Jools Townsend.

Q147 The Chair: Welcome back to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s public evidence session in our inquiry into public transport in towns and cities. We are considering future trends in public transport use and innovation, and indeed how it serves users, which is important for this session. We will make recommendations to the Government later this year.

Our witness today is Jools Townsend, who is chief executive of the Community Rail Network, which we are very interested in hearing some more about. Perhaps I could ask you to tell us a little bit about the network, how big it is, who is involved and what its purpose is. We would then like to move on quickly and talk about the public transport usage pattern, particularly post Covid. You might want to say a little bit about the network.

Jools Townsend: Thanks for having me today. I am really pleased to be telling you a bit more about community rail. We are a national umbrella body, working across Britain to support community-based groups, voluntary groups and community-based partnerships that are engaging with their local railways and stations, involving local people with rail and promoting, encouraging and supporting rail use.

Across Britain now, the movement is continuing to grow, I am pleased to say. We have more than 1,200 station friends groups. These are small voluntary groups carrying out localised work around stations, such as community gardening, community events, arts projects, working with local schools, et cetera. Then we have 76 community rail partnerships, which are small, community-based organisations, usually with one or two staff members, working closely with rail industry partners.

It is very much a grass-roots movement, carrying out all sorts of different activities according to different local needs and priorities, but working closely with the rail industry. It is quite unique, we would say, in being a well-established, well-connected grass-roots movement working with and promoting and enhancing public transport.

The Chair: Are you a charity?

Jools Townsend: We are a not-for-profit organisation.

The Chair: Given your reach across different parts of the country, can you say anything about the pattern of public transport usage that you are seeing, particularly after Covid? What is coming back and what is going to be a permanent shift?

Jools Townsend: It is perhaps worth mentioning that, historically, community rail has been quite concentrated in more rural areas. It came from a backdrop, going back 25 years or so, of communities being concerned that rural railway lines might face further closures and that they were not being used well enough. More and more community rail is operating in more urban areas and sometimes now in some very built-up environments, and, of course, promoting connections between rural and urban locations.

On the impact that the pandemic has had, community rail activity has been affected, like all community-based activities. Community rail has kept going, kept building positivity about the local railways and redoubled efforts, particularly in recent months, in the light of the impact that the pandemic has had on rail use.

We have seen a huge drop-off in rail use through the various lockdown periods. Rail passenger numbers were starting to bounce back, particularly in the leisure and tourism market. We were starting to near the 90% mark in terms of rail use getting closer to pre-Covid levels, but certainly bouncing back more strongly in leisure and tourism use, rather than commuting. There has certainly been attention to that within community rail, working with our rail industry partners to think about how we can encourage more people to use the railways as a form of sustainable tourism and leisure travel.

Q148 Lord Stunell: Could you say something about how the community rail movement actually makes any changes? What kind of impact does it really have on the operators and, for that matter, the public and communities they serve?

Jools Townsend: We have a really strong track record in community rail of impacting on rail patronage. That is well demonstrated in passenger numbers over many years. In the 10 years up to 2018, so pre-pandemic, we saw stronger passenger growth on lines with community rail partnerships compared with those without. That is quite well established. We also have a range of qualitative evidence, as you can imagine—case studies and interview evidence—showing the very real and important effect that community rail can and does have on people’s lives, enabling more people to use the railways and access new and different opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach, enhancing well-being and a sense of community and connectedness.

Community rail delivers those sorts of impacts in different ways. It is perhaps worth thinking about the two sides of community rail activity. First, there is working to shine a light on local needs and opportunities, helping the rail industry to work collaboratively with local authorities, local community groups, educators and businesses, and joining up and synergising local objectives and strategies, feeding into the rail industry on what people think about the railway, what the barriers are to rail use and how those can be overcome collaboratively.

