Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Passenger transport in isolated communities, HC 853
Monday 13 January 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 13 January 2014.
Members present: Mrs Louise Ellman (Chair), Jim Fitzpatrick, Karen Lumley, Jason McCartney, Karl McCartney, Mr Adrian Sanders, Chloe Smith, Graham Stringer and Martin Vickers
Questions 1-118
Witnesses: Janice Banks, Chief Executive, Action with Communities in Rural England, Claire Haigh, Chief Executive, Greener Journeys, and Stephen Joseph, Chief Executive, Campaign for Better Transport, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Would you give your name and organisation, please?
Stephen Joseph: I am Stephen Joseph, chief executive, Campaign for Better Transport.
Claire Haigh: I am Claire Haigh, chief executive, Greener Journeys.
Janice Banks: I am Janice Banks, Action with Communities in Rural England.
Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. What do you mean by isolated communities? Who are we talking about?
Claire Haigh: I am very happy to kick off. First of all, we really welcome this inquiry because it is going to put a useful spotlight on people who are suffering from transport poverty. I would say that isolation is not necessarily just geographical; it is also socio-economic, so we would broaden out the distinction. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has recently reported that transport poverty is even more serious than fuel poverty.
Q3 Chair: Mr Joseph, what do you mean when you say isolated communities?
Stephen Joseph: The full title of this inquiry is “Passenger Transport in Isolated Communities”. In our view, as we said in our evidence, passenger transport isolation is where the provision of passenger transport does not allow passengers to make important journeys that are required in modern society. As we said, for certain groups in society, that can encompass urban and suburban areas. When people think of isolated communities, they think of more remote and rural areas. In our evidence, we cited various pieces of research that we have carried out on transport and social exclusion, including looking at the impact of the lack of transport on particular groups—the elderly, young people and the unemployed. Even in some quite urban areas, these people are isolated.
I think the good news is that we have found that there are measures that can be taken to address some of those. I know you have had evidence from the other end of the spectrum, from the Scilly Isles, who are about as isolated as you get. They have made the case to the Committee that they face specific problems that other island groups elsewhere in Europe do not face. There are specific issues about communities like that, but, in the terms the Committee has posed this question, it can affect much wider groups than that.
Q4 Chair: Have you any idea how many people we are talking about?
Stephen Joseph: On the basis of what I have said, people fall in and out of isolation. To the extent that they are unemployed, for instance, they can face isolation, particularly from employment and from jobcentres. We have talked in our evidence about the impact on the unemployed when, for example, jobcentres located in sometimes quite inaccessible locations require people to sign on weekly or, indeed, in some cases on a daily basis. That is a real problem for unemployed people. The reference we gave on young people pointed out that they have less access to car use; access to cars has been declining and they make more use of buses than older people do, even though older people have the free travel concession.
Q5 Chair: Ms Banks, what sorts of problems do the people you are representing face in terms of transport?
Janice Banks: Problems affect different sectors of the community in different ways. If we take younger people for example, lack of public transport routes to and from school means that they are not able to participate in extracurricular activities after school, so it means that they are missing out on both social and development activities. When you get to jobseekers, they are often unable to take up job offers because they are unable to get to and from their place of work. A lack of an integrated public transport system means there is often not a choice of options for people who have to work shift patterns. If you look at the older community—a quarter of the rural population is over 65—there are issues around transport solutions for people with disability or who are infirm and their ability to access services such as doctor and hospital appointments where these do not fit in with a transport timetable.
Q6 Chair: Is there any hard evidence of the economic impact of people being isolated from transport networks?
Claire Haigh: There are certain groups that can be particularly affected by transport isolation. We have already talked about people looking for work. Young people are particularly dependent on buses as the predominant mode of public transport. We know that we have a problem with people who are young and unemployed. Some research that we commissioned recently has shown that 80% of the young unemployed are entirely dependent on buses for getting to work or looking for work. A quarter of those have been forced to turn down a job through lack of transport access. Two thirds of those would see it as a major barrier. That is just looking at one particular group. If you were to put a spotlight on one of the groups that can potentially become isolated, for the young unemployed, it is serious, and that of course has a knock-on effect on the wider economy.
Q7 Chair: Does anyone else on the panel want to add to that?
Stephen Joseph: When the social exclusion unit under the last Government reported on transport 10 years ago, they noted that two in five jobseekers said that lack of transport was a barrier to getting a job. That was about getting to interviews, making job applications, and access to training and education as well; under that survey, nearly half of 16 to 18-year-olds experienced difficulty with the costs of transport to education. Those are real numbers, and as far as we can make out, they have not changed. In some ways, they have got worse in some areas. We did some research with Citizens Advice, which brought together cases from citizens advice bureaux around the country where transport problems were inhibiting access to jobs. There were some really quite sharp pieces of evidence—cases where people had to turn down job offers because they just could not get either there or back, or both. Jobcentres had then sanctioned them for refusing the jobs. There is some evidence around. I do not say that it has been brought together in a consistent and comprehensive form, but there clearly are pieces of work that have shown up the economic impact of isolation.
Q8 Chair: Is any more information available on problems with access to jobcentres and people being sanctioned because they cannot get to them because of transport reasons?
Stephen Joseph: We gathered what we could from Citizens Advice, which is the sort of organisation that would be at the sharp end of finding those. I do not think there has been a consistent study looking at this. However, one of the things that we pointed out when the Government was considering cutting bus service operator grant last summer as part of the spending round was that this would have a significant impact, both in terms of the availability and the cost of transport, on unemployed people’s ability to get access to jobs. I believe the Department for Transport has just commissioned research on the impact of the previous reductions on bus service operator grant, including in this area, so there will be some research coming up.
Q9 Chair: Ms Banks, do you want to add anything? I am looking for some examples or hard evidence of the problems that it creates.
Janice Banks: I wanted to talk about the general economic impact. We know that people living in rural areas make more frequent and longer journeys to access services that are more easily available in urban areas. For people living in rural villages and hamlets, the average mileage travelled each year is 10,000, which compares with 6,400 miles a year for those in urban areas. If you look at the fuel costs of that, you will see that there is a very clear economic angle just from that. They have no option but to travel, because they do not have availability of services for them locally any more.
Q10 Chair: Do bus services to isolated communities have to be loss-making? Is there anything that could be done to make them more viable? Ms Haigh, do you have any ideas about that?
Claire Haigh: It is challenging in isolated areas. The population density means that it is difficult to run commercially viable services, which is why it is essential that there is support for services in more isolated areas. Very often, a lot of the bus services we are talking about are supported services. It does not make them any less important that they do not serve as many people; they are crucial, but the economics are challenging. In deep rural areas, it can be very difficult to have a viable bus service. Creative solutions need to be thought up—postbuses, smaller vehicles, taxi buses and that kind of measure.
However difficult it is, withdrawing a bus service has to be seen as a last resort. Looking for an alternative to public transport must be very much a last resort because it is crucial. You get a virtuous circle with services that everyone can use. The economics do eventually begin to stack up, but it is challenging.
Q11 Chair: Mr Joseph, you have suggested a proposal for ring-fencing some bus grant and then linking it with the Government Departments who are going to benefit. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Stephen Joseph: I will expand on that. The core issue here is, what does Government want to buy? We would argue that it needs to be accessibility. It needs to provide greater accessibility to employment and the key public services that people need to reach—health services and so on—beyond what the market would normally provide. When we did the work around the spending round last summer, we found that counties such as Norfolk and Devon do this sort of accessibility planning. They distribute their bus funding according to links between the places where people are living, versus employment, hospitals and so on. We thought that, if they could do it, other counties and local authorities could do this.
We realised that, without ring-fencing that funding, the money would just disappear, so we argued that local transport funding should be ring-fenced and drawn from the Departments for Work and Pensions, Health and Education on the grounds that those are the Departments that benefit most from having good accessibility for people without cars. We also argued that this was a way of integrating a mix of provision that you find in rural areas particularly, but also elsewhere—even in quite urban areas.
You asked in a previous question, are they inevitably loss-making? There is an inevitability about subsidy and funding, but you can reduce that overall. One of the things we found—I know it drives some local transport authorities mad—is that individual public services do their own thing. Hospitals run their own inter-site transport. Prisons provide their own staff transport. Private sector employers sometimes provide their own transport. It is utterly unco-ordinated with the rest of the transport provision. Bringing this together will involve making much better use of the public funding that goes into providing transport as a whole.
Q12 Graham Stringer: Are there any studies that show that subsidising buses and bus companies is better than giving individual credits or cash allowances to people on a means-tested basis, so that they can purchase taxis or some other form of transport to get there?
Stephen Joseph: There are taxi vouchers available in some areas. The problem with that is that it does not allow the aggregation of funding to create the critical mass for a service; you cannot bring that together. We and Greener Journeys—
Q13 Graham Stringer: I understand that. It was not quite the point I was trying to make. Which is the better scheme, given a quantum of money, for giving the best accessibility to the greatest number of people? Have there been any studies done that compare subsidies to buses against voucher schemes?
