The member of the Welsh parliament who represents Chirk and the north Shropshire border is stepping away from being a minister.
www.shropshirestar.com
Ken Skates has stepped down from his role as as minister of economy, transport and North Wales saying that "Clwyd South has always remained my number one priority, and my decision will enable me to spend more time in the constituency, focusing on local matters,””.
Unfortunately, with this explanation, Ken Skates is articulating what he has been inappropriately doing during his 5 years as Transport Minister in providing bus services for the benefit of his South Clwyd constituents. Hopefully we will now receive from the Welsh Government a true and correct picture of the annual T2/T3 passenger figures , a true analysis of the Free Weekend Travel scheme (which has been spectacularly unsuccessful) and a full review of the Trawscymru network. The WG should never again indulge in the fabrication of Trawscymru T2/T3 passenger figures which they carried out in June 2019. The WG should also not indulge in the fabrication of a “High-Level” review of a Trawscymru Wrexham to Aberystwyth service, which they also carried out in the same month of June 2019 The fabricated “”High-Level”” review made no mention of a Trawscymru route between Wrexham and Aberystwyth which had been ignored for the second time. Trawscymru services such as the T10 (Oswestry to Bangor via Corwen) and T15 (Chester to Corwen) both linking with the T3 at a hub at the small town of Corwen in South Clwyd, (population 2325), should not be imposed on the public without an appropriate thorough evaluation and consultation by stakehoders,
Trawscymru is supposedly a long distance network linking strategic locations in Wales. The idea that a T3 service between Wrexham and a non strategic location of Barmouth (population 2,552) should take precedence over a truly strategic route (T2/T1 Bangor to Carmarthen via Aberystwyth) is a joke. There is now no connectivity between T2 and T1 services in Aberystwyth on the original Trawscambria route which has no other form of public transport since the axeing of the Carmarthen to Aberystwyth railway in 1965. The idea that a T2 service between Bangor and Aberystwyth should be delayed for 15 minutes in Dolgellau to wait for a late arriving double decker T3 service from Wrexham is a joke. The joke is even funnier when the late arriving T3 double decker service carries only a handful of passengers none of whom wish to transfer to the T2 service which have been held up unnecessarily for 15 minutes. The T2 should be a through service in Dolgellau with no wait for T3 services from Wrexham and the 15 minute connectivity should be transferred to the connection between the T2/T1 services in Aberystwyth.
The reason the T2 services have to be held in Dolgellau for 15 minutes for late arriving T3 services from Wrexham is because between Corwen and Bala the T3 double deckers divert for 14 miles along the B4401 through the Clwyd South constituency of Ken Skates. These services frequently pick up and drop off no passengers along the B4401. In 2019, after 2 years of lieing by WG officials saying they deleted all bus performance monitoring data , the WG were finally forced by a High Court Tribunal to release the bus performance monitoring information, which showed that the T3 service was the only Trawscymru service to not meet the Traffic Commissioners Punctuality standard. The High Court Tribunal found against the WG and asked them to publish the bus performance monitoring information on a regular basis as part of the WG publication scheme. To date the WG have not complied with the High Court request.
The Transport portfolio has now been passed to a newly created Climate Change Ministry which has a wide brief covering environment, energy, housing, planning and transport. It remains to be seen whether the new Minister will right the wrongs left by Ken Skates.