus lanes, for example, not 24 hours and really condensing the amount of times that they’re bus lane or the length of time that bus lanes. So I’d be nervous if I were a bus passenger.

pedestrian measures I think was missing. If you think about pedestrianisation, okay, but does that help people get around their local area? Those hyperlocal journeys are really missing and that’s a shame because actually 25 % of car journeys in the city are for distances less than a mile and those are completely walkable, wheelable and cyclable distances as long as they feel safe and are safe and pleasant journeys to make.

And it just makes you wonder if by focusing on the big ticket ⁓ item of an underground, whether those local journeys are forgotten. And actually, once you think about it for a while, there’s always been an approach from the local Conservative Party here that’s like we’re not going to inconvenience drivers. And you can see that totally because it will build bike lanes away from

away from roads. We’ll build underground so we don’t have to touch roads. If we’re touching a road then we want it to be a tram rather than a bus lane for example. So there’s a real nervousness I think around doing anything that is a road scheme and that’s really disappointing considering the vast number of people that do get around by bus and would probably like to get around by bus much faster and by doing so you then start to be able to take some of those journeys off the road and onto buses which are high capacity.

reduce congestion and then ultimately have benefits for everybody.

So the green manifesto for walking and cycling, we’ve got protected cycle lanes on key routes, cutting waiting times at pedestrian crossings. For public transport, we’re looking at free public transport for under 18s. Also more frequent bus routes, especially on non-city centre routes between suburbs. In terms of rail, we’re looking at full funding for reopening the Sutton Park line, which kind of

cuts through between kind of Walsall down through Sutton, Coldfield and Sutton Park and kind of ends up at Castle Bromwich in the kind of northeast of the city and also reopening Castle Bromwich Station. For more frequent trains on the Cross City line and the reopened Camp Hill lines and other local rail lines we’ve got for road safety and driver behaviour.

a local road safety budget to improve safety of streets in local areas, 20 miles an hour speed limits on residential streets, improved speeding enforcement as a priority for the police, increasing enforcement of dangerous illegal and obstructive parking,

And finally, for school journeys, we’ve got more resources to make streets safer outside schools, including tackling school parking and two more things, the retention of crossing patrol wardens until at least 2030 and safe crossings within 200 meters of every school. There’s a lot of schools in Birmingham.

Something that stood out particularly was free public transport for under 18s so need to work out how we’re going to fund that regionally.

Which isn’t to say it’s impossible, but it’s a discussion that needs to be had, and it would need to be across the entire combined authority, not just for Birmingham. But there seem to be, for the most part, some improvements to every mode that you could get on, and therefore at the end of it should start to see more people using those modes and reducing congestion on the road as more people feel.

they can leave their car at home for some journeys. What did you think, Lucy?

Lucy Caldicott (21:33)
what I would see in the Greens is that you’ve got ⁓ some of the jigsaw pieces, you’ve got lots of the right ones there, but I don’t see where, you know, how that connects and how that’s heading. was, ⁓ you know, just looking here at the school journeys, we’ve got school streets being trialled and being rolled out.

and that’s actual road closures to stop through traffic past schools. We don’t have mention of that and that seems like, you know, in other cities we’ve got hundreds of school streets in Birmingham, we’ve got a handful and you know that to me would seem, you know, a very vote-worthy piece to put it to include and would go further than what they’re talking about there.

Martin Price (22:16)
Yeah, absolutely. That kind high level vision seems to be missing from ⁓ most of the kind pledges and manifestos that we’ve seen. ⁓ Shall we come on to Labour?

Lucy Caldicott (22:29)
Yeah, so we’ve asked several times to get hold of the manifesto for the Labour Party here in Birmingham, but we have seen a pledge booklet and I don’t know if that is their manifesto, but that’s what we’ve been going on. So ⁓ the areas which pertain to travel are about ⁓ tackling dangerous driving and speeding. We’ve declared a road safety emergency and we’re investing in new mobile speed cameras and red light cameras to slow traffic and everyone should feel safe.

walking Birmingham streets.

Working with Labour Mayor Richard Parker, we’re building a transport network fit for the second city. Labour is investing £2.4 billion to get the transport network that we deserve. We’ll expand the metro in East Birmingham, connecting people to the new sports quarter and unlocking £3 billion of private investment and jobs. We will invest £40 million in our streets over the next year with an extra £13 million for pothole and pavement repairs.

We will bring our bus network back into public control and cap bus fares. ⁓ So what I thought was quite interesting about this is that Birmingham City Council does have a transport plan and it does have

a road danger elimination plan and what this doesn’t do is mention implementing the plans that they’ve already got, many of which our measures have been partially implemented or you know have stalled or what have you. you know there are measures that you know could be very much supported by people like campaigners like us but we you know we want to see progress on those measures.