Stephen Joseph: The short answer to that is that I am not aware of any. There are some issues about making that the basis of provision, for the reasons I have said.
Q14 Karen Lumley: I was a councillor myself and remember that we used to give tokens to old people and then they used to sell them to other people. It is a very difficult situation. I want to go back to thinking outside the box with regard to rural transport. In my own area, we have a system where big buses do not run around half empty. They have moved to the smaller buses, car sharing and also paying people to take other people in small villages to hospitals and things like that. Gone are the days, apart from in London probably, where massive buses are driving around half empty. As a country, we cannot afford that any more. Are there any examples of other counties where that has happened and people think outside the box in that way? You made the point that we should all be thinking about travelling together, so school buses should be used for older people who want to go shopping and things like that. Are there any good examples in the country of where that happens?
Janice Banks: There are examples around the country. Rural community councils around England all work on local community transport schemes. There is a scheme in Derbyshire whereby they have a minibus which provides a commuter run in the morning to link up with the station. It provides a service for the local primary school five days a week. It provides a service for the volunteer centre one day a week. It is also then available for community groups to hire in the evenings and at weekends. With this, it is able to more or less meet its running costs. There are other examples of schemes like that around the country.
However, what it does not do is build up enough capital for the capital purchase of the vehicle in the first place. Where there are successful community transport schemes, they have usually been supported by a donation or funding to purchase a minibus in the first place. We are seeing an increasing number of schemes where MPVs are being used for transporting groups of people, and some informal car sharing where people are able to club together to avoid several cars going in the same direction—for example, for commuting and so on.
Q15 Mr Sanders: How big is this problem comparatively with 10, 20 or 30 years ago?
Stephen Joseph: I think it has got bigger because of the centralisation of facilities; we have bigger hospitals and larger schools and colleges. Also, many of those have been sited in places that suit cars but do not necessarily make public transport access easy. We have talked about the concept of car dependence. For example, because the Norfolk and Norwich hospital is outside the city, it means you have to drive to it. Providing public transport to it is more difficult. That is just an example. The problem of facilities built around the car is that public transport access is often only thought of as an afterthought. It has increased the exclusion for those without cars and made it much more difficult and more expensive to provide access to places like that for those without cars.
Q16 Mr Sanders: But, presumably, even with centralisation, wouldn’t that mean that there were more people wanting to access services to towns?
Stephen Joseph: If they were in towns, that would be fine. If they were in out-of-town locations, that makes it more difficult.
Q17 Mr Sanders: But it means there are more people who would want public transport.
Stephen Joseph: If that is the way it works. As I say, in many cases, public transport access has been thought of as a last resort. There is a now retired bus manager who was running buses when the Metro Centre in Gateshead opened. He was only approached afterwards, when there were massive traffic jams going back on to the A1, to say, “Perhaps we should put on some bus services here.” That was an extreme case, but it shows the extent to which, in some cases, public transport has been an afterthought. There are examples of good practice in the other direction, where people have really thought about this.
Q18 Mr Sanders: That is not really answering the question that I was asking. Is this a bigger problem today than it was 20 or 30 years ago? You are saying that it is to do with centralisation, which does not really add up. Are there more bus services today than 10, 20 or 30 years ago? If the answer to that is no, why aren’t there? Surely, the answer is that there are fewer passengers.
Claire Haigh: This is a really important area. Before answering the question as to whether it is worse now, and I suspect it is, I would be looking at time frames and looking forward into the future. As Stephen alluded to, a key thing is integrating transport with land use planning. As we go forward with new developments, we would say that all new developments should have full assessments of transport needs, and travel plans should be mandatory. That is looking forward into the future.
Winding back, the ’50s were probably the heyday for bus travel. What has happened over the last few decades is that more people have become able to buy a car, hence there have been very pro-car developments, and measures where only the car has been thought about. We find ourselves in the situation, as a result of planning decisions that have been made historically, where the car has been thought about as the primary mode of transport, where more and more people are using cars, or actually depending on cars—the key point being dependency. A quarter of households have no access to a car, and nearly half of workless households. It is a serious problem. I know I am making a number of points, but an issue I feel quite strongly about is the planning aspect and the seeds that we are sowing now for the future.
Q19 Mr Sanders: I was born and brought up in Devon, so I come at this from a very different angle. I have to say that London-based organisations telling us what our problems are with transport does not go down very well at a local level. What we have seen is the loss of bus services as a direct consequence of the changed demography—losing full-time residents in many rural areas because of second home owners. There are villages in Cornwall and Devon where over 50% of the community are now second home owners. The people who have continued to live there have become more isolated due to factors totally beyond their control. It is nothing to do, in that sense, with bus subsidies or with ring-fencing. It is a completely different issue. Have you not done any work in that area, on people in isolated rural communities, where incomers with cars who are not there full time have reduced the number of potential passengers that would have kept the bus service going?
Claire Haigh: One of the things is making it clear in the evidence just how crucial buses are. Funnily enough, I have some very useful stats from Devon, provided from Devon county council, showing that 27% rely on buses to get to work. A fifth would not be able to get to work if that bus was removed. Issues of employment are just as real, valid and relevant in Devon as they are in urban areas, for a start.
There is also the issue of the ageing population, which is much more prevalent in rural areas. The number of people over 85 in Devon currently will not be the same for the rest of the population until 2026. Of course, older people become unable to drive and are that much more dependent on transport services. It is a very real issue.
From the point of view of our work on raising awareness, we are currently doing some research with the University of Leeds, and Devon and others sit on the steering committee for this. I will be very pleased to share the results in due course, if it would be of interest. We are specifically looking at the economics of buses in rural areas. They are different, but they are just as important. The demography and the patterns you describe are very challenging.
Q20 Chair: Ms Banks, did you want to add something in response to Mr Sanders’s question?
Janice Banks: Yes; if I could respond directly. We surveyed our network of members, covering the whole of England. There have been cuts in bus services which have affected the whole of the country, not just Devon. While undoubtedly some areas have issues with second homes, it is by no means the only cause of the problem. The issue is that, as services have been reduced, where home owners or households can afford to, they are forced to buy a car because, without it, they have no alternative. As somebody who has lived in a rural village in Wiltshire with no evening bus service and no Sunday bus service at all, if your family is to have any kind of social life, you are really struggling if you do not have access to your own transport. It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. While there is no alternative, more who can afford to do so are forced into car ownership. The problem is reversing that trend. If there was regular and reliable transport, more families would feel confident not having to rely on buying their own car.
Of course, the problem with the way things are going is that it means the very young, the very old and those on low income—the ones who can’t or don’t have access—are the ones who lose out and are not then able to join in either socially or economically to the same extent as they would if they were in urban areas. Rural isolation increases because they do not have access to the services and opportunities that other areas do.
Q21 Mr Sanders: Second homes are not the only reason, but the centralisation that is happening is also a consequence of the second home owners, because the village school closes and the community hospital closes. All those services close because there are not enough people. That just fuels the centralisation.
Stephen Joseph: I would not disagree with that. It is a really important point. Although we are a London-based organisation, we try to base what we do on statistics and research. We conducted research in a couple of communities—one in Hartlepool and one outside Southampton—where all the bus services had disappeared. We found that social isolation was one of the big impacts that came out of that. There are some much wider costs from that social isolation, particularly older people who are not able to get out and find they are relying much more on social services, with wider public costs.
Q22 Miss Smith: I join the club in speaking as someone who has lived in a rural area. I grew up in rural west Norfolk and have seen the problem first hand of trying to get a job, trying to get to school and trying to have a social life based on village bus services. In short, it does not work.
First of all, I feel I ought to pick up on Stephen’s point about the Norfolk and Norwich. It is possible to get to the Norfolk and Norwich hospital by bus, but it does raise the point, which is important in the debate, of the double bus problem. You are effectively always doing a two-leg journey to get to a place. I do not think that is a problem per se; if you were to give the time to that journey, it can be done.
What I want to ask you about are your views on how to find a balance between the different generations in this debate. There is a policy kicking around in Norfolk at the moment which seeks to remove some of the subsidy from services going to young people’s 16 to 19 education. Obviously, elsewhere in the public service world, young people are being asked to stay on in education. Here we have the classic problem of balancing one generation’s needs against others in an array of decisions that all relate to tough public finances—there is no getting away from that. In your experience, how do we make good decisions between generations?
Janice Banks: It is a very difficult decision to make. Successful transport solutions are ones that take all those needs into account and try to have an integrated solution that addresses all of them. With the example I talked about in Derbyshire, in Hayfield, they are looking to balance commuters, schools and groups. The thing that I think is missing for young people is some sort of evening transport, so that they are able to have a normal teen/young person’s social life and are still able to get home at a reasonable cost. I do not think it is mutually exclusive, but I think it does need a lot of joined-up thinking about the different needs, in terms of linking to railways and some people joining up, so that they are travelling together as groups.
