What a great meeting!!

Hello Blogwatchers!!

First of all sorry for taking so long to get back to you with this blog, we are sure that you have been itching to find out how our meeting went.

Well, well, well (a little more suspense won’t hurt!) It was incredible! Really really incredible! We had the pleasure of meeting four great people, who have great confidence in Hereford and what it can achieve and who seem to think that our idea can work. What’s more not only do they want to be part of it but they want to help us, which is great.

The four people we met with were, Amanda Barton who is the team leader of Integrated Transport, Ben Boswell who works with Amanda and is responsible for plenty of great things to do with the leasing of bikes. Clive Hall (serious but positive!) who is responsible for highways and transportation in the central area and finally but by no means least Cynthia Spaull who is the city centre manager.

We got a photo but unfortunately it was at the end of the meeting, after Clive and Cynthia had left, Dave Tristram filled in (he helps people with money issues) and his crazy hair was just what we needed!

In the meeting we discussed lots of things, we started off with a snappy presentation about us and what we are planning. Then we had a chat about all the things Ben and I and the team from the council wanted to know about the project. We covered most of the things and also loads of brand new topics which will enable us to provide a much more versatile service.

Some of the major points that the council wished to raise were whether we could operate using the existing infrastructure (which we can ) and what help would we need (things like storage, licensing and loads of other practicalities about our professionalism!) All in all it was great and we were able to discuss opportunities for assisting with the Local Transport Plan,
potential cargo services, advertising the council in a positive light and also promoting Hereford on behalf of the tourism office. We also chatted about assisting Ben Boswell with his leasing schemes and inter office travel plans by having the Pedicabs run a pick up and drop of service bookable by council employees.

All in all it was fantastic! Really great, the council not only agreed to help us, but also agreed to believe in us, back us and show us that they care about the policies we have.
We asked everybody to give us some feedback about the idea and they all said it was excellent. It was really nice to hear that they thought that.

We also met two lovely ladies at the reception!
We have things to do, registration, licensing and getting councillors on board and have already got a date for the next meeting! Amanda emailed us this morning -

‘Ben and Will
Good to meet up last week.

I will circulate your presentation to relevant colleagues.

Re Councilor support - I would suggest writing to both the Cabinet Member for Highways and Transportation (Cll Brian Wilcox) and the Chief Executive of the Council (Neil Pringle), both at the Brockington Offices; requesting support from the Council - you might want to mention
we had a meeting last week.
Hope this helps, hope licensing get back to you soon too.

Re a second meeting we can do 3pm on 20th December - can you? I was thinking of inviting Trish Marsh (Sustainability Manager - responsible for ISO 14001), Janette Barratt (Sustainable Travel Officer - who coordinates grants for companies setting up a Travel Plan), JaneLewis/Mark Jones (Tourism), could you invite licensing if appropriate.

Regards
Amanda’

Great isn’t it, were all doing our bits, and we are all going to be able to do this. So a big thank you to all of you who are supporting us, and we hope that very soon we’ll have Pedicabs on the streets of Hereford!

We’ll be in touch with an update very soon, this is an exciting time for us and we are glad you are part of it.
Ben and Will