There is another side to community rail. Perhaps this is a false line that I am drawing, because these two sides work in synergy. There is that feeding into industry partners on local needs and opportunities, and then there is the direct engagement, working closely with people within the local community—often marginalised groups, groups that face mobility barriers, but also children, young people and older groups—to help them feel able to use the railway and benefit from it to build confidence, skills and awareness. That is so often greatly lacking among large parts of the population.

An often overlooked, very significant barrier to people using public transport is lack of familiarity among large parts of the population. We often forget that many people very rarely get on a train. A lot of children and young people who our members work with have never been on a train and find it quite a daunting prospect. It is about getting people to try out the train, understanding how to buy a ticket, and bringing people together through events, “try the train” trips, social activities and outings that include using the train. These are often referred to as softer measures, but they are incredibly important from our evidence and experience.

We are thinking a lot about how we rebuild confidence post pandemic, and about the impact that Covid has had on people’s confidence using public transport, but actually this goes back long before the pandemic. There are lots of people with very limited mobility horizons who are not travelling far afield for a variety of reasons due to their personal circumstances, but also a lot of people living very car-dependent lifestyles, who are not giving a second thought to using public transport. There are a lot of children and young people growing up in car-dependent households who are not developing those skills, that awareness and that kind of thinking that public transport is a natural way to get around.

Lord Stunell: You mentioned that there is evidence that patronage increases where there are community rail partnerships or whatever. Is that a figure or a number that you could supply to the committee separately so that we could see it?

Jools Townsend: Yes, absolutely. We have a report on the value of community rail with statistical information and qualitative evidence on the impact that community rail delivers in different ways, contributing to enhanced patronage [1]. It also contributes to social inclusion and a more inclusive and accessible railway [2], impacting on people’s lives and their life opportunities, and contributing to sustainable development and sustainable mobility [3].

The Chair: That would be very helpful. Can you give us an idea of scale? You said that patronage increased. Has it increased by 2% or 20%?

Jools Townsend: In the 10 years to 2018, on lines with community rail partnerships there was a 42% increase in patronage compared with 35% overall [4]. It is a statistically significant difference. We are continually building the evidence base and there is more work to be done to understand exactly what interventions are most effective and bearing the greatest results.

Q149 The Chair: What can be done to ensure that passengers are at the centre of decision-making about public transport at national and local level? You are mentioned in the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail because of your role, which you just described in graphic terms, in terms of volume. We wondered whether more could be done at the centre to promote the kind of activity that you have described, either nationally or with local leadership.

Jools Townsend: In answering your question on how we put passengers at the centre of public transport, I am focusing more on the rail side. I would emphasise, though, that community rail increasingly is working across modes and looking to join rail up better with buses, walking and cycling, and promoting sustainable end-to-end journeys.

We have a very close working relationship with the rail industry. From that, a lot of progress has been made to improve thinking around putting passengers at the centre of the railways. That is emphasised very strongly in the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.

Our challenge is that we should be putting not just passengers but communities as a whole at the centre. We should be thinking about non-passengers—people who may use rail and public transport in the future but do not at the moment—and the need for a modal shift and increasing the modal share of public transport to decarbonise and create a more sustainable, equitable system of mobility. It is incredibly important that we do not forget those people.

As I have already alluded to, there are many people who are not using public transport at the moment but who may do given better engagement, if their needs were better met and if we were to break down barriers that may be standing in the way of them using public transport or using it more. That is certainly something we emphasised through feeding into the Williams review. The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, as well as putting passengers as the centre, acknowledges the need for the railways to be more responsive and attentive to communities. We are really supportive of that. As I have described, that is part of what we do within community rail.

There is a long way to go however. I am chief executive of the Community Rail Network, but I am also a local volunteer and a parish councillor working to champion sustainable travel at a very local level within my semi-rural and very car-dependent community in West Yorkshire. I have local experience of championing sustainable travel at a time when bus companies were carrying out a major overhaul of their timetables without any local consultation or communication, taking the very groups and local councils that sought to champion public transport entirely by surprise with a completely reformed timetable. From that local experience, there is some way to go before we have those really strong relationships, effective dialogue and mechanisms in place for communities to continually feed in their views and ideas.

