Last week, Centre for Cities hosted an event to discuss the next steps for improving the quality of bus services and their contribution to the economy, supported by Abellio.
It’s an important time for buses, hit hard by Covid-19, just as plans were under way for a new national strategy and Greater Manchester was on the point of making a decision on reform.
The discussion touched on three immediate problems for better buses in England:
Who is writing the National Bus Strategy?
The National Bus Strategy (NBS) is due ‘soon’. What it says – and how useful it is – depends on which bit of government leads on it.
Panellists at our event were concerned that if it ends up as a Department for Transport (DfT) document, it is likely to be a damp squib. If Downing Street takes ownership, the Prime Minister will want buses to be a signature policy – and they have the potential more than any other transport policy to be felt by the next election – to deliver on levelling up bus services by levelling up to the level of London. As a former Mayor of London, the Prime Minister is uniquely placed to understand the practical benefits of hands on control of buses.
The DfT have shown time and again that buses are viewed as the poor cousin of rail and road projects. These get huge multi-year budgets: the £26 billion Road Investment Strategy despite the spectacular conflict with Net Zero and air quality aims, and instant and intense rail support at times of crisis.
The Transport Secretary felt no compunction in moving to a management contract on rails – effectively the franchise system. But as funding for the rail sector rockets too, councils are not given the same power to ensure the best use of their money.
Who gets to decide what local bus services should look like?
Panellists at the event agreed that the National Bus Strategy should take a clear position on franchising, which is the best option in most instances for an efficient, integrated and accountable public service.
If there are to be options, franchising should be treated as the default option for how places run their bus services. Cities can opt-out of franchising if they please, but opting in should the norm, and the funding and regulatory barriers to getting to a franchised system removed.
At the moment, nearly four years after the first metro mayor was elected, other big cities are still waiting for Greater Manchester, which has invested tens of millions of pounds looking into undoing the swipe of a pen in 1986, to make up ground that London never lost.
Running bus services is a local service like collecting the bins. The benefits of public control over bus services, including the improvements and savings made in Jersey, are clear. A government committed to levelling up should not take a disinterested view in places overcoming the legal and administrative obstacle course uniquely set over this mundane public service. It should actively provide the money, support and encouragement to get gold-standard, London-style bus systems up and down the country before 2024. That should be the centre-piece of the NBS.
Who pays?
Covid has pushed down ridership, although much less than rail and tram systems. This is likely to take years to recover. Panellists agreed that the public funding that has filled that gap will need to continue, otherwise services will be cut, and the spiral of decline of bus services will accelerate.
The current way of distributing huge sums of public subsidy is deeply inefficient – councils paying operators for non-existent concessionary fares and journeys not being made, rather than purchasing networks that cities need to keep nurses and shop workers getting to work, and soon pupils getting to school. The current system is largely designed to prop up bus operators rather than fund critical bus services as effectively as possible.
Panellists said that the government should commit to devolve the Bus Service Operators Grant – an amount based on mileage paid directly to operators from government – to local transport bodies, and give them control over subsidy. When the Chancellor is thinking about how to save every penny, stopping the Department for Transport from getting in the way of cost-saving efforts by city authorities trying to level up their bus services is the lowest hanging fruit available. It would also clearly be a good thing for bus operators over the medium term.
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