Heather burning, Amey contract and decarbonising buses and trains – Sheffield Green Party leader answers your questions

Emily G asked: “What three things are top of your wish list for improving active travel?”

Coun Johnson said: “Segregated cycle ways, continuous pavements and a more pleasant environment – those are the three things really. They are all really good things and the more of that we can have the nicer a city it will be to walk about in.”

Emily G asked: “Will you introduce a workplace parking levy, and if so when?”

Coun Johnson said: “We have been supporting a workplace parking levy for a number of years. It’s in our budget amendment so hopefully people will go for that and we can start some more work on it.

“It’s not been popular with the other parties, it’s astonishing really that people would rather cut social care than put up parking fees...The problem is it's a democracy, I’m not a dictator – I don’t have control over budgets or all decisions. It’s very much about trying to persuade other people and to date people have not been persuaded.”

Emily G asked: “How quickly will you decarbonise transport in Sheffield? When will trains and buses here stop burning diesel?”

Coun Johnson said: “Buses are going to be diesel buses for the foreseeable future but with the Clean Air Zone coming in part of that is about unlocking grants to retrofit the remainder of the Sheffield bus fleet to make them to Euro 6 equivalent standards which are much cleaner than the old dirty buses you occasionally see now which have been making the city dirty for many years.

“What we are not seeing is a lot of electric buses. In other parts of the country the companies do provide those. It is for the bus operators that provide the buses, it’s not a council function and the council isn’t even the transport authority – that’s the city region.

“In other parts of the country the bus companies are providing electric buses and they are in areas where there is much more political drive to see improvements in public transport and I’ve been very critical of South Yorkshire being not very ambitious about improving public transport.

“Personally, I’ve been meeting with people from First and Stagecoach and I think they do get the idea but they are grappling with commercial realities of how they run profit-making businesses. The bus companies are not a public service, they are contracted to run a public service but that’s a different thing.

“On trains, we have certainly supported the electrification of the mainline to London and also up to Leeds and ideally all the other lines coming out of Sheffield. Again, it’s something completely outside of the council’s control but we would certainly like to see much cleaner railways there.”

Cycling In A Skirt on Twitter asked: “What happened to the £2 billion contract to fix Sheffield’s roads?”

Coun Johnson said: “Basically, it’s £2 billion which has largely gone, we are 10 years into that 25 year contract which covered the first few years when they were meant to be repairing all the roads in Sheffield which still hasn’t happened – there are still some roads that are in an incredibly bad condition. The suspicion is they simply weren’t resurfaced because there were tree campaigners living around them.

“There has been lots of resurfacing but it is a missed opportunity because it has simply been replacing the inadequate structure that was there designed in the 1960s and hasn’t been doing anything to invest the money wisely in the 2020s. So it’s a very backwards-looking contract and ultimately it’s £2 billion which has mostly come from Sheffield taxpayers.

“The budget has been going up each year, we will be paying more for the highways contract this year than we did last year and that has been going on for 10 years at a time when all other budgets have been cut so it’s been very costly not just in financial terms but also on Sheffield Council’s budget.”

MORE POLITICS: Climate crisis, public transport and active travel – Sheffield Green Party leader answers your questions

Chris Charlesworth asked: “When will there be a ban on burning heather on the moors around Sheffield and Barnsley?”

Coun Johnson said: “A lot of the problem is enforcement also that it doesn’t seem to be always illegal to burn heather despite everything. Some of the moorland is controlled by the council directly as landowner so we ensure there isn’t any heather burning but most of it is private estates for shooting and keeping grouse on and they burn the heather for the grouse farming industry.

“It proves difficult to enforce because it’s not always clear where it is illegal but where it is it falls under the jurisdiction of Natural England and then the police to some extent as a crime.

“As always it seems to be the problems of resources needed to take hold and act on that and the police has been cut back a lot since 2010, people voted for a reduction in public services and that is what they got.

“Ideally, if we had more resources in the council we would be looking to get officers spending time trying to talk to the land owners there and see what their take on the issue is but also we don’t have widespread powers to take on moorland burning. So it’s more a case of persuasion.

“What I ask people to do if they see burning on the moors is to report it to Natural England.”