Just a thought.

Richard Wyatt

While we are talking about ways to improve Bath for the future – wouldn’t this be a good time to suggest our two universities merge into one – making enormous savings on management at a time when they are taking a hit from a loss of overseas students? It’s not that big a city!

Let’s also stop those continually circulating buses and give those in higher education a proper time-table to work from to help teach them to be punctual.

Oh and while so many residential properties are being offered for hire to celebratory groups  – let’s get some regulation in for party houses and make them pay tax.

Just saying……..

Published by Richard Wyatt

Freelance Journalist, broadcaster, columnist and local historian. Director of Bath Newseum. Married and lives in Bath. Interested in local history, architecture and visual display in museums and urban spaces.

7 Comments

  1. University of Bath buses … Spot on; They’ve been running through the town with very few passengers – if any – ‘every few minutes’ between 10am and 5pm for years. I’ve given up raising this with the university, First Bus and the council. None of these bodies have been interested.

  3. Oh Richard…..what hot potato you have just served up! In the 1980s Bath Spa University (as it now is) had to fight for its life against the thread of the kind of merger and loss of independence and status that the Min and RUH have gone through. Indeed, it makes perfect sense in many ways but dangers lurk beneath the surface. Were I now Minister for Higher Education (do we even have such a post?) I would consider your suggestion very, very carefully. However, I would set in place guarantees that the balance of arts, humanities, sciences and sports had to maintained by law (of some kind). Indeed, since Bath University is not a full university in any sense, having been moved and ennobled from Bristol College of Advanced Technology to the Bath site in the 80s. Performing Arts and Creative studies do not exist on the campus up the hill nor do most humanities…..Education has a small presence. The risk is that the Newton Park campus would be taken over and used for other purposes by a university that has never expanded across all studies and who, as far as I know, has shown no desire to do so and justify its name of university any more than Bath Spa has.

  5. Party house and airB&B should have to apply for planning permission for change of use from residential to commercial, they then should have to abide by commercial property letting rules and pay tax on the income.

  6. Total logic ! The present system is self-indulgent, overly expensive, and inefficient. This would be a suitable moment to retrench.

    Tony Howell, Lansdown.

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