Claire Haigh: I would say that, potentially, a useful way is to look at particular groups. We certainly would not want to pit one generation against another. That is not a road anyone wants to go down. At the same time, there is some acute need—apprentices, for example. One of the things that Greener Journeys is calling for is a discount for apprentices. It would not necessarily break the bank; it would more than wash its face commercially, in fact, and would help a very targeted group. Equally, more than 50% of students rely on buses, so students need to be supported. The list can go on. Where do you start? Greener Journeys would call for more support for young people, because they are the group that probably needs most support.
Q23 Chair: But I think what Miss Smith is really posing is, how do you deal with the issue of scarce resources and all the ongoing problems? The list can be endless. It might include young people and the old, but how would you address that?
Claire Haigh: It would be to pick particular groups. Apprentices would be one group that you would just target. There are still lots of other young people that would not be covered by that, but it would be something tangible and would have a very clear economic benefit. That would be one solution.
Stephen Joseph: We carried out work for the Intergenerational Foundation on precisely this issue. Our conclusion was that setting generations against each other would not necessarily result in good outcomes for either of them. One of the things we have been struck by is noticing that, where local authorities have moved away from dedicated services, both generations benefit. For example, where you move away from dedicated school transport to ordinary services that can be commissioned by schools—Hertfordshire have done this—older people can use those, too, and therefore you get the benefit of bringing together, as it were, revenue streams from across the generations. There is a lot more that can be done in that area.
The other point is that there isn’t enough marketing done for a lot of the subsidised services. They have tended to be run because they have always been run, without looking at them properly. Where local authorities and operators have got together and marketed networks of services in more rural areas, or even in relatively urban ones, they have been able to get people back on to buses who have not been there for a long time. We proposed the concept of community bus partnerships, building on the success of community rail partnerships—about which I think you will hear later—as a way of seeing whether you could make more of the bus services that run simply by encouraging people to adopt them, market them and do the sorts of things that rail partnerships have done, such as beer mats in pubs marketing the services, adopting shelters and that kind of thing. That has been successful with rail. It seems to us that it would be possible to make the same things happen with buses, too.
Q24 Martin Vickers: I will start with Mr Joseph, although the other witnesses may wish to comment. A considerable amount of public money goes into subsidising bus services in rural areas. Is that money well spent and could it be better administered? It often appears to me that you get some funding through a local authority, and various voluntary groups apply for grants to what are in effect different parts of Government. Is there scope for streamlining it and, therefore, releasing additional funds to do the job that is intended?
Stephen Joseph: The concept that we put forward in our evidence, of ring-fenced funding based around accessibility, seems to us a way of making better use of what is going on at the moment. By the way, that does not necessarily go to what Ms Lumley described as large buses running around half empty. It can go to all sorts of services, including community transport services where appropriate. It is about bringing together streams of funding so as to make the best use of scarce resources, but focused on what Government really wants to buy, which is better accessibility for employment, education, training, health and so on. We think that is a way of doing this.
The Passenger Transport Executive Group talked about total transport pilots, where you would bring together all transport spending and commissioning in a particular area to see whether that would make a difference. I think there is definitely something in that. As I said before, there is a problem in that you get individual services being specially commissioned by individual groups. That is a waste of money, which could be saved.
Janice Banks: The most successful schemes are where there is a real partnership approach, where the local authority and bus providers work with the local community groups to determine their needs and work out what the best solutions are, bringing in all the different options that are available, so it avoids large buses driving around half empty, but it enables community solutions to feed into services that are timed, so that there is maximum usage from it. The advantage of doing that at a community level is that it is bespoke to that community. Trying to do a one size fits all does not work because geography and needs differ. Partnership working is where we have seen the most successful schemes and, therefore, the most efficient and economical schemes.
Q25 Martin Vickers: Mr Joseph mentioned adopting bus shelters and the like, and we are all familiar with those sorts of schemes. Just to be devil’s advocate for a moment, why should the taxpayer pay for that? Shouldn’t there be a commercial incentive for a bus operator, train operator or whoever it happens to be to provide better facilities and therefore increase patronage?
Stephen Joseph: Completely. But this was in response to a question about making better use of what we’ve got, and my point was that, in too many cases, nobody has gone out and properly marketed what is there. Just as community rail partnerships, which get support from operators as well as from the public purse, have made a difference in terms of bringing people to local rail lines, we think there is a case for looking at whether you could do that for some bus services on a kind of “use it or lose it” basis in some cases. We think it would be worth trying that, in the way Janice described, as a partnership between the local community, the local authority and local transport operators.
Claire Haigh: I wanted to add a point, following on from Janice’s point about partnership. Very often, it is not money that is needed; it is priority measures. The key thing is for really good joined-up thinking at the local level and for the bus companies and local authorities to work closely together. That is fundamental. Very often, an awful lot can be resolved that way.
Q26 Chair: In the current economic climate, what could be done to support community transport schemes and demand-led schemes like voluntary car schemes? Is that the answer to the problems in those areas, and what could be done?
Stephen Joseph: The problem we have had with demand-responsive schemes in the past is, just as Janice said, that they do not have the funding for the capital costs that are needed to make them work. There has been rather too much in terms of short-term limited funding, which then disappears and the services disappear with them. There have been examples, such as in Lincolnshire with the CallConnect service, where you have a mix of fixed route and demand-responsive feeder services. Those seem to have lasted a lot longer, and we think that that kind of approach, linking demand-responsive transport into the network with fixed route, either bus or rail services, makes a lot more sense.
We have seen with the Government’s local sustainable transport fund a number of initiatives that have been designed to help isolation, whether in urban or rural areas. Some of those have been well targeted. For example, in your own area of Merseyside, there has been some very interesting work done with groups of young unemployed people, in terms of giving them targeted support and funding to access jobs elsewhere in the conurbation, or indeed outside it. That seems to have worked in terms of addressing the isolation of specific groups or communities. The point of our proposal for ring-fenced funding based on accessibility is to try and draw this together to provide long-term and sustained funding for these kinds of initiatives within the concept of accessibility, rather than one-off initiatives that appear and then disappear.
Q27 Chair: Are the ideas and the proposals there, but it is a matter of funding?
Stephen Joseph: They would need to be developed. As I say, in some counties—we used Devon as a good case study of a county that has done quite a lot in this area—there are local authorities that are more ready to implement this kind of thing than others. It does build on work started by the last Government’s social exclusion unit around the concept of accessibility planning, so it is not starting from scratch. There has been work in this area which can be built on.
Q28 Chair: Are there any additional points either of the other two witnesses would like to raise on this issue? I am looking for proposals of what could and should be done in community transport, demand-led schemes or similar schemes to solve the problem of isolation through lack of transport.
Janice Banks: There are a whole range of different options out there, many of which we have talked about. I go back to what I said earlier: partnership working at a local level between all of the stakeholders is absolutely key in delivering it. But we must remember that to try and make it commercial, or not requiring subsidy, is unrealistic where you have groups, particularly in rural areas, who do not have the financial means to pay a fully commercial fare. There is always going to be a requirement for an element of subsidy. We need to make sure that, whatever changes or solutions come up, those are not the people who end up being disadvantaged. But I do think that partnership working with all of the stakeholders around the table looking at local need and the variety of options that are available and making the best use of them is the way forward.
Q29 Chair: Ms Haigh, do you have anything additional you want to say about what could be done in these areas?
Claire Haigh: The final point I want to make on community transport is that it undoubtedly plays a crucial role and can very often enhance networks, but should not be seen as a replacement for public transport. That is the point I would really wish to emphasise.
Stephen Joseph: That is correct. The only point I want to add is that, from the research that we did at the end of last year, looking at what is happening to subsidised services on the ground, this problem is urgent. There are a lot of places—for example, Worcestershire—which are consulting on removing all subsidised services. That may mean that there are services there during the day and during the week but not in the evenings and at weekends, when some people need them. We think that the Government will have to address this issue of its wider objectives of getting people off welfare and into work are going to be achieved.
Q30 Jason McCartney: Apologies for being late. I have just been discussing cycling in isolated communities ahead of the Tour de France coming through my beautiful Yorkshire constituency on 6 July next year. In that vein, I see that in the next two sessions we are going to be focusing particularly on bus integration and connectivity and also local train services. I have two lines going through my patch.
I went to meet my local motorcycle action group last Thursday night. A young lad who has just got an apprenticeship talked about poor bus services. He has just invested in a moped to connect him with the six miles to work. What are your thoughts about companies or educational establishments investing in motorcycles, mopeds or cycles as a way to connect? A lot of focus in this session seems to be on rural bus services and local train services.
Stephen Joseph: I just referred to a project in the Chairman’s constituency which is being funded by the local sustainable transport fund. There are others, and you may hear about more of them in subsequent sessions. There is the Wheels to Work project, which started as quite a rural thing, but there is a very good programme in south Yorkshire run by the community transport organisation there, again funded through the local sustainable transport fund. That has been very successful in providing loans and funding for motorcycling, cycling and so on.