I think, you know, our colleagues in the Black Country and in Coventry and in Solihull would have some questions to ask about the 2.4 billion because that does cover all seven authorities of the West Midlands Combined Authority Patch. It’s not just for Birmingham. What do you reckon, Martin?

Martin Price (24:25)
I thought that it was incredibly high level, which is disappointing compared to what was published in 2022, which was very much, we’ve got Birmingham Transport Plan, we’ve just adopted it, we’re really proud of it, and this is what we’re going to do to implement it. And this almost feels a little bit passive in terms of, we’ve got this money, we’re going to do some stuff with it, we’re going to do it across the region. We’ve got the tram to East Birmingham, which is, if you think about how it’s spread across the region.

I think that other authorities would say that’s quite a lot of money that you’ve taken for yourself there, Birmingham, to improve connectivity, which is wholly necessary in that part of Birmingham, but is quite a large chunk, especially with the overrunning schemes. And also that’s really important to know as well that there’s projects in here that would have been in the, as part of this £2.4 billion that would have been put forward as part of the 22 more detailed manifesto.

I also thought that they have the plans for the next couple of years. They’ve just passed a budget with loads of budget lines to say, we’re going to do this in the next three financial years. So why can’t they bring these schemes into kind of public consciousness and celebrate them?

So yeah, I feel that this is a bit limp compared to previous manifestos, unfortunately.

Okay, we are into our last one, which is for Lib Dems. So, walking and cycling. They’re planning to deliver a network of cycling and walking routes, making best use of things like central reservations, service roads, parks, green spaces and canal towpaths. Importantly, making sure that it’s an integrated network, not a series of one-off schemes.

For buses, we’ve got incentivising a move to electric private hire cabs by allowing them to use bus lanes, working with the combined authority to prioritise improvements to buses, electrifying buses for rail, electrifying all heavy rail services into the city, prioritising the Chiltern line, working with the combined authorities to again prioritise general improvements, building ⁓ Balsall Heath.

station on Camp Hill line with a park and ride attached. For car parking, tightening the rules on pavement parking with local support and sufficient enforcement.

Introducing new resident parking schemes, considering lowering the car parking charges for smaller electric cars. Introduce solar panels at car parks, proactive enforcement over driveways,

For electric vehicles, increasing on-street charging points for local traffic measures, enabling local communities to narrow streets and install new signage. For road safety and driver behaviour, improving enforcement, expanding average speed enforcement network, introducing more moving traffic enforcement. that’s things like red light running, one-way streets, yellow box junctions and such like.

working with DVLA and police to improve enforcement of untaxed cars without MOTs and insurance, reducing speeds on residential roads to 20 miles an hour supporting more school streets. Now there’s a couple of things in here that make you raise your eyebrow a little bit. There’s a lot of really good stuff.

So we absolutely need an integrated network of walking and cycling routes. The trade off there is that we have ⁓ kind of couple of really strong corridors, which is where you would have to begin to start kind of creating branch lines off of them.

So you would end up accidentally prioritizing South Birmingham and North Birmingham and not so much your East, maybe bit of West. So that needs some really careful thought and also really wary about the use of parks, green spaces and canal towpaths. They are routes, but they’re not 24-7 routes. mean, a lot of our parks are even closed at night. Then…

Another eyebrow raising thing is around private hire cabs in bus lanes. kind of understand the incentivisation, but also aren’t bus lanes supposed to be for buses and taxis?

Lucy, what did you make of it?

Lucy Caldicott (28:57)
⁓ I suppose there are some areas that I thought sort of incentivised driving, so building Borsal Heath station with a park and ride attached, I’m not sure that we want to be driving, like I would like to see cycling encouraged to a station and then you can…

Martin Price (29:15)
It’s a really congested

area, isn’t it? Really congested area, to the point that it actively kind of congests the 50 route, which is the highest frequency route in the city. So encouraging driving there was a bit strange. Perhaps we should be looking at park and rides to collect people off the motorway, for example, and the surrounding shires, and working out a way to kind of make that as cheap.

as driving, the cost of driving to somewhere for example like Selly Oak which is actually relatively central and parking Longbridge versus Selly Oak for example there’s a massive price disparity as to whether you park at the park and ride at the closest park and ride to the motorway versus just carrying on a bit and ending up in Selly Oak and having a percentage of the rail fare and free parking.

So yeah, absolutely. Park and Ride probably has a place, but I don’t think that it’s in Bolts or Heath.

