Social exclusion resulting from not having access to public transport has fallen off Whitehall’s radar, according to a former Labour policy advisor.
Tony Graying, associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, said last week that not enough has been done since the Social Exclusion Unit’s report on transport to improve access to jobs and facilities.
Speaking at a conference in Leeds, Grayling said: ‘Social exclusion was scarcely mentioned in the transport white paper 2004, while the transport innovation fund is to be spent on congestion reduction and productivity.’
But the Disabled Rights Commission chair Bert Massie sounded a more positive note. London’s buses were now 100% accessible to the disabled – something Massie had been told 20 years ago would never happen – and four tenths of buses elsewhere are also accessible.