Written evidence submitted by Bus Users UK (BCC0045)
Background
In principle, the idea of allowing local people to decide how their bus services should serve their needs is sensible. However, in recent years, the mechanisms for control have been onerous for any local transport authority (LTA) which is not well-staffed, experienced in transport planning and delivery and/or aware of what their residents’ specific needs are in terms of travel (except at a very high level such as commuting patterns, home to school/hospital transport and local tourism options).
The costs related to gaining expertise in all these aspects are not met by the provision of one salary, though this is welcomed in many places, nor tight timelines. This has led to a bonanza for transport consultants, often cutting and pasting a basic proposal without ever spending time getting to know the area or its needs.
Competitive bids for funding have also put smaller LTAs at a disadvantage as they tend not to have staff with experience in this area. A failed bid will have consumed precious resources which are not easily replaced.
A new system must offer huge flexibility and long-term ring-fenced funding in order to give confidence to suburban, coastal, rural and semi-rural areas that they will be able to provide and maintain a bus service which truly meets the needs of their communities.
For the new policies to succeed, passengers must remain central to the planning and implementation of services. Any new scheme must require LTAs to engage meaningfully with bus users at every stage to ensure the improvements reflect real needs and priorities.
a) Challenges for rural and out-of-city areas.
The term ‘rural proofing’ has been discussed for many years with varying outcomes, but has not tackled the need for rules to be appropriate for the area/context in which transport operates. For instance, there is currently a ‘one size fits all’ approach to transport regulation which nearly always increases the cost of running services in rural areas, which is disproportionate to users’ ability to pay. This is not only about funding, but making regulation fit for purpose, especially for smaller vehicles which are more appropriate for rural areas and easier to manoeuvre in narrow lanes, but which are as expensive to register, insure and run as larger vehicles.
In addition, people in rural and underserved areas are more likely to have to use a car to get anywhere. This will increase congestion on the smaller, narrower roads common in rural areas and is likely to make any bus routes slower and less reliable as opportunities for bus priority are minimal.
Bold action will be needed in order to change mindsets in these areas. This will need to include ‘sticks’ as well as ‘carrots’ to dissuade the use of cars in some areas at various times and to remove them altogether from some town centres, ensuring that accessible park and ride schemes are available. Road pricing will need to be used in areas which do have local bus services on offer, along with any other measures which ensure that public transport has the right of way at all times, on all roads.
Areas with low public transport offers and high congestion levels will need to be offered far more capital funding to achieve ambitious plans, as well as an ongoing revenue pot to maintain and assess these facilities.
Public consultation needs to be carried out at a much earlier stage than is done currently, to ensure buy-in. More often than not, current practice is to decide a way forward and put that out for consultation as a fait accompli. While this may be tweaked, it is generally already the expected way forward and will not be changed fundamentally by responses to consultation. In smaller, rural areas, consultation at an early stage ought to be much simpler and more personal than in a major metropolis or unitary authority. However, again, the skills are often absent from the small staff teams in rural authorities and much work is dependent on community volunteers. This could be addressed by funding and provision of appropriate training or expertise.
While it is not straightforward to develop a funding model that allows for wide differences in approaches, anything else will not meet the very different needs of small communities with different topography and infrastructure.
b) Effectiveness of recent bus policy in tackling the decline in bus services
In recent years bus services have regained recognition for their huge societal value and their transformational power for communities. This has led to a number of new approaches, new funding pots and many opportunities to improve the experience of bus passengers.
One of the most effective of these has been the £2 fare cap. This has proved popular, easy to understand and in some areas has boosted passenger numbers to pre-Covid levels, as well as encouraging some people to travel by bus for the first time. Increasing the fare cap by 50% was, by contrast, a very unpopular move which hit the lowest paid and most disadvantaged communities at the worst possible time of year.
The requirement for LTAs to have a Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) in order to continue to receive government funding was a major change for many and focused the minds of all. However, it was not clear that only some authorities would receive funding for their plans, so many set aside time and money to work on plans which they then had no funding to implement. In some cases, this was taken to mean they shouldn’t do anything to improve buses, so the plan backfired substantially.