The point I would make about this is that transport interventions have not traditionally been seen as part of the array of measures to get people off welfare and into work, to help reduce disadvantage, and actually, what we are seeing from the local sustainable transport fund is that they can be. It was not what the fund was specifically designed to address but it seems to have produced a number of projects. We are starting to collate them together in some areas just to see what is happening out there. We think there are opportunities for providing this kind of targeted intervention. Wheels to Work projects are one way of doing that.
Claire Haigh: Another area this raises is active travel. Transport can be a solution to another big problem—obesity. You mentioned cycling, but it can even be just walking to the bus stop; we like to say that commuting to work by bus gives you half your weekly recommended exercise.
Q31 Chair: Can we concentrate on isolated communities, please?
Claire Haigh: Sorry. I had to get that one in. With regard to health issues in isolated communities, active travel is an important area to look at.
Janice Banks: We are huge supporters of the Wheels to Work scheme. We have lots of case studies of people who have been able to take up employment specifically because that scheme has helped them to get to the place where they have been offered work. We are supportive of that. However, it is not the solution to all things, because, while it might help you get to and from work, you cannot really do your weekly shopping on a moped.
Chair: Thank you very much.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Bill Freeman, Chief Executive, Community Transport Association, Ewan Jones, Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Operations, Community Transport Association, Martin Higginson, Adviser, Association of Local Bus Company Managers, and Claire Walters, Chief Executive, Bus Users UK, gave evidence.
Q32 Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Could we have your name and organisation, please?
Ewan Jones: My name is Ewan Jones from the Community Transport Association.
Bill Freeman: I am Bill Freeman, also from the Community Transport Association.
Claire Walters: I am Claire Walters from Bus Users UK.
Martin Higginson: I am Martin Higginson from the Association of Local Bus Company Managers.
Q33 Chair: Who do you think are the isolated communities in relation to public transport? Is it just rural areas, or are there other groups?
Ewan Jones: There are plenty of isolated rural communities, but it is not just rural communities, and it is also not necessarily just communities that are isolated. It can be individuals within those communities, which is why there are examples of things like community transport that have been set up to run services across town rather than necessarily along radial routes. There are examples of that in Manchester, for instance. Individuals can be isolated by geography, but the problem can have socio-economic reasons as well.
Q34 Chair: Does anybody else have anything to add on that?
Martin Higginson: There are certainly examples in peripheral housing estates, particularly very often in smaller market towns, but also sometimes in the major cities. Housing estates have been built which are not easily served by public transport, and, if they are served, they result in circuitous routes, sometimes blocked by parked cars because the roads are narrow. While we typically think of rural areas as being the most isolated, they are, as you say, not the only areas that suffer.
Q35 Chair: Ms Walters, can you tell us how far cuts in support to bus services have affected services to isolated communities, whichever those communities are?
Claire Walters: We are not a research organisation, so I cannot give you statistics, but certainly, anecdotally, it would appear that some services struggle to stay viable and keep moving when they are not reimbursed to the same level any more. As I said, it is anecdotal. There are also people who are isolated by the fact that it is costly to get into their local areas in terms of fares going up, which also has something to do with the reimbursement. In estates where a lot of people are on benefits, if the concessionary fare reimbursements are not reimbursed at that level, it becomes harder for the service to run. I think there is an impact, and there are going to be more impacts as the cuts bite deeper.
Q36 Chair: There has been a suggestion that buses are over-regulated and could be run cheaper, and could be more comparable to community transport. What are the areas of regulation that you think should be changed?
Claire Walters: I do not think regulation of buses is expertise that Bus Users UK would claim to have.
Martin Higginson: There are some areas in which the regulations are different as between community transport and mainstream registered bus services, and which do not have anything to do with safety. There are, for instance, services run by more or less the same size of smaller vehicles that come under different and more stringent regulations, such as those for drivers’ hours, driver testing, vehicle testing and registration with traffic commissioners and the VOSA safety organisation, which apply to public transport but do not apply to community transport services. To say that the reasons are safety differences is probably now spurious. We need to look at the reasons why those differences apply and think about either strengthening the regulation of community services, if there is a need for drivers to be licensed with a PSV driving licence and so forth, or reducing the requirement, particularly for smaller vehicles where they are run by mainstream bus operators.
Q37 Chair: How can we get better integration between rural bus and train services?
Claire Walters: It is clear that most passengers want to be able to catch a bus to catch a train, and when they get off a train they want the bus to be there. I understand that that is going to cause some planning problems for the buses. If you need to turn up five or 10 minutes before the train leaves in order to catch it, and then you have to wait for five or 10 minutes after the train has arrived in order to make that connection, it can be difficult. It is a question of talking, really, and of joined-up thinking. Sometimes the same company operates the train service and the bus service, and they do not make any kind of connection between the two, which does seem a bit unreasonable from a passenger perspective. It would be useful if they asked their passengers what they wanted.
Q38 Chair: Does it need more formal partnerships between transport operators and local authorities to make this happen? Can it be done without that?
Claire Walters: Personally, I do not think formality is the watchword here. I think encouragement and incentivisation would be helpful rather than formality.
Bill Freeman: There is a significant role that local authorities can play in leading more imaginative partnership working, collaboration, consortia and integration of services. We see examples in different parts of the country where local authority officers are able to play that role, between not just types of services but different sectors, creating some of the connections we have talked about. One example would be small community transport operators helping people reach conventional bus routes. We have seen examples of that. There is a leadership role that can be played by local authorities in brokering, supporting and rewarding organisations that put themselves forward and participate in that more collaborative approach.
Q39 Chair: We have heard about Coasthopper bus services in Norfolk. What is the secret of the success there? We have been told it is successful.
Martin Higginson: The secret of the success there was very substantially down to one particular individual who decided that he was going to take a really professional approach to running his public transport, and he made sure that his company did speak to the rail company. The rail company, in discussion with him, agreed that they would put bus connections on their train timetable leaflets for the services to King’s Lynn.
But it is not just advertising. That is a major part of it, but it needs to be ensured that the services are reliable enough to make connections. We did some work a few years ago on the Newcastle to Carlisle railway, where a lot of people said that, if the buses and the trains connected with one another at Hexham, they would use the rural bus to connect to the train and vice versa. When it actually came to it and surveys were undertaken with the passengers, it was found that very few people used them. The reason quite often was that the train service was much more frequent than the bus service, but the services were not reliable enough to make the guaranteed connection. People were finding that they had to catch an earlier train or bus than they really needed to make the connection, and the whole journey became terribly slow. The result was that most people, if they wanted to catch the train, would drive to the station. For integration to work, as well as good will and arrangements between the companies, there needs to be the means by which the services can be run reliably, which means rail service reliability, absence of road congestion and so forth.
Q40 Chair: Could the concept of community rail partnerships be extended to buses?
Martin Higginson: I think some parts of it could. The concept of having a funded community rail officer, as most rail partnerships now have, is very important. I have seen examples where, before a partnership officer was appointed, the partnership did really rather little. Once he is in post, an enthusiastic partnership officer can be the eyes and ears of the rail service within the community, and can make sure that people know about it and are enthused about it. He has liaisons with local clubs and societies, schools, sports associations and all sorts of things that can make people aware of the rail service. In the case of the one I know best—the Bishop Line community rail partnership between Darlington and Bishop Auckland—the number of passengers using the service has gone up because people are more aware of it. Most recently that partnership, with its very competent local officer, has started bringing the local bus company in and making sure it attends the partnership meetings. Without any doubt, similar things could be done to improve the awareness of local bus services in their communities, which, I regret to say, not all operators are very good at doing.
Q41 Chair: Ms Walters, do you have any views on bus operators making communities aware of the services they offer?
Claire Walters: I think it is a massive problem, partly because there are lots of different channels of communication. The bus stops or bus shelters are not necessarily owned or operated by the bus service providers. There is an awful lot of confusion about who runs what and where the information can be found. Not everybody is Twitter-friendly or has access to the internet, particularly in some rural areas.
People do not seem to have heard of an awful lot of the organisations that could provide the information. There needs to be a community investment in the information, so that it goes out regularly. It should go out in major town centres, supermarkets and that kind of thing, and not just in the conventional places that people might look now. There have been some attempts in Birmingham, I believe, to show the next bus departure in some of the big shops. That is a very big city and it has more money to throw at the problem, but none the less the concept is a worthwhile one. There is nothing to stop timetables being displayed in shops, farm shops and all the rest of it.
Q42 Martin Vickers: Mr Higginson, you finished your last reply by saying that some bus companies were not particularly good at advertising their services to connect with trains and so on. Is there a temptation for companies that are operating services as part of a public subsidy to dump their commercial enterprise and say, “We are running that service because we are paid to,” and not do anything to encourage additional passengers?
