Working in partnership

Working co-operatively to meet social, economic and environmental objectives is at the heart of CT's partnership working.

This section illustrates such partnership approaches.

CT operators working together

North Manchester Local Link (serving Moston, Charlestown, Harpurhey, Collyhurst, Crumpsall and Middleton) is run by four operating partners:

It is funded by Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority.

This Demand Responsive Transport service provides accessible, on demand transport, seven days a week, to residents of the defined area. There are no age restrictions.

Passengers can book from one week to one hour in advance by making a local rate call to a central call centre. The call centre then allocates trips to operators according to vehicle availability.

Popular destinations include shopping, hospital visits and connections to to main bus and Metrolink services. The service is also used by people travelling to work.

Research undertaken to review this service shows that the service has proved extremely popular with passengers. This is due in large part to the community-focused ethos of the operators, who provide a personalised, friendly and flexible service to passengers. It has also been judged a great success by the four partners.

Download a copy of the research.

Working with other partners

Rochdale Flexible Transport Group brings together all partners involved in providing social needs transport, and aims to deliver a "joined up" approach to provision.

Added value

It is often argued that investing resources in community transport produces added value, which would not result from a comparative investment in commercial delivery options.

The logic behind this is that any surplus generated by a CT operator undertaking, for example, a contract, will be ploughed back into the organisation, not distributed to shareholders. This will enable the operator to concentrate on making its community-based services as affordable as possible.

Research undertaken in Greater Manchester demonstrated that operating partners were able to use vehicle resources to provide a range of community benefit and socially-needed transport outside DRT service operating times.

The provision of these vehicle resources also enabled some operators to enhance employment opportunities.

CT and health services

Transport is an integral, but often unrecognised, component of delivery of health services. Either the service comes to the patient (expensive and resource-intensive so usually reserved for emergency or severe illness) or the patient travels to the service.

In the latter case, given the ongoing reconfiguration of primary care and the higher probability of impairment (and therefore difficulty in accessing transport) amongst patients, getting to and from health services can present problems. And if the patient can’t get to the service, this can impact both on costs for the service and the nation’s health.