There is also a lot of opportunity at the moment, with rising awareness about the climate emergency, and increased attention to community and our localities as a result of the pandemic. There is a real opportunity to strengthen those local relationships and get the transport sector to work in synergy with those bottom-up initiatives that are springing up across so many of our communities, with individuals and groups wanting to create more sustainable local places.

The Chair: Can you talk a little bit more about how the network gets feedback? Does it hold elections? Does it have public meetings? Can you give us a little feel for that and, indeed, where you have had successes? You mentioned the challenge on the bus timetables, but it would be good to know what kinds of positive results individual networks have had.

Jools Townsend: We are a network of grass-roots organisations, so we do not dare to tell our members what to do! We are here to support and empower our members around Britain, and for them to engage and empower their local communities. Our members are gathering inputs and feeding them through at a local level in a variety of different ways.

To give you a few examples, sometimes it happens at a bigger scale, looking at more strategic improvements. Community Rail Lancashire—one of our members—built over a number of years a social case for a major infrastructure project, the Todmorden curve, to shorten journey times between various towns in Lancashire into Manchester. Obviously it is a major infrastructure project and not delivered directly by community rail, but community rail played that role through local engagement to really understand the difference that that change would make to local people and their lives and fed that into the commercial case for that project. That is a larger-scale piece of work.

Drilling down to the very local, there is an entirely voluntary group of station friends at St Germans in Cornwall. That has been carrying out local surveys and local engagement activities to understand how the railway can be better integrated with other forms of sustainable transport to provide better for local people and, indeed, for incoming tourism.

I will give you one other example. One of our community rail partnership members in south Wales, South West Wales Connected, has been carrying out local visioning events around local stations, bringing together different partners, stakeholders and members of the community to develop a shared vision for local stations and how they can be made more central to the community and better joined up with other modes, but also with the station itself being more useful, more vibrant and more of a focal point for community life. That is another part of what community rail does. It is about putting public transport back into the heart of communities.

In terms of Community Rail Network’s work at a national and strategic level, we are talking to our members all the time. We are gathering case studies and evidence from them, as I mentioned. We run an annual Community Rail Awards—we have just had 220-odd entries to that—which enables us to really understand good practice that is being carried out across the network and the impacts of those activities. It enables us to feed those experiences and views in at a strategic level, such as via the Williams review and opportunities like today.

We recognise that community rail is fairly unique as a grass-roots movement working with public transport, although we also work closely with other national third sector organisations involved in active travel and public transport generally, such as buses. We are part of the Sustainable Transport Alliance, which brings together different national third sector organisations, which are supporting communities and advocating for sustainable and inclusive transport. Through that, we share insights and consider what is needed at a strategic level to advance sustainable transport. We also try to make sure that our networks are well joined up.

Q150 Lord Berkeley: I find your evidence very interesting. I live in Cornwall and I have seen the work you have done in the community there. It helps that the bus service is now, effectively, franchised, so the county council is encouraging links between rail and bus timetables and fares and everything. Your idea of creating more community hubs presumably needs to encourage bicycles, walking and scooters in appropriate places, as well as encouraging people on to the trains and buses. There are leaflets and everything; I have seen you down there.

Do you need any encouragement for this excellent work from Ministers, or do you feel that you have such a good relationship, not only with the railway companies but the bus companies and so on, that if there is enough voluntary enthusiasm locally it will happen on its own, with your co-ordination?

Jools Townsend: As you said, community rail has extremely good relationships with the rail industry and with government at different levels. Through the process of rail reform and transformation, I hope that we are further cementing community rail’s place and its ability to deliver positive impact.