Martin Higginson: In some respects, I think it does not help. Because the money comes from the local authority, one might think that the local authority would encourage funding and publicise services, which some of them do very well. It is very much a matter of individual locations and individual operators. In some areas, you will even find more than one operator operating in the same area. To take the example of west Cornwall, until recently Western Greyhound was very good at publicising its services—the drivers carried copies of the timetables, and they were well displayed at the stops—whereas the services run by one of the national plcs in the area were rather less strongly marketed, and the vehicles were rather old and were not terribly clean, for example. Unfortunately, Western Greyhound, under pressure from local authority funding cuts for the tendered services, has withdrawn its entire network of services in west Cornwall. They have been replaced to a certain extent by the plc company expanding its services with local authority funding, and by some community transport services taking over, but generally at much lower frequencies and with a much less intense network than used to be provided. This is a very specific example of the way in which things sometimes do not work as a result both of different operators perhaps not working together and of cuts to funding, which mean that in desperation things have to be curtailed.
Q43 Chair: What should be done to support community transport services?
Bill Freeman: There is a whole range of community transport services. We have heard some examples today. There is everything from Wheels to Work, group transport, demand-responsive services and community buses. Underneath that range of organisations there are some commonalities around trying to fulfil a social purpose, being values-driven in terms of the way they work with their service users—
Q44 Chair: Yes, but what should be done to support them?
Bill Freeman: We are beginning to get a number of things right. If they are going to be viable, they need a viable business model, particularly the smaller operators. That enables them to access different types of support and investment. We have already heard a number of examples where they are able to run their services but not build capital over time in order to reinvest in new infrastructure and vehicles. There might be some help there. There might be some changes around the way in which they are able to deliver certain types of services. At the moment, commissioners might commission completely separate infrastructure to deliver health transport, schools transport and transport for prisons. It might be that you can use the same infrastructure. It makes it more viable if you have maybe a single organisation or a small group of organisations that are delivering services for a range of commissioners, but there is not that joining up. Again, it goes back to the issues around integration that we have just been talking about.
There is an issue around the diminishing pool of volunteers that will happen because of licensing.
Q45 Chair: How can that be resolved?
Bill Freeman: We could go back and change the regulations in the European Union, but we are probably going to get further faster—
Q46 Chair: What do you want to be changed?
Bill Freeman: People who passed their test after 1997 are limited as to what vehicles they can drive and for what purpose. Two years into the next Parliament, you will not be able to drive certain types of community transport if you are under the age of 40, which means that over the years the pool of people who are available to work as volunteers driving certain types of community transport will diminish.
Q47 Chair: Are you sure that that information is accurate? I have heard that said before and I have also been told that it is not correct. Are you quite sure about that?
Ewan Jones: Drivers who first passed their test on or after 1 January 1997 can continue to drive minibuses, but only subject to certain conditions. It has to be for social purposes on a voluntary basis. There is a weight limit to the vehicles.
You asked what we can do. We have seen, for instance, with developments in safety and technology in vehicles that they have got heavier. That means the payload gets lighter. Drivers are more limited in the vehicles they can drive and CT operators are buying smaller vehicles, so the carrying capacity is going down. It is possible that something could be done there around the plating or the weights of the vehicles.
There are also issues around training and safety. The CT sector has a very good record in that regard. It goes beyond the driver licensing requirements to provide training, so perhaps you could look at something so that drivers trained to an agreed standard are not subject to all the restrictions that apply at the moment. There are things that potentially could be done. Certainly, it is something that is raised. We have done some research for the DFT—and several hundred groups responded within a fortnight—to say that this is a problem now. It is restricting us in accessing volunteers and it is restricting paid drivers. We see the problem getting worse.
Q48 Chair: You see this as a very important issue.
Ewan Jones: Yes. We ran roadshows around England with 400 attendees. It was raised at all of those as well.
Q49 Chair: I just want to identify the things that could be done to make it easier.
Ewan Jones: That is certainly one.
Q50 Chair: Is there anything else?
Ewan Jones: Community transport is low cost in terms of the total amount of money that goes into transport.
Q51 Chair: Yes, but what can be done to make its scope wider?
Ewan Jones: When funding does go into CT—for instance, the £20 million that went into rural community transport over two years—our research into the first tranche of that £10 million shows that less than half of it was spent on community transport, because it was not ring-fenced. When money is made available for community transport, we would like to see some sort of requirement that it is actually spent on community transport.
We would like to see the mandatory use of reimbursement for concessionary travel extended to section 19 services that are run at separate fares. At the moment, the majority of community transport is run under a section 19 operator’s permit for a range of different client and passenger groups. Some local authorities will reimburse those operators for carrying passengers; some won’t. We would like to see that made mandatory.
There is also the issue that a trip generation factor is applied to concessionary travel. There is an assumption that, if you let people travel for nothing, more people will travel, so you do not get 100% of the costs reimbursed. Logically that is fair enough. However, with most community transport services being run in relatively small capacity vehicles, typically up to 16, they do not necessarily have the capacity to carry more passengers. If they are reimbursed at 70%, for the sake of argument, they are worse off for participating in the scheme. We would like to see that at a higher level as well.
Q52 Jason McCartney: I am trying to get to grips with what the actual demands were from Mr Freeman. Having listened quite carefully to what you said, I am not sure I can pinpoint it down to one thing that the Government could do particularly, when we put our report forward, that could really make a difference. Could you focus on one specific thing? You started off with real generalities. We want to focus on how this report can give clear recommendations. What can we recommend? I have lots of isolated villages in my part of west Yorkshire right on the edge of the Pennines. What can the Government do to help these isolated communities with their connectivity to transport? Please give me one specific thing.
Bill Freeman: Increase the accessibility and affordability of training for volunteers and paid drivers.
Q53 Jason McCartney: That links into the EU regulation.
Bill Freeman: It opens up the number of people that you can get involved in that activity. Can I have a second thing?
Jason McCartney: Yes.
Bill Freeman: This might end up sounding woolly again. We have talked about integration in terms of getting operators working together more effectively. That kind of investment from a local authority, perhaps putting infrastructure in place so that small groups are able to share management and back-office services, means that small schemes can plug in their scheme and run it. They do not have to have their own board, their own management or their own staff.
Jason McCartney: It does sound a bit woolly. I am trying to be helpful; I want something clearly defined if someone from Government is going to read this. These are all nice generalities and we all agree with all of this—better training and better shared services are great—but we need specific things.
Q54 Chair: What would you like us to ask the Government to do?
Jason McCartney: Yes, this is what we are trying to get to grips with.
Ewan Jones: Require them to calculate social value, not just consider it.
Q55 Jason McCartney: I was going to ask about that. How do you calculate the need for transport in isolated communities? How do you decide? Time and time again in my patch, when I meet with Arriva, First Bus or Stotts Coaches that do the taxi minibus, I hear, “We put it on, and they don’t use it.” That happens all the time. Use it or lose it. Could I bring in Ms Walters?
Chair: Could I also ask you to give us a reply to Mr McCartney’s question: what is it you would like Government to do to support buses in relation to people in isolated communities?
Claire Walters: I would like to see a requirement to talk to the community before anything is put on or taken off.
Q56 Jason McCartney: They do that already. You have said that. This is the thing. I have spent the last months in massive consultations in town halls and village halls. That has already been fulfilled; that is ticked. That’s been done.
Claire Walters: As long as they are in halls that are accessible at a time when—
Jason McCartney: They were during the day in market halls and in evenings as well. They were very well attended. That has been done.
Claire Walters: Perfect. We love you. The cost-benefit analysis that we would like to see when people look at whether or not a service should be taken away is not just the cost of how many people are carried versus the amount it takes to run that bus service. We would like to see that put against the cost of removing all those people from access—the health costs, the social costs and the democratic costs of removing them. I am not sure how you would put a figure on it, but I do not think it should just come down to money. A lot of mental health issues come up when people are isolated.
Q57 Jason McCartney: That could be quite intangible though, couldn’t it? You could probably make the figures work whichever way you wanted to really.
Claire Walters: But I do think it is important across the board. We would love to see transport—
Q58 Chair: You say you want a cost-benefit analysis to include consideration of the overall impact.
Claire Walters: Yes.
Q59 Chair: Is there any specific action you would like the Government to take to support buses in relation to isolated communities, apart from giving you unlimited money?
Claire Walters: Obviously, that would be nice. We need to see a better patchwork that is based on what the passenger wants—a jigsaw made up of what the passenger needs, rather than what everybody is able to give.
Q60 Chair: Mr Higginson, do you have any proposals for us in relation to what you would like Government to do?
Martin Higginson: Yes. Increasing integration between different kinds of bus services would be very important, particularly reducing the absolute segregation between commercial and tendered subsidised services. I know there is a certain amount of what is known as de minimis payment to increase the extent to which a commercial service can have a few bits of journeys added to it, but I think there needs to be rather more of this. There is a rather artificial distinction between the two different kinds of services.