Enhanced Partnerships which did receive funding seem to have made genuine improvements to services which have benefits for passengers and have had an impact on passenger journeys. Transport for West Midlands, which began work on this earlier than most, has seen significant improvements in many areas and has a long-term plan to do much more.
Franchising schemes have taken rather longer to show any real benefits for the passenger, but this may be because they were starting from a much lower-quality base, eg Manchester, which still has only around 80% punctuality.
c) Effectiveness of bus as part of a multi-modal network
Bus is the primary way in which people access other, fixed modes of transport such as rail, light rail, tram or even coach stations. It is therefore a vital part of the connectivity jigsaw. However, the operators of rail and bus services rarely interact with each other, even when the parent company is the same for both. This is reflected at LTA and government level with teams which do not deal with each other working in silos, with no idea what policies or plans are being developed by the others. Those teams which work on Active Travel or Net Zero tend to ignore public transport teams and workstreams too, focusing mainly on cycling, walking and encouraging EV use. It is convenient to specialise, but not effective in the long-term.
It takes political will and determination to join those dots and some form of compulsory joint plan would seem to be needed to make this happen. The benefits should outweigh the inconvenience in due course. The Sustainable Transport Alliance was set up to help LTAs and government departments to do exactly this and stands ready to help.
d) Social and economic impact of poor connectivity
There have been many research projects highlighting the impact of transport poverty, many of which are available on gov.uk, but the findings of the Social Market Foundation[1] highlight some of the most crucial.
It is well understood that the lack of transport options removes or reduces the opportunity to attend schools, colleges, employment training and jobs with non-standard hours. It also reduces opportunities for leisure and personal enrichment, leading to very high instances of social isolation, which is far more expensive to address with social and healthcare budgets than the support of adequate bus services.
e) Effectiveness of current funding and governance models
Our experience is that the current funding models are a complex net of possibilities which, where an LTA has the resources to research and write proposals, or funds for a consultancy to do so, they can be very successful. However, these skills are quite specialised and expensive and are therefore beyond the scope of many smaller authorities, especially in rural and coastal communities.
There were discussions of providing boiler-plate plans for various kinds of transport plans/franchising models, to enable LTAs to select what might work for them, and that seems a sensible approach. It would be useful to discuss some of these options with local authority representatives where they have not previously received much support, in order to test how flexible and appropriate the offer is, and how it might be adjusted to suit.
What isn’t clear currently is how LTAs are being encouraged, if taking on direct control of buses, to meet the requirements of the Trading Standards legislation by subscribing to an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) service. This should be written into guidance in order to ensure LTAs are compliant, especially if they haven’t directly provided such services previously.
f) Alternative models of provision, including Direct Responsive (DRT) and Community Transport (CT)and others.
There are some deep rural areas which may never have sufficient resident numbers to make a standard bus service a viable option, while other areas have numbers artificially swelled in tourist season but need fewer services in the off-season.
DRT also needs a reasonable base number of potential customers to make it workable but it may nonetheless be an option in some areas. These services do need to accept concessionary passes, however, which is currently not always the case, so careful assessment needs to be put in place before committing to funding such a scheme.
Community Transport could provide much -needed services in many areas, but it is constrained by strict rules set up to prevent it ‘competing’ with bus operators: this needs to be addressed. If some of these rules were altered or relaxed, allowing providers to run community services in a far more flexible way, this could fill a lot of the current holes in provision. Community Transport should also be funded properly to provide this kind of option and supplied with appropriate vehicles to do so.
Previously in rural areas, post office and other delivery services also were able to transport several passengers to places along their route. There should be an easy way to register this as a bookable service and bring that option back, where required.
In extremely rural hamlets and communities in parts of Europe, the local mayor is given a small budget which enables residents to take a local accessible taxi to the nearest town twice a month. It’s a very popular scheme which encourages people to live in rural areas, confident that they won’t always need to drive to fulfil their needs. It also keeps a local taxi driver in business. This model could easily be adapted for use in more rural areas of the UK.
g) Effectiveness of EPs outside major conurbations. Might franchising be better? Other options?
Bus Users UK has been involved in the work of many LTAs in developing BSIPs, Enhanced Partnerships and assessing franchising proposals as well as chairing the various Boards.
