In the king’s speech to parliament, a change in how public transport might be operated in the future was promised. There will be a better buses bill, but what will that entail?
The case for franchising
I suggest that we look at what the Labour Party is saying about taking back control of local bus services. Labour is promoting a franchise bus operation which, in effect, contracts bus companies to run buses according to the specified levels set out by the franchising authority which will be the local government. Bus companies will have to bid for routes in the same way the rail companies had to bid to run rail services.
Bus franchising has not always worked perfectly for Transport for London (TfL) but it can show long-term verifiable success compared to commercial companies running monopolies along defined routes or areas, as shown here:
Compared to the free market alternative which has operated since the passing of the 1985 Transport Act that deregulated bus operations, it would appear the case for franchising is rock solid, but London is a special case.
London has recourse to superior funding and an organisational structure that even large municipalities or metropolitan regions might find hard to match. So how will non-metropolitan areas like Kent cope?
Financial struggles
London started from a completely different base. The predecessor to TfL was London Transport; a unified, vertically integrated organisation. Elsewhere, we have territorial monopolies who, as can be seen, have presided over a steep decline in their networks.
The Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT) urges caution on reregulation plans. The CPT discusses an alternative based on the Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP). One argument against franchising is that it will be more expensive for taxpayers and that local authorities are inefficient and cannot run a bus network effectively. Manchester’s Bee Line faced several lawsuits from bus operators before it started, which added additional costs and delays. The proposed new statute is meant to stop any repeat of this activity elsewhere.
Many local authorities struggle with finance but this has more to do with 14 years of austerity than sheer incompetence. Bus companies also have to withdraw for financial reasons, such as when the Transpora Group pulled out of several routes in Bristol and Gloucestershire on 17 July 2024.
However, some of the larger local authorities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow have been very efficient multimodal operators of trams and buses in the past. We would not have trams in England had it not been for Blackpool’s steadfast operation of trams; when trams were considered outdated perhaps the bus companies protested too much.
What about the Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP)?
The Bus Service Improvement Plan was an invention of Boris Johnson’s government in 2021 which no doubt became alarmed at the catastrophic decline in the amount of passengers during the pandemic. Kent County Council (KCC) has published a very useful report that details the doleful history of this stratagem.
As part of its national bus strategy, central government tasked local authorities to produce a Bus Service Improvement Plan. This incorporated a linked enhanced partnership with bus operators in March 2021, with a deadline of submitting it to the government by October 2021. Panic ensued as hardly any of the local authority public transport units were capable of producing a coherent strategy.
Predictably, many local authorities used consultants like Systra Group, who produced identikit plans for each council. These were often loaded with much car-centric highways engineering and very little about increasing services and improved passenger facilities.
The government was proposing to spend £3bn on the BSIP scheme, but by October 2021 this had fallen to £1.2bn. KCC asked for £213mn to complete its BSIP, and the current BSIP final allocations for KCC have delivered (but not confirmed) only £35mn. It has, at best, received under 17% of the figure that its own BSIP considered necessary. We will return to Kent shortly.
The introduction of electric buses
There have been successes with the BSIP with the industry keen to recommend them, such as in Leicester, but it has six bus operators who have to cooperate, which is unusual. It has also received additional funding for electric buses and has achieved some extra local funding
Other cities like York have adopted electric vehicles or, like Brighton, have phased out or converted older specification diesel buses. However, many other areas have continued the decline in bus networks even with BSIPs in operation. I am concerned that some councils would be comfortable if the bus disappeared altogether.
Kent has no electric transport vehicles, but it is spending large sums of money on concrete and tarmac for two fast bus services in Dover and North Kent called Fastrack. This aims to produce a fast service partially on reserved roadways using electric vehicles to remove ageing diesel buses, but they won’t. The Dover scheme is late, it is having to alter its route due to the Dover Traffic Assessment Project (TAP) congestion and will start with diesel buses, not electric vehicles.
In North Kent, a new operator Go-Ahead is going to operate tram-type electric buses, but it, too, is not yet operating EVs. Everywhere else in Kent, the two main bus companies, Stagecoach and Arriva continue to use ageing diesel buses and far from expanding the bus network, it has retreated in almost every district where KCC robs the BSIP fund to stave off further bus cuts which affects the school runs.
Is there an alternative to either scheme?
If Kent is any indication, much of non-metropolitan England remains firmly car-centric in its policies and planning. The local leadership will not adopt bus franchising because they view it as ‘socialist’ and not ‘business friendly’. Forcing them to adopt bus franchising either by appointing shire mayors or by statutory obligation will not work either.
An alternative is to adopt regional transport bodies, such as Transport for the South East (TFSE), to administer public transport and highways, including those run by National Highways, so that local roads and motorways would receive fair funding and connectivity to allow buses to operate efficiently.
TFSE could adopt franchising, but perhaps the government could also form a ‘Great British Bus Company’ to bridge the gap where the market fails to operate efficiently.
The functions of the Great British Bus Company
The Great British Bus Company would have several functions:
- As an investment vehicle which, although like any business would have a ranking list for new projects and investments, would not have to waste resources submitting schemes competitively to outside decision-makers.
- Research, which would cooperate with academia and industry to design vehicles that can cope with future passenger requirements rather than continue to design vehicles that focus only on cost and operating efficiency. For instance, how do disabled people manoeuvre the current models of mobility scooter within the confines of our buses? How do we remove cash transactions and yet allow those without the technology to travel by bus? How do we encourage car users to switch modes of transport?
- A unit to investigate and finance better ways of running rural bus services, which are disappearing fast, leaving isolated communities with no transport links.
- Advising urban planners on improving bus service reliability and as a statutory consultant on all urban planning proposals so that car-centred projects do not get approval in future. Developers and town planners would have to raise their game in the future and stop creating urban sprawls like Westwood Cross in Thanet.
- Promote passenger-first concepts with better information systems, bus shelters and a nationwide advertising budget to promote bus services in the same way as the rail industry. Local authorities would be expected to cooperate and show results annually; no more derelict bus shelters and outdated paper timetables.
- As an operator of last resort, if necessary, in areas where either the operators or the local authorities fail to deliver a comprehensive, reliable and efficient bus service.
But what about the passenger you may ask?
We have seen how rail passengers can be extremely vocal when rail fails, such as when a group of MPs travelling to parliament held the Avanti boss to account for poor service but I have yet to see the CEOs of Arriva, Stagecoach or First Bus summoned before the Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, even if she is ‘passenger in chief’.
The voice of the bus passenger is muted, so one reform that could be undertaken is to appoint a bus users council in every local authority or regional transport area, with resources to comment and give feedback on how Better Bus Britain is working. However, their membership must not be the usual squad of the great and the good; they should be bus users and represent diversity across all communities, not just middle-class professionals.
It is early days, but if the transport secretary is serious about public transport and buses, then hopefully she will listen, not just to the lobbying from industry and to some in local government, but to bus passengers who have suffered decades of poor treatment, arbitrary timetable changes, cuts in services, and poor customer service.