Hand in hand with that, there needs to be something—it cannot be absolute coercion—to persuade bus operators of the value of marketing. Some of them do it very well; others seem to do it hardly at all. I cannot understand why an operator of any kind of commercial business would not want to advertise their services to as great an extent as possible. Some are absolutely brilliant at it. They may be small companies like the one in Herefordshire who, among other things, organises a hog roast for the local community in the summer and invites everybody to it. These kinds of things are so important to keep your name to the fore. Other operators—not necessarily the small ones but some of the bigger operators—can be worse at it. This sort of encouragement, through a report by a Committee such as this one, extolling the virtues of very strong marketing, would be worth quite a lot.
Q61 Chair: Ms Walters, do you have another proposal?
Claire Walters: One that I originally submitted was a change to the concessionary fare scheme to allow people to pay in order to keep their bus service going, should they wish to. I know that there are all sorts of problems that might surround that, but I think it is feasible. We have been asked several times why pensioners in particular cannot pay to keep their bus service going, even though they have concessionary fares. We could tell them it was not against the law for them to take the concessionary pass, and add £1 or 50p.
Q62 Chair: Mr Higginson, do you have any views on that proposal?
Martin Higginson: There is actually nothing to stop it happening at the moment. I do not personally think it would make a huge amount of difference. A few people will always be altruistic and say, “Yes, I will volunteer to pay for something that I could have for free.” There are people who deliberately do not take up their concessionary passes, because they are still in employment even though they could be retired. I think this would only be of relatively minor importance. For the people who really deserve it—the poor people we have heard about: the apprentices, the students and the not well-off unemployed looking for jobs—it would be somewhat of a red herring.
Chair: Thank you all very much for answering our questions.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Neil Buxton, General Manager, Association of Community Rail Partnerships, and David Mapp, Commercial Director, Association of Train Operating Companies, gave evidence.
Q63 Chair: Welcome to the Transport Select Committee. Could we have your name and organisation, please?
David Mapp: I am David Mapp, the commercial director for the Association of Train Operating Companies.
Neil Buxton: I am Neil Buxton, the general manager of the Association of Community Rail Partnerships.
Q64 Chair: Mr Buxton, could you tell us the benefits of community rail partnerships, and give us some idea of how they are linked with the rest of the rail network?
Neil Buxton: The benefits are that they bring together everyone with an interest in the community rail line in particular. It enables us to address niche markets and deal with some of the problems that I think you, as a Committee, are looking at in terms of isolated communities. I am sorry; what was the second part of the question?
Q65 Chair: How are they integrated with the rest of the network?
Neil Buxton: By getting involved with the industry in general; working together with the train operators, identifying issues that matter to the train operator and to the community, to try and make the best use of a community rail line and get the best value for money that is available with a very limited service.
Q66 Chair: Mr Mapp, does ATOC welcome community rail partnerships, or do you see them as a bit of a nuisance?
David Mapp: No. Both ATOC, and indeed the train companies, are extremely supportive of community rail partnerships, to the extent that they are now an integral part of the rural railway. It is quite difficult to imagine the rural railway operating without those CRPs. They bring benefits in terms of local focus and practical support in a range of ways for train companies and rail services. They provide innovation at a local level. In particular, they engender the kind of partnership working that is quite important to ensure that rural routes are successful.
Q67 Chair: What more can rail do to support people in isolated communities?
David Mapp: It is worth considering the role of train companies in the context of rural rail services. Clearly, these are services that cannot be operated on a commercial basis. Therefore, they are dependent upon public subsidy and support from the Government. The role of train companies is twofold in that context. The first is delivery and the second is development.
Delivery in the sense that through the franchise bidding process, which is a highly competitive process, government, both local and central, can be assured that good value for money procurement takes place and that cost-efficient services are procured. Delivery in the sense that the train company is then contractually obliged to deliver high-quality services on those routes. We have an important delivery function in terms of rural services, albeit based on funding from central or local government.
We also have a development role. Train companies, through their franchises, are incentivised to grow the market on the routes that they serve. They play an important role in working with CRPs, local communities and other partners in developing rural rail services through innovation and so on. The relationships that we have with CRPs have proved to be especially fruitful in that respect. Over the last five years, the growth in usage on CRP routes has been roughly double our usage across the rest of the rail network, which itself has been quite high growth.
Q68 Chair: How easy is it to change service patterns of rail to assess if there is a new demand?
David Mapp: The service pattern essentially is set through the franchising process. The Department will issue a specification, and train companies will bid for that franchise. As part of that process, they will assess demand and put forward suggestions and ideas in terms of the timetable. It has to be said that on many of these routes the timetable is relatively infrequent, so very often it is an iterative process as opposed to being a significant period of change.
Once the franchise is awarded, a basic timetable is specified, which the train company must provide. The history of CRPs in particular over recent years is that there has then been evolutionary development in the timetable. Very often, it will become apparent after a year that an additional service here or there, Sunday services or a slight increase in frequency and so on would better align those rail services with the needs of the local market. There is quite a good track record in incrementally improving services on that basis.
Normally, those changes are developed in close consultation between the train company concerned, the CRP and other local partners. Those changes then have to be agreed by the Department. I think, to be fair to the Department for Transport, their track record in that area is good; generally speaking, they have been very supportive of improvements to train services.
Q69 Chair: Is that a complicated and time-consuming process? Is there a need for any changes in the franchise regulations to make it easier to do?
David Mapp: We probably would prefer it to be a little quicker than it is.
Q70 Chair: How long would it take from somebody putting forward a proposal?
David Mapp: Neil probably has more experience of this than I have.
Neil Buxton: It depends how complicated it is. I was going to make a little aside on this. There is already a process in place where we can get a line designated by the Department to exclude it from some of the more onerous requirements of railway operation. That does make things easier and slightly speeds things up. A simple one that would be easy to explain is that, if there is some issue with ticketing, for example, that stops people using the railway service, a designated line is sometimes able to step outside the major requirements of the rail settlement plan and do their own local ticketing. That can be introduced overnight—almost.
Q71 Miss Smith: It is fascinating to conclude with your session, after we focused quite a lot on buses for the earlier part of the session. One thing we were speaking about in connection with buses is the need to advertise services, and from there to the concept of using it or losing it. Mr Buxton, could you give us an insight into how some of your members, in best practice, engage the community and advertise not only for customers but also, I assume, for volunteers and those who can run, and help you run, partnerships?
Neil Buxton: Yes; we have a lot of examples of communities working together. The most obvious one is the station adopters, who look after a railway station because they have pride in it as a local place. They feel that a nice station will make their village or community look nice. It also provides a good sales pitch for the railway industry because it is a place where people want to go, but very often it is not the sort of expense that the rail industry can justify. A little platform in the middle of nowhere is not something that a main operator would want to spend all their time dealing with, and that is quite understandable, so you get local people to look after it.
Q72 Miss Smith: How do you get local people together?
Neil Buxton: We normally form a community rail partnership. They usually have a paid railway partnership officer, very often only part time and not very expensive at all. They will engage with all the local interested parties from the train operator, obviously Network Rail, the local authority, local schools, parish councils and individuals. We pull them all together. It is like King Arthur and the round table; everyone sits equally around a table and discusses the issues that are a problem.
As David said a little earlier, if there are issues of, say, train timing, everyone will discuss them. The local people will say, “Well, if you managed to re-time the train by two minutes, all these people could get this connection at such and such a station and then we could make onward journeys.” It may be something that the rail operator overlooked, for the most obvious reasons. You are not going to notice two minutes here or there, but because the local people have engaged and have all made a common decision to do this you get an improvement.
The best example I can give is the line between Blackburn and Clitheroe, where they did not have a Sunday service for a long time. By community agreement, they agreed to have the fares slightly increased on Monday to Saturday in order to offset the cost of running a Sunday service. Now the Sunday service is very successful, and very popular because it was by community diktat.
Q73 Miss Smith: That is extremely interesting. On the other side of the coin, are there any bad examples you have come across where things have gone wrong?
Neil Buxton: It sounds like a get-out, but I cannot say there is any bad example of things going wrong, because they are all discussed around the table.
Q74 Miss Smith: To put it another way, presumably there must be examples where a community rail partnership does not exist, or used to exist but has failed.
Neil Buxton: Yes.
Q75 Miss Smith: What accounts for that?
Neil Buxton: Just if there is no local interest; you cannot make a community rail partnership come out of nowhere. They have to be grass-roots. They have to be grown from the ground upwards. The part of the rail partnership officer and my organisation further up the scale is to encourage, grow and enable these organisations, but, if there is no willingness to make this happen, the community are obviously not getting a buy-in to local transport. The same would apply to buses; it is not just railways. You cannot make community transport appear out of nowhere if people don’t want to run it. You just have to accept that. Communities have to accept responsibility for what comes out of that.
Q76 Chair: How long did it take to get that route going in the Clitheroe example?
Neil Buxton: About a year at most.
Q77 Chair: A year from the time it was suggested.
Neil Buxton: Yes. I cannot give you an exact figure, but off the top of my head I think it was about a year.
