From
Norman Baker, former Transport Minister who tells this so well.
There may have been champagne corks popping when the government finally committed to introduce a National Bus Strategy for England, something the Campaign for Better Transport and others had been pressing hard for.
It all seemed to good to be true. We were promised a transformation in services, new routes where there were none, cheaper fares, and a modern greener bus fleet.
The government adopted a pro-bus policy like none we had seen before in living memory. We even had the prime minister, of course formerly mayor of London, talking fondly about making models of buses, even if nobody quite believed him and thought it more likely he was spending his time with other sorts of models.
£5bn was set aside for this transformation, and even if the cycling lobby managed to divert two-fifths of that, that still left a sizeable £3bn chunk. Local transport bodies enthusiastically worked up plans that would qualify them for some money from this new pot of gold, and all 79 accordingly produced a Bus Service Improvement Plan within the tight timescale demanded by the government.
Yet instead of record growth, we are now in danger of record decline, with a tsunami of cuts to services fast approaching. The champagne has well and truly gone flat, lying morosely in its glass as a symbol of what might have been.
[snip - immediate issue of people not using buses, and indeed being told not to ...]
Meanwhile, the amount of money available to invest in delivering the National Bus Strategy has shrunk and shrunk. The £5bn became £3bn, then that pot was used to provide the emergency short-term funding to keep routes running, a situation that looks likely to further deplete the pot if emergency funding continues past its current deadline of March 31, as it needs to.
So it seem, there will be at most £1.2bn to distribute for enhancements, plus a further £200m for zero emission buses. But the 79 local transport authorities, having all been encouraged to be bold and radical, have submitted BSIPs which will cost in total at least £7bn to deliver. The Department for Transport would need £2.8bn to fund just the four biggest of the 79 BSIPs that have come in.
Clearly, there are going to be a lot of disappointed authorities, who will feel they have been marched to the top of the hill, and marched down again, even if the toxic Duke of York has not been involved.
So will they all get something?
The DfT» , which is doing its best, told me that they intend to help all those who have submitted plans. This is a laudable aim but unless they can deliver a miracle with loaves and fishes, a lot of local authorities will get nothing, or the funding will be spread so thin as to make it almost meaningless.
Even those authorities who do receive something may well be left in the unwelcome position that their carefully crafted scheme becomes unviable as it holds together as a whole but does not work in bits.
It is useful that flexibility in the arrangements for notification of route changes to the traffic commissioner has been maintained, but there is a definite echo from cans being kicked down roads. The reality is that in places such as Oxfordshire, Tyne and Wear and South Yorkshire, we are already seeing cuts. And TfL» is talking grimly of “managed decline” as its direction of travel.
Over the last decade, cuts have mainly come to those supported services paid for by councils, with the 80% or so of services which have been commercially run being relatively untouched. But this time we are seeing, and will see, commercial services cut too, and cash-strapped local councils simply do not have the cash to pick up the slack.
A further local concern - we don't even know what we'll be getting in 3 months time, nor what strings are attached to it. So how can we plan?
Norman Baker goes on to suggest
So, the picture is bleak, but all need not be lost. Here is my recipe for recovery:
* The government is going to have to continue the emergency funding regime, probably for another six months at least. The money for this must not come from what is left of the funds set aside for the National Bus Strategy. An early announcement, ideally within the next fortnight or so, is needed to allow for some forward planning.
* The government should maintain the payments to operators for concessionary fares, but recompense councils for the element that relates to non-existent journeys.
* The government, especially the Treasury, must not adopt a defeatist attitude that this is the “new normal”. Rather, they should resolve to pursue policies that drive up passenger numbers.
* As part of that, they need to change the perception that the bus is somehow unsafe in health terms. Let us see the prime minister and the chancellor on a bus, and let us see a vigorous public information campaign from the government to tell people the bus is safe to get back on. My belief is that there is a proportion of the population, maybe as high as 20%, that is waiting for that lead from government before they return to the bus.
* We need sufficient funding and political support for measures that increase bus priority in our urban areas. As people return to their private car, we will see increased pressure to reduce the hours of, or even take out, bus lanes. Ministers must be vocal in supporting bus priority measures, not hide behind local councillors.
* The government must recognise that they need to deploy the stick as well as the carrot. We need action to limit the use of the private car, through higher car parking charges, workplace charging schemes such as in Nottingham, and an end to the counter-productive freeze in fuel duty that has now gone on for 11 years.
Ministers have shown imagination and commitment in producing the National Bus Strategy. It would be a great shame if that now all fizzled out.
As at the time of writing, each of 79 Local Transport Authorities has put in a bid (and what a lot of hard work was done, and money spent, preparing them) for funding - encouraged to be ambitious for improvements from April.
We don't know how it will be "divvied" out ... whether it will be a proportion of what was asked for, a proportion based on relative population of the
LTA▸ , a base amount split from part of the remaining fund, plus a tranche for attractive projects (attractive in terms of being good ideas, or to win votes), etc. And we don't know what limits will be put on how it is spent - will it be left to the LTAs, or micromanaged by the DfT? Will it be spendable to fund services which would or have otherwise failed in the last 2 years because of loss of passengers during Covid at, to a very great extent, the government's own direction and marketing.
Perhaps not knowing is the biggest fear and it will sort out before April.