Specifically on modal integration, thinking about stations as multimodal hubs and the importance of that to reducing car dependency and increasing people’s mobility horizons, that is so incredibly important. Our members recognise that it is incredibly important [5]. We are certainly supporting an increasing amount of activity on this topic, from spearheading improvements to local footpaths and cycling paths around stations to multimodal ticketing deals that have been brokered in some cases.

There is a fantastic example by Three Rivers Community Rail Partnership down in Southampton. Through quite drawn-out negotiations between multiple train operators, bus operators and ferry operators, it has introduced a fully multimodal ticket. Local residents can make use of it and it also enables day trips out of Southampton. It is a really great example of bringing together those different partners, but achieving that kind of harmonisation between different transport modes is often a lengthy, drawn-out and fraught process.

Lord Berkeley: That is fantastic. You know that there is going to be a transport Bill in this Session, they say. Do you think that Bill needs anything to encourage what you are doing, or will it just happen because of the enthusiasm? You represent the communities informally. It is very informal, but you represent people who have an interest. If people are listening then maybe nothing else needs doing, but if somebody needs a bit of a kick or an encouragement to do it, what would be needed, if anything?

Jools Townsend: In many ways community rail just happens. As you said, it is founded on the enthusiasm and good will within communities. There is growing opportunity to facilitate and support this type of community-based action across sustainable transport and public transport generally, not just in relation to rail. Lessons could certainly be learned from community rail and transferred successfully.

Regarding community rail, we also, to a large extent, depend on the support and collaboration of the rail industry. Community rail would not be what it is if we were not working closely with the rail industry. We would not be able to do a lot of the things that we do. The growth of community rail has been, in significant part, due to increases in support and funding from the rail industry to enable it to happen.

Lord Berkeley: Yes, but hang on. If, in a year or two’s time, we have a completely government-owned railway it will be different. What happens if it does not support you? Do you need anything to encourage Ministers—it will start from them—to keep on encouraging you by whatever means, so that the community, in some way, gets heard?

Jools Townsend: As I mentioned, we are on a journey where a lot of progress has been made to ensure that the railway is fully responsive, and is thinking about communities and has the mechanisms, commitment and culture in place to listen to local needs and voices, and respond to them. But further work is needed. We are pleased with the commitments set out in the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail. We are working closely with government and the rail industry to make sure those are realised. We see that as incredibly important.

To come back to your original question about what else we need from central government, we do need further attention to joining up transport modes, particularly in the light of decarbonisation but also of the social and economic benefits that can unlock. The other thing I would point to, which I believe your inquiry has been looking at, is the importance of joined-up government and thinking about the ways that transport intersects with other key public policy objectives to do with the levelling-up agenda, decarbonisation, which I have mentioned several times, air quality, public health, well-being and mental health.

There is a need to think more about the way that communities can be engaged and empowered in this incredibly important endeavour of promoting and widening access to public transport, and how that can serve all these other benefits. It is also about how other areas of public policy need to align. Planning and housing development is another key area where there clearly is a need for joined-up thinking and policy.

Q151 The Chair: I want to go back to what you are doing and what you might do going forward. I am very interested in what rail users and people using stations actually want. You mentioned some very interesting things, such as pathway improvements and bike racks, and that there had been a lot of problems with timetabling. Do you or your local networks go out and ask people what the problems are?

For me, going on the train is about the right timetable, it not being overcrowded, and there being somewhere to park, if you have to go by car to get to the train station, et cetera. Have you done some work on that? That voice of the user is going to be important, particularly in the circumstances Lord Berkeley described of a nationally run railway. Perhaps you would like to have a go at that.

Jools Townsend: As I have mentioned, our members are working in lots of different ways to engage their local communities. Some are carrying out surveys at stations of existing passengers. I would also point to that deeper engagement work that is going on with different local groups, including those not using the railways at the moment, to understand what they need and want to be able to make use of rail.