A large amount of groundwork was needed to set up an effective EP but the compulsion by the previous government was a motivating factor. In the main, the main large bus operators were quick to adapt to the new environment and didn’t find it too hard to accept the changes. For smaller operators, there was less enthusiasm initially, mainly for fear of losing hard-won routes to the bigger operators. However a strong, properly-constructed Partnership Agreement helped to quell fears in most places.
In Warwickshire, there was no funding in the first round of BSIP awards, but the councillors and transport team set about trying to fulfil some of their plans without central funding, which they did. They impressed sufficiently that they did get an award in the second round and this is making a big difference in a largely rural county.
In some local authority areas relationships have been strained and bus service provision has been politicised. Having a neutral Chair has helped to resolve these issues in some cases while in other areas, franchising has become a weapon rather than an opportunity for improvement.
There have been few examples of franchising to consider so far but the amount of funding expended on consultancy is a huge cause for concern. This funding would have been better spent on improvements to bus services and it is welcome to note that this is less likely to happen going forward.
In addition, timescales have been exceptionally long, before any actual improvements have been offered. Even in Manchester, there is still a long way to go before the general public will see major improvements to what has been, historically, a very poor service.
A main concern about the impact of a franchised model is the insertion of yet another barrier between the passenger and the provider of the service. In London, where there has been a franchised system for decades, bus operators consider Transport for London to be their customer rather than their actual passengers. If passengers are unhappy, they have to complain to TfL, which passes it to the operator, which may or may not respond in a timely fashion and is not required to hold the CCTV recording of any incident for any length of time. If they do respond to TfL, TfL will then contact the passenger and it can all take a very long time for the matter to reach London TravelWatch and actually get resolved. This needs to be avoided at all costs in any new franchising scheme.
The main alternative to these two options is a municipal bus company. This is a model which has not always been successful, but some of the best bus companies in the UK are, or started out as, municipals – Blackpool Transport, Lothian, Nottingham City, Reading Bus and Brighton & Hove, being the obvious examples. The main factors for success seem to be a local authority which understands the vital importance of bus as part of its offer, a deep understanding of the community served because of the strong local link between council officers/members and bus company staff, and a level of real ownership and pride among the residents, which is hard-won and needs a great deal of consistent promotion. It is not achieved by simply branding something as locally-owned.
h) Managing services which straddle boundaries
In the main, the boundary issues have been addressed by any LTA which produced an effective BSIP within England. Clearly, passengers do not usually live their life within one borough, district or county and most EPs took care to consult with neighbouring authorities so as to avoid unexpected problems.
There are two areas where this is still a problem: UK country boundaries and concessionary pass rules and administration.
There seems to be no valid reason for only allowing people with concessionary passes to use that pass in the UK country of issue. This is a back office issue which has never been a problem for the NHS and we see absolutely no reason why UK-wide travel could not be cross-charged in the same manner. Setting up artificial borders within the UK does not help to connect communities and should be removed.
There is also huge regional disparity surrounding policy and application processes for people entitled to a disability pass and/or a companion pass. Even within a single English county, there will be different time restrictions for people with a disability pass trying to get to work across various districts. If someone needs help to travel, there should be a requirement to provide a companion pass for the entire journey, not an additional free ticket to one specific point on the journey. Each area is also allowed to determine its own restrictions and eligibility criteria, which makes the process of applying for a pass time-consuming, onerous and, for some, impossible. There needs to be a standardisation across the UK for such passes if disabled people are to be supported to live full and active lives.
Bus Users UK is a charity that campaigns for inclusive, accessible transport. We are the only approved Alternative Dispute Resolution Body for the bus and coach industry and the designated body for handling complaints under the Passenger Rights in Bus and Coach Legislation. We are also part of the Sustainable Transport Alliance, a group working to promote the benefits of public, shared and active travel.
Alongside our complaints work we investigate and monitor services and work with operators and transport providers to improve services for everyone. We run events, carry out research, respond to consultations, speak at government select committees and take part in industry events to make sure the voice of the passenger is heard.
January 2025
Endnotes
[1] Getting the measure of transport poverty: Understanding and responding to the UK’s hidden crisis - Social Market Foundation.