09/03/2023
The Cliff Edges are Still Coming…
The latest of the home nations to have its bus-using citizens under a dangling sword threatening a thousand service cuts is Scotland, following a similar situation in both England and Wales. As ever there is the possibility of finding more eleventh-hour bus funding down the back of the sofa to last another three to six months at which point this time it will fall to Ms Gilruth to no doubt smile and say how generous they’ve been. But is this month by month approach any way to finance the country’s most popular form of public transport?
A fundamental question we might ask is why government should prop up the existing bus network when many other business sectors are left to adjust themselves to the post-Covid situation? Well, for one, the public transport network was particularly savaged by Government’s Covid messaging that it was ‘poisoned’ and unsafe, no doubt reflecting a Westminster view that public transport equals a crush-loaded London Tube. Then more Covid messaging frightened away one of the bus industry’s key markets – concessionary travellers, more of which anon. So the Government has some responsibility to deal with the aftermath.
The concessionary issue is difficult because the rate of recovery has varied so much in different areas. But what seems an obvious conclusion is to say that most concessionary passengers now travel only when they have to and it’s the discretionary trips – the trips for the sake of a trip out – which have gone. In other words, the ‘generated’ trips have largely evaporated. Yet there has been no DfT guidance to reflect this by raising reimbursement rates, nor much sign of this happening unilaterally. That’s if the authority in question is not still paying ‘adjusted’ pre-Covid payments, which in itself is leading to another cliff edge.
But the arrangement for BRG can’t be right in the longer term, even if its very existence acknowledges for once that all revenue spending is not necessarily bad. It’s too indefinite in what it is really paying for and it’s not a level playing field – there are already significant operators which don’t qualify for BRG as their networks have shrunk too far below the pre-Covid level. There must come a point soon where a significant number of previously commercial services is identified that stand no chance of returning to cover their costs and thus should naturally fall to the tendered network.
But therein lies the real nub of the bus issue in that fifteen years of austerity coupled with bus services being a discretionary spending category leaves few local authorities in a position to do anything about it. That’s if they can find an operator with sufficient drivers to provide a service.
For once London is not different. TfL might have its own funding ‘settlement’ - with strings - from central government but that too is time limited, its bus network has seen significant reduction in fleet size and mileage operated and it has been affected by post-Covid patronage drops, driver shortages and industrial action just the same as out in the real world.
In the UK we love doing things in silos and hence all that’s seen from bus spending cuts is a straight saving to the authority and maybe a pat on the back because concessionary spend will be down as well! But it all overlooks the wider effect. It misses the cost of NHS appointments missed due to lack of transport; someone staying on benefits because the bus to the employment opportunity no longer runs; the cost of social care provided to an older person whose health has declined and has lost their independence because the village bus is no longer there; talent wasted because a young person had no bus to 6th Form College; ageing rural populations because young people have to leave and so on. It’s all a greater cost to UK PLC.
In the midst of all of this, we have climate issues and the distant promise of net zero. As modal split stands, using 2021 NTS Data, switching 1% of car trips to bus would increase the number of bus trips by 11½%. This has to be an aim if we’re serious about tackling traffic congestion and reducing emissions. Better that than an unreliable drip feed of recovery funding.
There are those who say lazily that it’s all the fault of privatisation and some magic wand of public control and/or ownership would solve everything. It wouldn’t (and didn’t) so long as the gap between income and cost persists. Some form of external funding needs to go in there somewhere. Money is the root of all evil, so they say.
The glimmer of hope lies in politics. If buses are an issue just in, say, Cumbria, nobody else is particularly interested, even if they are an issue in all Metropolitan areas it can be glossed over, but when threats to the bus network, real or perceived, start to fill MPs’ inboxes and postbags stretching from Copeland to Canterbury, from Waveney to Wallasey and bus questions are asked in ‘The House’ then perhaps the day of the transport underdog has come and buses will get the attention they deserve. Maybe the cliffs will at least be pushed past the next General Election.