We have a number of reports, which I am very happy to feed into the committee, on different topics, which attempt to bring all those insights together and paint a national picture. Obviously, an inherently important part of what we do is pointing to the local and the differences between different places and their needs.

You are absolutely right to draw attention to what people need from their station. They need to be able to get there and away again. That is absolutely fundamental. We should remember that a significant part of the population does not have access to private cars. If the station is not accessible by bus, walking or cycling they are effectively excluded from rail use. About one in three adults does not have direct personal access to a private car [6], so we need to bear that in mind. As well as from a sustainability perspective, it is incredibly important from an accessibility and inclusion perspective.

People want their stations to be welcoming and, as I mentioned, an integral part of their community. They want them to be pleasant, welcoming and well looked after places. A lot of our members play a really important role. Station friends and volunteers, in particular, play a very important part in that. People want it to be simple too. There is an expectation around flexibility, people being able to get the train when they need to and travel when they want to.

Of course, as you mentioned, reliability is incredibly important and having the right information when things go wrong. All this is also very well documented by Transport Focus, in terms of what is important to existing rail passengers and what needs to be improved [7].

Q152 Lord Carrington of Fulham: It is a fascinating project. One aspect I want to explore a bit more with you is what you can do to change things. I am an urban creature; I sometimes travel by train outside London, but not often. When I travel outside London, main line stations, the smaller ones particularly, are unbelievably inaccessible. That is not in the sense of getting to them, although that can be sometimes very difficult, but once you are there. You get off on one platform, but you then have to go up some gantry, go across and come down the other side, which I can manage but a lot of people cannot.

The trains come in and the platform is a drop from the train down to the platform itself. That is a serious problem if you have problems with eyesight or mobility. Nothing ever changes. They have been like that as long as I have known trains, which has been rather longer than I wish it was. I would have thought that was something that the users of a station would be pushing very hard to try to get investment in. It often comes down to money. Do you have much influence on where the allocation of resources is and the priority given by Network Rail, or whoever it is that operates that particular station, to make it better for your members?

Jools Townsend: Yes, we can do. I am glad you asked that question because basic accessibility is a very important aspect of what matters to people about stations that I missed out of my previous list. We have quite a lot of examples. All our members care deeply about accessibility of the railway and are proactively putting forward suggestions and ideas. We have a lot of examples of community rail partnerships and station volunteers working closely with the rail industry to get improvements made. Things do happen, but sometimes it takes a while.

We have a wonderful example up in Handforth. Station volunteers worked over a number of years, again with the rail industry, to explore how step-free access could be introduced into quite a challenging environment. They finally got there and I think that work is under way; the ramp is being installed at the moment [8]. There are those discrete examples. It is worth saying, as you intimate, that these improvements benefit people with physical disabilities in particular, but they benefit all sorts of rail users: people with luggage, pushchairs, children, et cetera.

We also have some brilliant examples in community rail of broader activities to make the railway more inclusive and accessible for people with hidden disabilities. There is a brilliant project on the Bentham line, which runs from Leeds to Morecombe, to make the railway dementia-friendly. It has been working closely with Northern to make not only physical improvements at stations. It includes some of the more traditional accessibility improvements, but also things like making the timetable simpler and easier for people to understand and removing features that can be daunting or inhibiting for people living with dementia. It is also providing training for railway and station staff to help them increase their appreciation of dementia as a condition and be able to support people with dementia who they might come into contact with.

That is combined with activities engaging people living with dementia and their carers, taking them on trips down memory lane via the railway out to Morecombe, and drawing on their lived experiences. This is another way that community rail can combine physical infrastructure improvements with engagement, listening and better understanding people’s needs and lived experiences. We need more of these initiatives. Part of our role is sharing them across our network, and we have started to see some other initiatives looking at dementia spring up. So yes, things do happen.

