Darren Johnson comments on the Mayor’s “mismanagement” of the bike hire scheme as costs of running the scheme to the TfL almost double.
Image courtesy of Stephen Craven.
Darren Johnson AM has reacted to the announcement yesterday evening by Barclays that the bank will not be renewing its sponsorship deal for London’s cycle hire scheme. In February 2013, the Mayor assured the public that TfL would receive £50m from Barclays over eight years and would continue to operate the contract as agreed.
Darren has uncovered figures within TfL’s latest draft business plan which show the cost to TfL of running the scheme over the next ten years has increased from £75million to £144million. This new figure represents approximately a seventh of TfL’s total cycling budget for the next ten years.
On Monday, the Mayor announced that only 33 of his top 100 priority junctions are going to be made safer using money from the Better Junctions program, during the next ten years.
Darren Johnson AM commented: “The Mayor originally said the bike hire scheme was going to pay for itself. But due to his mismanagement and this poor sponsorship deal it is going to soak up a lot of the funding needed to create safer junctions and quality cycle routes.
“Earlier this year, the Mayor told me publicly that the £50m from Barclays was secure, which means that he either he was misleading us or he simply didn’t know. Barclays have had an amazing amount of publicity on the cheap.”