At a recent online event organised by Transport Focus, Baroness Vere, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Transport with responsibility for buses, opened up a touch on her current thinking about the direction of bus policy and what should inform the National Bus Strategy – which I hear might not now be released until Q1 2021.
She told us that passengers will be at the heart of the strategy, and that it will set out how the government and the industry can get people who currently do not use the bus to become bus users, as that is how growth is achieved.
Will the National Bus Strategy teach the industry to to suck eggs?
Wise words, perhaps, but hardly rocket science. Do we really need a National Bus Strategy to tell us that the passengers must be at the heart of the industry, and that attracting first time users is a key objective?
This, surely, has been at the heart of how every bus operator thinks, lives and breathes every second of every day. If they do not, they should not be in the industry. If this is to be the core of the National Bus Strategy, then I worry that it is going to be a huge disappointment.
Baroness Vere also posed the question: “How do we get first time users onto the bus?” That, too, is hardly a new question, or something that bus operators don’t think about every day. And here, I suggest, the answer is already well known. Bus services must be reliable and punctual, clean and affordable.
There. That wasn’t rocket science, was it?
National Bus Strategy to talk up the benefits of reregulation?
Surely there cannot be a single operator that is not constantly thinking about new ways to attract first time users onto their services? Please tell me that the National Bus Strategy is going to be more substantial than this!
But, as this was an online discussion, I suspect that Baroness Vere was keeping her powder pretty dry. I don’t blame her for that one bit. It’s what I would do if I was in her shoes. But here, I think, is the concern.
I’ve said often enough before that I was worried that a National Bus Strategy might talk up the benefits of franchising and that franchising is the way to deliver the key criteria – reliability, cleanliness and affordability – to encourage people to use the bus.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that in the early days of his premiership, Boris Johnson himself expressed support for franchising. If the National Bus Strategy is to be worth it, and if it to be a genuine “strategy” and not just a paper that pushes out platitudes, and a paper with genuine proposals in it, then I worry that it might give a genuflection – perhaps more than that – towards the franchise model.
Consider the arguments around bus franchising
I have expressed this concern before, and I have heard nothing that eases it.
Indeed, the collapse in patronage as a result of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic can all too easily be used by advocates of franchising as the reason why Combined Authorities and local transport authorities should have a far greater say – even control – over the bus market in their areas.
To the neutral observer, they have compelling arguments – until you remind them that the regulated market never halted the decline in bus patronage anyway, and exposes taxpayers to substantial financial risk.
So I await publication of the National Bus Strategy with interest, but with some trepidation, too.
The good news is that a vaccine is now on its way and a vaccination programme is starting to be rolled out. That is positive for bus, coach and rail operators alike, as perhaps there is now light at the end of the tunnel, and we can look forward to a day when life returns to normal and people return to public transport.
It will be some time, maybe years, before we get back to anywhere near pre-lockdown patronage levels, but I can imagine that operators can now start to feel that the tide will begin to turn over the coming weeks and months.
Industry must now look forward to 2021
It is hard to describe the kind of year that we have all had, individually and as businesses. Public transport operators have been on the front line, not just in terms of impact on their businesses but in terms of how their front-line staff in particular – the customer facing part of the operation – have coped with it all.
One can only sit back and admire the resilience of these front-line staff and their willingness to keep operations running, especially in the early days of the pandemic when there was so much uncertainty about how dangerous it really was.
If I may say so, it is the front-line staff more than the back-room managers, Managing Directors and CEOs, even government ministers and civil servants, that are the real heroes in all of this.
At least we can look forward to 2021 with rather more confidence than perhaps we thought might be the case a few weeks ago. I hope that the National Bus Strategy is worthy of its name and that it retains the concept of a deregulated commercial market at its heart.
The trouble is, when you see how the government has been willing to effectively renationalise the railways – not just this year but progressively since Network Rail was renationalised – my hopes and expectations for the Strategy are not high.
This is my last Westminster Watch for 2020, a year that I suspect most of us will be glad to see the back of. It only remains for me to wish you all as happy a festive season as you can possibly have. I think we can now all believe that 2021 is going to be a rather more prosperous year than 2020. Happy Christmas!
