Great Western Coffee Shop

TravelWatch SouthWest asked public transport operators in our area to consider an enforced mask mandate from next Monday on their services - as is happen in London on TfL services, in Wales, and on trams in Manchester.  Sharing here a reply from Rupert Cox at Stagecoach.


One of my fellow directors at TWSW follow up around our group:


And, sadly, I can't fault her logic on that.

Even if they do mandate it, as we have seen on GWR, they can't/won't enforce it.

Responsible people will show consideration for others and wear a mask, selfish people won't.

What train, bus etc companies could do very easily is make mask wearing compulsory in their conditions of carriage, even on a temporary basis and publicise it.....nothing wrong with taking a bit of ownership corporately. Given the older demographic of a lot of bus users, it'd probably be applauded.

I understand that, whether it is UK law or railway bye laws, the only organisation with the legal power to enforce it is BTP.

Conditions of carriage are contractual conditions between passengers and the provider - surely this means that should someone refuse to wear a mask (unless they are in one of the exempt categories), when the conditions say it's compulsory, then they can be refused carriage? (Happy to be corrected if that isn't the case).

I absolutely get that Train Managers are unlikely to start slinging people off trains, however were it to be publicised as a condition, it may well make people think and understand their obligations more clearly?

I'm really hoping that people use common sense on this one and continue to wear masks on public transport - buses/trains/Tubes are potential viral petri dishes.

My personal view is that all of this is largely irrelevant, as the masks, along with another national lockdown, will be back by autumn.

Whether that will also be the case on my side of the channel is still in the balance. I suspect they will try and control it by insisting on the showing of Covid Vaccination Passports for most everyday activities - including using public transport - first.

Ultimately though, we all have a choice to make in the near future. Do we want a world where politicians panic at the first sign of a new variant or leap in the number of infections, and keep a largely fully-vaccinated population face-hidden and distant from one another across internal and external barriers - witness tonight's singling out of France to keep quarantine for returning travellers despite having tens of thousands less Covid cases per day than the UK - and regularly locked down...

...or are we going to at least try and return to some vestige of what is officially known as "the old normal", and at least some of us used to call "freedom?"

And if it is to be the former rather than the latter, then what exactly is the point of the current mass vaccination programme anyway?

Agree re: Autumn

If I'm honest (and I know it's a personal thing) I don't really feel that my basic freedom is threatened by wearing a mask on public transport or in other areas where larger numbers of people come into contact indoors in a confined space. I'm happy to live with a bit of minor inconvenience to preserve my own and others lives.

The volatility of the situation is understood by most I think and those willing to take a gamble on booking summer holidays abroad this year have to accept that sometimes gamblers lose.

I do sympathise/empathise with those unable to visit family however, having been kept apart from my own for nine months.

We perhaps shouldn't be too surprised that we are where we are taking into account 60,000 at Wembley last week and at football matches, Wimbledon etc for several weeks before with associated carousing...................and today there are 80,000/tomorrow 140,000 at Silverstone.............we reap what we sow.

I agree with this. Personally I don't like wearing a mask, and occasionally it does cause me minor difficulties, but in the grander scheme of things, I have no problem doing so where it appears to give greater benefit. Public transport is, and no doubt always has been, a major carrier of diseases and viruses, because people are in close proximity and are the carriers. We've always accepted this, though it will undoubtedly have put some vulnerable people off from ever using it, and the pandemic is now making this situation more clear, as suddenly in 2020 we found out we were all relatively vulnerable to this newcomer.

To answer Lee's last sentence - the point of the vaccination programme is to speed up immunity amongst enough of the population to make a return to the 'old normal' a reasonable proposition. The question is whether we are there yet. As Taplow Green says, we are reaping what we have sown.

From Frome Bus


From Faresaver

The point of the vaccination programme is to to get back to 'normal' when we have achieved herd immunity. The level of immunity required to achieve that depends on the transmissibility of the virus. The Alpha variant was more transmissible than the original virus and the delta variant even more so. Every new more transmissible variant increases the target.  The last figure I heard for the required level of immunity was 85% of the whole population. At present we are way off that level and to achive it we will probably have to vaccinate secondary school age children. 

Opening up early brings with it the risk that a new variant that resists the vaccine will emerge and set us back even further.  The panic about France is that the Beta variant which originated in S Africa that is common in France is more resistant to the vaccine and especially the Astra Zeneca vaccine.  A cross between the beta and the delta in the viral stew we are brewing here would be make a return to normal even more difficult. 

TaplowGreen and froome are of course entitled to their opinions. My worry I guess is that, after a long period of everyone pretty much holding the line of an "irreversible" unlocking roadmap - notwithstanding of course the delay to the final stage - over the past few days Boris Johnson, Savid Javid, and Chris Whitty have all started to subtly weave into their narratives the same "Except if..." get-out clause, which is "Variants".