Lord Carrington of Fulham: There are your volunteers at the railway station, for instance. I think particularly about somebody who is, say, challenged with their eyesight. They may be totally blind or just less able to see. Often, the railway will try to organise a member of staff to meet them at the platform to help them off the train safely and negotiate all the obstacles on the platform to get to the exit. Is that a role that has to be done by railway staff, or can it be done by your volunteers?

Jools Townsend: I believe that role is most appropriately done by railway staff. Community rail can play a role in, for example, connecting local community groups with opportunities and services that are offered within rail, such as working with local disability groups, helping them to understand, for example, the support available from rail staff and how they can carry out a supportive journey, and perhaps running activities to help them try the train and experience that support. As I said, that particular role is best carried out by rail staff, but community rail can certainly feed in and raise local awareness about the availability of such services.

Q153 The Chair: We are drawing to a close, but I have a last question for you. You mentioned that one in three people does not have access to a car, and of course the figure is probably higher in urban areas. Do you think that car sharing or some variant of that presents an opportunity that your networks could link into?

Jools Townsend: Absolutely, yes. I mentioned that we are part of the Sustainable Transport Alliance and working with third sector partners that are involved in other forms of sustainable and active travel. That includes CoMoUK, which represents car and bike share schemes and other shared mobility, as well as the Community Transport Association, and Bus Users, for example [9].

Part of the reason why we are part of this alliance is because we think that it is important to recognise the full sustainable transport mix and, indeed, the sustainable travel hierarchy, which is clear on the need to give priority to walking and cycling, public transport and shared mobility over private car use. We recognise the increasing academic evidence that says that, for us to achieve our Net Zero climate targets, we need to rapidly and significantly reduce private car use. Academics and experts are starting to coalesce around the 25% mark in terms of appropriate private car use reduction by 2030 [10].

There is a lot of work to be done to reduce car dependency and a lot of benefits to be derived by our communities in doing so. For us to achieve that we need to have the alternatives to private car use working together in synergy. From my experience working locally in more rural communities as a volunteer and a parish councillor, there is a lot of interest in these sorts of car-share schemes as solutions for areas that are less densely populated and have less frequent public transport services.

There is evidence from CoMoUK that people who are accessing car-share schemes use public transport more [11]. Rather than seeing these things as competing, we see them as things that should be working in synergy. There are a lot of opportunities at railway stations for making sure we are providing for that full, multimodal mix, as we mentioned already.

The Chair: Of course, electric vehicles might change the dynamics of it and the hierarchies and so on, because they are greener [12].

I am afraid we are out of time, so it just remains for me to thank you for coming and for your very interesting evidence and examples. We look forward to seeing those reports that you mentioned.

[2] See ibid p19-24; and Community Rail and Social Inclusion, Community Rail Network, 2018, https://communityrail.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ACoRP-CRSI2018.pdf

[5] See Community Rail Network’s 2020 guide on modal integration for more examples and advice on how communities can support and spearhead better connectivity between sustainable modes: https://communityrail.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ACoRP-STP-toolkit-final-version.pdf

[6] Updated statistics for 2020 show it is now 26% of adults who don’t have direct personal access to a car (15% of adults age 17+ live in households without a car, plus 11% live in car-owning households but are themselves non-drivers); however, amongst the lowest income group, it’s nearly half (45%) of adults who do not have direct personal access to a car (DfT, 2020, National Travel Survey, table NTS0704)

[9] The Sustainable Transport Alliance comprises Bus Users, Campaign for Better Transport, Community Rail Network, Community Transport Association, Collaborative Mobility UK (CoMoUK), Living Streets, London Cycling Campaign and Sustrans. See https://como.org.uk/sustainable-transport-alliance/ .

[12] The advent of electric cars does not change the order of the sustainable transport hierarchy: private cars still sit below shared vehicles and public transport. See https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/an-introduction-to-the-sustainable-travel-hierarchy/, and academic discussion on the environmental and social issues associated with a focus on simply replacing all ICE cars with EVs: https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/129/1/13/5274656.