Birmingham City Council has guaranteed there will be no school crossing patrol job losses next year after launching the School Crossing Safety Trust. And council leader, Cllr John Clancy, is continuing talks with businesses and other potential partners to fund the service in future years. Cuts to the service were among budget proposals published in December but Cllr Clancy stressed his preferred option was to launch a trust to fund crossing patrols in future years.
The city council leader said: “We made it clear during a very tough budget process that we were looking for a way of funding school crossing patrols and enhancing school crossing safety.
“We were in a situation where we probably had to consider losing some school crossing patrols in terms of funding unless we decided to come up with another way of doing things.
“So we’ve made some recalculations after a very late settlement from Government and we’ve decided that there will be no redundancies this year in this service.
“But we can’t keep going through this every year so we’re going to continue to develop the Trust model. We need to reduce the costs to the Council and to that end I’ve already had encouraging talks with potential partners and will continue to work on this important area.”