Essentially, the decision to make France the only country on the amber list from where people coming in or returning to the UK will have to quarantine is an experiment into how this get-out clause could work in practice. What they are effectively saying is because the Beta or South African variant is present in France, and there is a possibility - no more than that at this stage - that it could evade the vaccine protection, then it doesnt matter whether you are fully vaccinated or not, you must still quarantine. In turn, if this leads to a more widespread use of this interpretation when such a variant comes along when formulating the rules of daily life in the UK, leading on to the regular lockdown of millions of fully vaccinated UK residents, this also risks making the "speed up immunity amongst enough of the population to make a return to the 'old normal' a reasonable proposition" argument completely redundant.

So I ask again, what exactly would the point of the current mass vaccination programme be in that scenario? My own answer would be that at some point you have to start putting your faith in the level of protection that the vaccines will still give you and start moving on with life again, otherwise there literally is no alternative to the current "lockdown, release, lockdown, release, lockdown..." rut we have got ourselves into.

There is a supreme irony here for me, of course. As you know, I work in the public transport system over here in France, and after the first lockdown ended, we were faced with the difficult task of how to both ensure the safety of our passengers, and to reassure them that it was indeed safe to use our services. On the trains, we resisted the temptation to follow the UK's lead and issue a kneejerk reaction "train travel is dangerous" edict, which as a result has kneecapped the future prospects of the UK rail network for at least a couple of generations. Instead the French government issued a blanket law requiring masks to be worn on all forms of public transport, which remains in place to this day, and is likely to remain in place for some time to come. It is enforced extremely strictly - At a staffed station you wont even get on the platform without wearing one, and if you join a train at an unstaffed one without wearing a mask you will soon be told to put one on in short order. Surveys and feedback tell us this is the single biggest factor that persuades Covid-fearing waverers to take the plunge and catch the train, and is thus also a big factor in our passenger figures remaining relatively stable, at least at our local/regional service level. As a result, we are able to move away from the negative spectre of service cuts and continue to take forward our rolling programme of reopenings and new service introductions.

Obviously, I dont like the fact from a personal and civil liberty perspective that the mask is so ever-present wherever I go on the network, but I also passionately want that network to survive and thrive into the future, so I just have to be pragmatic and accept it for now, although hopefully for no more than absolutely necessary.

I just hope that we arent back here posting much same thing after having had much the same kind of winter as last time round. For me, that would be the biggest fear of all.

Very gracious, thankyou!  :)

I actually agree with most, if not all, of what you say, particularly your 4th paragraph. If the variants hadn't complicated matters, I would have expected us to have opened up fully here some time ago. However, they have appeared, and currently have the potential to both spread very quickly and possibly, at least to an extent, evade the effect of the vaccines. Right now, the UK feels like it is going backwards very quickly, with many more people ignoring mask wearing and social distancing, while cases rise at an alarming rate, and deaths and hospitalisations are also rising. It certainly doesn't feel like the right time to try our current experiment in opening up and advising caution.

I also have a cynical suspicion that the administrative classes like rules, regulations, and restrictions for their own sake and/or to protect jobs in the civil service.
"Covid compliance" is a huge new industry that wont willingly be closed down.

Restrictions on the opening hours of public houses were a "temporary" measure introduced in the first war to stop munitions workers drinking instead of working. It took a lifetime to partially remove these restrictions.   

The MOT testing of motor vehicles was intended to be a temporary requirement after the second war. The idea was rid the roads the pre-war "old bangers" that had been kept on the roads with often bodged repairs during the wartime and immediate post war shortage of parts and spares.
No question of abolition these days, indeed the MOT test becomes ever more complex than the original basic examination of lights, tyres, steering, brakes, and no bits tied on with string.

The MOT test was originally introduced in 1960, some time after WW2.

Just to add to what I said above.

It's not what I want, but I can see a very good case can be made for mask wearing to be a requirement for public transport for some time now, at least until we can be as close to 100% certain the pandemic is under complete control. In that scenario, at some point ideas such as mask-only carriages, as suggested elsewhere, could be considered, but the time for that is not now. Right now, what we desperately need is caution.

Exactly this.

Not that long, post war shortages of new vehicles persisted for some years. The intent was to "get the pre-war old bangers of the roads" once new vehicles were available to anyone with the money.

Originally the Motor Vehicle Test as it was first called (at least officially) applied only to cars that were ten years old or more. Around 40% failed and a large number of older cars disappeared from vehicle tax records without being tested at all, presumed scrapped. When it was reduced to seven years the failure rate came down but only to around a third. Deficient brakes were most often the problem. Surveys showed that five year old cars would have been just as likely to fail, hence the next reduction. However, brakes were in general much less effective back then even when properly maintained.

From Buses of Somerset, which is a First Group company.

From Swindon Bus