Lucy Caldicott (30:19)
No, and if you think about the pressure on the surrounding streets in that area of parking on residential streets, a really serious problem with parking congestion in residential streets in the central city. I think, so I was pleased to see introduction of residential parking schemes, because I think that you’re going to have some ability to protect the ability of residents to park and, you know, try to kind of ⁓

Martin Price (30:24)
Mmm.

Mm.

Lucy Caldicott (30:49)
even that out. So I was pleased to see that in the policy areas there. ⁓ And also, yeah, support more school streets. So as I’ve said, I think that, you know, more school streets across the city would really, you know, that it’s that school run traffic, if we can try to sort of tackle some of that, and encourage more walking and wheeling and so on to school, that would be, ⁓ you know, a really, a kind of really good policy area to be to be focusing on because you would

likely have large ⁓ local residents support for those kind of measures. ⁓ So yeah, those would be my comments there.

Martin Price (31:28)
Great. Now, before we started recording this, we kind of had a question for ourselves around kind of what our three transport priorities for a new administration would be. So I was wondering, Lucy, what are your three for the person that ends up in the council house on say the ninth or tenth of May, finds themselves in holding whatever portfolio at that point holds transport this time.

What would your three priorities be for them?

Lucy Caldicott (32:01)
Yeah, so I really would urge ⁓ whoever takes the reins to have a vision for this city. We simply cannot go on as we are with increased numbers of private car being used. Gradually we’re going to be getting closer and closer to kind of gridlock in some of this. So we’ve got to do something. And in order to kind of carry the city with us, with you, you will need a vision.

you will need to paint a picture of what the city could be like and then put the policies behind. All those different measures need to kind of act together to kind of create the kind of Birmingham that I think most of us would want to live in. I think ⁓ I would like to see far greater attention being paid to pedestrians and measures to support walking.

Far too many people drive very short distances to get around. And if we made it more, feel more safe and feel more attractive to just simply walk around our city, that would have a real kind of benefit. And as I think I’ve said several times through this podcast, real focus on schools because you’re gonna get behavior change at a younger age. You’re gonna have…

you know, each ward councillor will have a number of primary schools in their ward and working with those schools and having more school streets I think would make a massive difference to, you know, some of the congestion that we see on a daily basis.

Martin Price (33:37)
Thank you. And I found this difficult. ⁓ And I think I found it difficult because we kind of co-authored, I suppose, the 10 steps to addressing the road safety emergency, which I think that we’re going to have to get printed and ⁓ handwritten envelopes to all of the new councillors. But if I were to be pressed on three probably slightly different ways of framing what we’d put together, I think the first priority has to be sorting out the delivery of transport projects.

It’s working better for some schemes, but overall it’s still not working and needs to be untangled and kind of put back together really with this is how we do transport. when we say we’re going to build something, we’re going to do it within a certain timeframe. And this is what you can expect of us and all of that. And that needs to be our priority. Secondly, prioritizing local trips while designating as a network of circulating traffic.

So often, and my worry actually for really local schemes where it’s like, ward counsellor, here’s your 150,000 pounds, what would you like to do? Means that you get so many of those disconnected projects and schemes that aren’t really effective because they don’t come together as much. And actually they might become a bit obstructive in future if you want to do something a bit more ambitious for a neighbourhood.

We’ve mentioned that 25 % of driven trips are for under a mile. How do we improve the accessibility and safety of local areas without the default of a car? And we’ve got more and more tools coming into kind of law really. So side road crossings and measures to deal with pavement parking and changes to enforcement, which has kind of hampered people outside, councils outside of London. So I think that using that toolkit and using it effectively.

everybody’s talking about enforcement here, so get on with it and kind of scale it really, because at the moment it’s not delivering, And then I guess this is to candidates, beware of the hill of hysteria, and what I mean by that is ⁓

There’s a documented cycle that every transport project goes through, which kind of looks like everything’s OK to, my god, something’s going to change, through to changing, and kind of really noisy ⁓ from all sorts of people pro and against. And then once the scheme beds in, you then see that people can’t see kind of life without it as much, and the noise really drops off.

And to do something effective means that you will need to get through a lot of opposition and that will die down. And that also means don’t accept speed cushions just because everybody thinks they’re easy.

So that’s a lot for the manifestos and also potentially for any candidates listening to this. But thank you for listening to our teardown of the different manifestos and hustings that have happened. And I suppose the last thing to do or to say is please, please, please make sure you use your vote and you encourage the people around you to use their vote as well.

Thank you.

Lucy Caldicott (37:05)
Definitely.

Thank you.