The bus industry mustn’t become complacent, and there’s two reason for this
I’m tempted to comment on the merits or otherwise of Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party conference last week (safe to say it was much better than last year’s, but I’ll refrain from commenting on her dance routine), but I’m going to focus on buses again. No bad thing given the nature of routeone.
It occurred to me the other day that we’re now almost 18 months on from when the Bus Services Act received Royal Assent, and to my knowledge there’s not a franchise proposal in sight. Not even, so far as I’m aware, from Greater Manchester.
I’m sure these things take time to prepare and evaluate, but Greater Manchester was working on franchising well before the Act got Royal Assent, and it even told the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, that the power to franchise bus services was an essential condition of the devolution agreement announced back in November 2014. Four years on and nothing’s happened.
No time for complacency
But the bus industry mustn’t become complacent, a point I made last week in another context.
I say this for two principal reasons. First, in its paper The Bus Services Act 2017: New Powers and Opportunities, published in November 2017, the Department for Transport (DfT) said that in 2019 it would “be looking to see what has been achieved and how the bus industry stands two years after the Act received Royal Assent.” The industry can’t afford to allow that review to find operators resting on their laurels.
If I was a transport minister or official in the DfT conducting this review, I would be looking for evidence of continuous service improvement – whether that be in relation to passenger information, smart-card technology, investment in bus fleets and the like.
I would pass on service reliability because all too often that is affected by congestion which the operators can do absolutely nothing about. The bus industry can’t afford for this review to conclude that operators are failing to deliver the kind of service improvements passengers want.
Most Important stakeholder?
Talking of passengers, and to my second reason for urging operators not to be complacent, I should report on a conversation I had with a senior individual in one of the ‘big five’.
I asked who they thought their most important stakeholder was. Guess what? I wasn’t told it was their passengers. Oh no. It’s their shareholders.
Don’t get me wrong, shareholders are very important indeed, and a company Board has a fiduciary duty towards them; without happy shareholders, there might be no company.
But, even if only to be politically correct, I had rather expected to be told that the most important stakeholder was the passenger. After all, no passengers, means no income and no profit to make the shareholders happy.
I was gobsmacked. Complacency is the industry’s biggest enemy – and its potential Achilles’ heel.