Q78 Mr Sanders: I draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Interests. I have a small shareholding in the South Devon and Dart Valley Railway Company, as will become apparent with my question. There are miles and miles of track that are run by railway societies, companies and volunteers. They are not-for-profit companies; they are railway enthusiasts, and they largely serve rural areas. What are the barriers to integrating them, where they would want it, in the national rail network again?
Neil Buxton: I have to answer that in two parts. There are no specific barriers. We already have examples. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway on the line near where I live on the Esk Valley links closely with Northern Rail services and runs through to Whitby. That was encouraged because it was delivering a lot of regeneration money into Whitby. It improved the service link from the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which originally terminated short of Whitby. The Swanage Railway is looking at a similar situation for the same reasons. But heritage railways are run on a completely different business model to the network. They run purely for historical purposes—for fun, if you like—and their costs are based on a non-distressed market. If you wanted people to get to and from work at the charges that most heritage railways are charging, it would be out of the question. There would have to be some subsidy for people to travel on those heritage railways if that was to happen.
Q79 Mr Sanders: There are rural communities served by those heritage railways, where the fare structure is a disincentive to use them for commuting and shopping purposes.
Neil Buxton: Yes.
Q80 Mr Sanders: But the infrastructure is there, and there could be some form of subsidy for the regular user as opposed to the tourist or the train buff. How could that be brought about? Would that be through your excellent organisation, through discussion with the train operators, or Network Rail—or who?
Neil Buxton: It would be largely through the local transport authority, which would be a local authority, and would subsidise it in the same way as they subsidise bus fares for pensioners.
Q81 Mr Sanders: But bus fares for pensioners are done nationally, aren’t they?
Neil Buxton: But the money still comes out of the local authorities.
David Mapp: In principle, what you suggest is a possibility, but, as Neil highlights, most heritage railways run on a quite different basis. They are there to serve the tourist market for the most part, and therefore their services are often focused on that particular market. In principle, if they joined with the national rail network physically, there is no reason in principle why they could not be integrated into the wider network. That probably would require a degree of subsidy. That can come from local government or central Government. There is no reason why the Department for Transport could not decide that it wished to engage with those operators and extend services on to their routes. In principle, what you suggest is possible, but it would require subsidy. Probably, given the nature of those routes, they would also benefit from the sort of approach which CRPs have developed—in other words, a very localised approach where you are building on community involvement in making those lines a success.
Q82 Mr Sanders: Finally, can I reverse it? What is to stop a train company from using the existing lines of a heritage railway company, in order that a cheaper rail service could operate on that line to serve those rural areas when the heritage railway society or company did not need to run a service at that time?
Neil Buxton: You have to remember that most franchises are fairly prescriptive, especially the kinds of franchises that operate in rural areas, where the timetable, level of service and so on is effectively prescribed as part of the franchise agreement, which in essence is a contract. For the train company to extend its operations on to the network of a local heritage railway, it would have to get departmental agreement. There would need to be departmental agreement to any additional subsidy that was required, either from the Department itself or from local government in that particular area. Again, in principle, it could be done. Had there been any obvious examples where there were opportunities, I am sure they would have been highlighted by now. In principle, what you suggest is possible.
Q83 Martin Vickers: Mr Mapp, you said a moment ago that the franchise agreements were very prescriptive, and they lay down a particular service pattern and so on. I have a particularly valuable community rail partnership in my constituency, from Barton to Cleethorpes. It is very valuable for many of the most remote parts of the constituency but of course, for many people, it runs at the wrong time. It takes roughly 50 minutes to go each way; there is only one unit, which goes back and forth, therefore it is not running at the most convenient times, when perhaps you would need an hourly service rather than a two-hourly service—at commuting times. What incentive could be introduced to make that worth while for the train operator?
David Mapp: The train operators have an incentive to grow the business on their routes, to increase passenger numbers and therefore to increase revenue. Where we have seen changes to timetables on CRP routes, it has very much been the result of the local train company working with the CRP and other local stakeholders to identify the kind of mismatch between demand and the provision of train services that you highlight, and proposing adjustments to the timetable and agreeing those with the Department. There are quite a number of examples across the country of that happening.
I cannot comment on the particular example that you quote. There may well be other operational issues that I am not aware of that prevent the kind of timetable change you have described. There have been quite a number of examples where timetables have been changed in just the way that you suggest. For the most part, they have come from the local partnerships engaging with train companies, and ultimately with the Department for Transport, to agree changes.
Q84 Martin Vickers: Is this a rather cumbersome process? It sounds it from the way you have described it. Is it something that could perhaps be speeded up?
David Mapp: Inevitably, with the local aspect of it and community involvement, you need to involve stakeholders and partners. Time needs to be taken to make sure that everybody supports decisions and policies. I think that is inevitable, but the quality of decision making that comes out of that process is good as well.
There is then a process in terms of getting the Department to agree to any changes. They may have to provide additional funding in some cases. Our experience with that is that generally the Department is very supportive. In terms of those changes being ultimately delivered, it has happened in the vast majority of cases. Certainly, the feedback I have had is that the process the Department has to go through can be quite time-consuming. Yes, we would like it to be quicker; but on the other hand, the track record in terms of delivering changes so far has been good, so I would not want to overestimate the scale of concern in that area.
Neil Buxton: There is an example on the St Ives line in Devon and Cornwall, where the problem was exactly that. The trains were running at a very inappropriate time. In consultation with the community and the railway—the train operator—they changed the entire mode of operation of the service and did a lot of adventurous things using a designation to change turn-around times and the way the trains were operated. They managed to get a regular clock-face service on that basis, but it did involve a lot of talking and working things out. It is not something you can do overnight.
Q85 Chair: How many community rail partnerships are in serious trouble because of local authority funding?
Neil Buxton: At the moment, two that I know of, but in the next two financial years there may be more. We do not know yet because the local authority budgets have not been finalised.
Q86 Chair: Two at the moment.
Neil Buxton: We are having issues with two at the moment, yes.
Q87 Jason McCartney: That is a very good question because my points follow on from that. I have two community rail partnerships in my patch: Slaithwaite and Marsden Action on Rail Transport and the Huddersfield Penistone Sheffield Rail Users group, which featured on Michael Portillo’s “Great Railway Journeys” last Friday evening. He went to the brass band in my home village of Honley.
I have spent a lot of time with them, and the issue is that the rail fares are not being collected. On the Huddersfield Sheffield Penistone line, the batteries in the ticket machine run out by the time it gets to Stocksmoor, which is where Michael Portillo got off to go to Holmfirth. On the Slaithwaite and Marsden line, we have the phenomenon of the real ale trail, which means that the trains are absolutely jam-packed because it featured on the Oz Clarke programme. Thousands of people flock into these villages and the tickets are not collected. There are no ticket barriers, although they have installed some at Huddersfield, but if you get on at an isolated station and get off at one, the tickets are not being collected and paid for. You are nodding; you are obviously aware of this. What can we, as a Committee, recommend to put pressure on the rail companies? You have just talked about funding. They are not getting the money from the passengers.
Neil Buxton: I will leave David to answer this predominantly, because it is his department. Broadly, yes, we acknowledge that this is a problem. We are almost victims of our own success in that respect. We think that changes in technology are the way forward, with smartcards and things like that.
David Mapp: I cannot comment on those specific examples, but in general we want people to pay for the rail journeys that they are making. That is certainly an important element of what we do. The stations on these sorts of routes for the most part do not have gates; they do not have automatic barriers when people leave. The train staff, of course, have a range of duties as well: not just checking and collecting tickets, but providing information and helping passengers more generally.
In a sense, in the future the development of smart ticketing in particular is likely to address the sort of issue that you have described. There are challenges in introducing those more modern forms of ticketing on rural routes, not least the fact that there is normally quite a heavy capital investment requirement in terms of additional machines and so on for staff, or at stations. That provides some challenges on routes that are more lightly used. In the future, that is likely to be the way that those revenue protection issues are addressed.
Q88 Chair: Mr Buxton, your organisation has called for a new duty on local authorities to ensure that local rail services are adequate. Have you had a response from the Government on that?
Neil Buxton: Not currently, no. What we would like to see is local authorities having a rail strategy. Where a local authority has a rail strategy supporting local policies and aspirations, rail services are well supported and they work. Broadly, where they don’t, it doesn’t. It is fairly simplistic. We would like to see some more input from local authorities, but with the current funding cuts we are very concerned about involvement with the railways in the future.
Q89 Chair: Is there something that the train operating companies could do to assist? Couldn’t you put a bit more money into local rail services?
David Mapp: From a train company point of view, we obviously cannot fill the gap that is left by central or local government funding, because that is where the substantive amount of funding for local services comes from. We are always prepared to help at the margin.
Q90 Chair: Could the train companies put more money into these schemes now that there are more problems? You said you could help at the margin. Couldn’t you help a bit more with a wider margin?
David Mapp: I think we can help at the margin, in the sense of providing small amounts of additional help and support. Typically, if you take a train company like Northern for instance, they contribute around about £150,000 a year to the CRPs which they support, plus staff time and so on. Clearly, what we can provide is not going to be sufficiently substantive to pay for any significant reductions in central or local government funding. Are we prepared to work with local CRPs in making the case for the continuation of funding with local authorities and central Government? Yes, we are prepared to help with that.
