A recent by-election result could have implications for the industry, writes our politics correspondent
I can’t recall a time when the result of a by-election has had such a major and immediate impact on a central plank of government policy.
I’m referring, of course, to the result of the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, in which the Conservative Party managed to hold on by its fingertips, with a majority of just 495 (down from 7,210 at the 2019 general election), courtesy of the Labour London Mayor’s proposed extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to outer London.
But for this, the Conservatives would have lost this by-election and suffered a 3-0 whitewash in the three by-elections held on 20 July.
The reaction from Conservative MPs was immediate and vocal: the government must reassess its net-zero policies, they demanded. Even senior government ministers, not least the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove, acknowledged the need for a reassessment of how the 2050 net-zero target would be achieved.
Rarely has such a central policy, which has taken enormous amounts of government time and energy to develop and which impacts on so many policy areas, including transport, been subject to such instant reassessment courtesy of a small handful of voters in west London.
PM ‘on the side of the motorist’
Barely a day now goes by without one government minister or another, or various Conservative backbench MPs, calling for a net-zero rethink. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak himself has declared that he is “on the side of the motorist”, a statement that has sent a chill down the collective spine of the environmental lobby groups, the active travel campaigners and, perhaps, the public transport industry.
Mr Sunak has previously talked up the important role of the bus when the government announced recent extensions to the Bus Recovery Grant and the £2 fare cap.
Now it seems he is on the side of the motorist, and presumably therefore will be endorsing measures which encourage or facilitate travel by car, which seems to me to sit uncomfortably with a pro-public transport policy agenda. All of this is a recognition, I’m afraid, that people like their cars.
In all likelihood, any changes to individual elements of the net-zero policy agenda that might now be made will be focused on individuals and individual households (the electorate). But if the 2050 net-zero deadline is to remain in place, a date that is enshrined in law, of course, and if its financial “burden” is to be eased for individuals and individual households then, by definition, this burden must be redistributed to other interests.
It seems likely, therefore, that industry and business will have to pick up this additional burden, both in terms of cost and potentially also in terms of speed of delivery.
Changes in store?
What might the implications of all of this be for the bus industry? Actually, quite possibly nothing. We still await an announcement from the Department of Transport (DfT) on the date for ending the sale of new non-zero-emission buses, and it’s not inconceivable that this might be delayed while net-zero undergoes something of a rethink.
Whether or not the date for ending the sale of new non-zero-emission buses is brought forward as a result of all of this we will never really know, since DfT has not yet announced what the proposed date is to be despite having initiated a consultation on the issue on 16 March 2021.
Why it is taking so long to announce this date is puzzling me as I can’t really see that it is an especially complex decision to take. After all, we know how many diesel buses are still in operation and we know what the annual capacity of the bus manufacturing industry is in the UK to churn out new buses.
There will, perhaps, be a political calculation as to how much of this investment should take place in the UK or whether overseas manufactures, particularly the Chinese, should be allowed to get in on the act.
There has certainly been a fair bit of noise from backbench MPs bemoaning that many of the new buses now on order or in operation have been supplied by the Chinese, but ultimately the government is pretty powerless to stop bus operators or transport authorities placing orders where they like.
So, come on DfT, give the industry a date. In your response to the Transport Select Committee report on its inquiry into the National Bus Strategy, you said an announcement on this would be made “shortly – to give the bus sector the certainty they need to plan for a zero-emission future”.
I’m never really sure what the civil service definition of “shortly” actually is, but unless this issue does get caught up in any review of specific environmental polices, I really can’t see any good reason why DfT can’t make this announcement pretty much any day now.
On polling results
A final word on those by-elections. In headline terms they were seriously bad for the Conservative Party. Losing the true-blue Conservative seat of Selby and Ainsty, where a Conservative majority of 20,137 became a Labour majority of 4,161, is as disastrous as it looks. But the Labour vote actually increased by only 2,598 votes.
In Somerton and Frome, where admittedly tactical voting was clearly a major factor, Labour‘s vote collapsed and it lost its deposit. Conservatives who want to clutch desperately at straws will see these results as a protest against the Conservatives, not a vote for Labour.
Fair enough. But Selby and Somerton are not natural Labour seats and there was always going to be a protest vote against the government rather than a ringing endorsement for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
The reality is that Labour has a 20% lead in the opinion polls and has so consistently for some time now. The only honest assessment of these by-elections and of the polls is that Conservative MPs need to prepare themselves either for opposition, or for a life outside of politics.