Q91 Chair: Mr Buxton, are you looking for any other forms of funding?
Neil Buxton: We are always looking for other forms of funding.
Q92 Chair: Have you found any?
Neil Buxton: Not at the moment. If I can just sidestep that slightly, one of the issues I have—
Q93 Chair: No, no; before you sidestep it, I want to know who you have been asking for more money. What have you identified as potential sources?
Neil Buxton: That was the answer I was going to give you for the sidestep.
Q94 Chair: Tell me, what are the other sources?
Neil Buxton: The other sources could be any of the funding bodies that are available. The trouble is that—
Q95 Chair: Such as? Who have you been asking?
Neil Buxton: All the local funding bodies that are available.
Q96 Chair: Such as?
Neil Buxton: Charities.
Q97 Chair: So you have been looking to charities. Who else have you been asking?
Neil Buxton: I do not look to charities. The rail partnerships do it on—
Q98 Chair: You are here representing the rail partnerships, so that is why I am asking you the question. What other potential sources of funding have you identified?
Neil Buxton: Growth funding, access to work funding, anything that the Government have got that we might be able to apply to; but it does not necessarily mean that we are going to get it.
Q99 Chair: Have you obtained any money from these sources?
Neil Buxton: I haven’t personally, no.
Q100 Chair: Look, Mr Buxton, you are here representing an organisation, so that’s obviously what I am asking you. Has your organisation actually identified any other source of funding?
Neil Buxton: No, we haven’t—not that we can guarantee to pass on to our members, no.
Q101 Chair: How hard are you trying?
Neil Buxton: Very hard.
Q102 Chair: What are you going to do? You have got this gap in funding. You have got community rail partnerships. You have heard the train companies say that they can help at the margin. They do not seem to be able to do much more than that. What do you see as a solution?
Neil Buxton: At the moment, we are working through the DFT to try and increase the input to CRPs through the franchising process. A lot of the franchises are being a lot firmer in terms of financial support for community rail partnerships. I am very pleased to see that and we are working through them. I am concerned that, if local authorities are not involved, we lose the concept of partnership. The whole point is that you have a train operator and a local authority who equally put their politics into the rail partnership, and they equally fund it. If the local authority is not funding it, it just becomes an extension of the train operator. Just the train operator giving money is not necessarily the answer.
Q103 Chair: What implications are you drawing from this? We are in a situation where local authorities are being squeezed, and that may well continue.
Neil Buxton: Absolutely.
Q104 Chair: You have not found any other sources. What does this mean for the future of community rail partnerships?
Neil Buxton: It is concerning. It could mean that community rail partnerships have to reduce in size or close, or just become extensions of a train operating company, which I would be worried about.
Q105 Chair: What are the projections that your organisation has at the moment about what might happen to community rail partnerships—first, the existing ones and, secondly, for any new ones?
Neil Buxton: The information we are getting is that most community rail partnerships are secure as I speak, but for the next two financial years we don’t know, and they don’t know. I cannot report on that.
Q106 Jason McCartney: I am trying to get to grips with the logic of this. As long as funding is coming forward, does it really matter where the funding is coming from? I have many fantastic local charities and community groups in my patch that get money from the Big Lottery Fund, for example, or the Heritage Lottery Fund because it is the anniversary of the start of the first world war. Whether or not it comes from the local authority or from a national body does not really matter, as long as it has connections with the community. Surely, we are talking about funding, and it does not have to come from the local authority.
Neil Buxton: That’s true. I get a list of potential funders from an organisation. I send it out once a month to all the rail partnerships. However, a lot of funders will argue that providing the railways should be a Government-funded thing.
Q107 Jason McCartney: But if it comes through the franchising process, which involves billions of pounds—in my patch the east coast main line is going out to franchise again—and if it is a longer franchise and they can get supportive communities by providing funds for community rail partnerships, would your organisation welcome that, or are you steadfast on it coming from the local authority?
Neil Buxton: No, we welcome funding from any source. In fact, we are getting funding for specific projects through the European project.
Q108 Jason McCartney: So that could secure the future of those local community rail partnerships.
Neil Buxton: Some rail partnerships, if they meet the criteria.
Q109 Jason McCartney: That would be welcome, and you could still call them community rail partnerships because it is linking with the community main line that goes through the patch.
Neil Buxton: Yes.
Q110 Chair: Where else have you secured funding from? You have had it from European funds. Where else?
Neil Buxton: From the Department for Transport, from Transport Scotland, from the Welsh Assembly Government and from some train operators. We get supported in kind by ATOC, who give us travel facilities.
Q111 Chair: Anywhere else?
Neil Buxton: Each of our community rail partnerships will find small selected pots for their own projects, depending on what the project might be. If one of them is focusing on education, they may find a local education pot. If another one is looking at the environment, they might find an environment pot. I cannot specifically say which one they would apply to, but any information I get I pass on to the community rail partnerships for them to act on themselves. Each CRP is autonomous. I am just their representative body; that’s all. Each CRP, like the Huddersfield-Sheffield one, will work entirely off its own bat.
Q112 Martin Vickers: On alternative sources of funding, virtually everything you mention is in effect taxpayers’ money by some route or another.
Neil Buxton: Yes.
Q113 Martin Vickers: What about private investment? There are many local businesses, perhaps situated in remote areas alongside a railway line, where it might be advantageous to get their employees to work at a certain time. Could there be some deal with the partnership service and so on? Returning to taxpayers’ money, it does not necessarily have to be a local authority. Further and higher education colleges often bus people in. Why can’t they train people in?
Neil Buxton: Exactly one of the issues we are looking at is to try and extend the funding base of community rail partnerships. A local railway is not necessarily providing just transport from A to B; it is helping Departments deliver their aspirations and their outputs. In our particular case, in Whitby, a hospital is being run down and people are now being required to go to Middlesbrough, but no one has applied for any funding to help people travel from Whitby to Middlesbrough. It is only through the CRP’s efforts that we have managed to begin to get a station built next to the hospital in Middlesbrough.
A lot of us are suffering from the fact that Departments in their own silos are making their own decisions about where they put centralised services, without thinking of the transport implications. This applies particularly in rural and isolated areas. You have people in rural areas trying to get to education, to work, to training, to hospitals and to shopping centres. Shops are closing left, right and centre in rural areas. Where is the transport to provide that? I think there should be some funding allocated from the other Departments.
Q114 Jason McCartney: Shops are opening in my community, by the way.
Neil Buxton: Yes, they are; that is true.
Jason McCartney: It has gone back on itself.
Neil Buxton: I shall wait for that to turn up in our area.
Q115 Chair: How can integration be improved between rural rail and bus services and community rail partnerships? Mr Mapp, do you have any suggestions as to what can be done?
David Mapp: This is an area where we have acknowledged that more needs to be done. There are a number of challenges, not least the fact that of course both the bus and the rail markets are deregulated, but both work to different arms of government. Local bus companies typically work to contracts awarded by local authorities, and train companies work to contracts awarded by central Government. There is therefore a fundamental difference in terms of how the two sets of operations are specified.
There are some practical issues as well. Where you have very infrequent train services and bus services, trying to get the two to integrate is not always straightforward. When they do not integrate it may be due to very good reasons; the bus services may be based around a local school that needs to get children home after school, and the train service operates in a quite different market—perhaps people returning home after work. There are some practical issues as well, which sometimes provide challenges.
There are, of course, good examples of bus and rail integration. The Plusbus scheme is perhaps the best example. For the most part, Plusbus tends to operate in medium-sized towns and cities. It does not work extensively in the kind of rural areas which the Committee is concerned about, but there are some examples. There are Plusbus schemes in places like Skegness, St Austell, Ely and so on.
This is an area where we would acknowledge that more needs to be done. As with so much else in these sorts of areas, it does very much depend on local partnerships developing between the local bus and train companies, often involving the local authority as well, and indeed the CRP. One good way of engendering those sorts of partnerships is through station travel planning, which is an integrated, co-ordinated approach to access and egress from stations. That is something which ATOC and the train companies have been involved in for some time now.
In summary, it is an area where more needs to be done. There are certainly challenges that need to be addressed to achieve further integration. Station travel plans provide one possible way into that.
Q116 Chair: Mr Buxton, do you have any ideas as to what could be done?
Neil Buxton: I agree with station travel plans. I think we could extend community rail partnerships to include buses; I see no reason why not. Transport is limited in rural areas. If you have a community rail partnership, many of them promote local travel links anyway, and you could extend it to include buses as well at the same time.
Q117 Chair: What percentage of stations served by community rail partnerships are fully accessible for disabled people?
Neil Buxton: I am sorry, I cannot answer that; I do not know.
Q118 Chair: Could you let us have the answer, please?
Neil Buxton: I could.
Chair: Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Oral evidence: Passenger transport in isolated communities, HC 853 5