Labour is right to reverse bus cuts. But it needs to go much further

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/26/labour-reverse-bus-cuts

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Buses are hugely important. They help us to get to work, to see our loved ones, to access the services we need, and to achieve a sustainable environment. Labour’s announcement today that it intends to reverse cuts to 3,000 bus routes, and expand bus services, with £1.3bn a year promised, is hugely positive and exciting. However, it’s also important that Labour is looking at who is running our buses, and who they’re owned by.

Labour reveals plan to put £1.3bn a year back into local bus services

Buses account for 59% of all public transport trips in Great Britain – compared with only 38% by national rail and underground. But with whopping cuts to these services, and soaring fares, there just aren’t enough. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, noted: “Bus networks are essential for towns and cities and for tackling rural poverty and isolation, which is why Labour is committed to creating thriving bus networks under public ownership.”

This is important because while public control and ownership has succeeded in many places, the country as a whole was forced to privatise its buses in 1986 under Margaret Thatcher. This led to the dominance of what we now call “the big five” bus operators. Our bus services then became a deregulated market, meaning that bus companies competed to run whatever services they liked, and set their own fares. Local authorities can ask companies to run some extra socially necessary services, but only if they have a tidy sum of money to offer them from the public purse. Since then, we have seen a steady decline in services. The Competition Commission found in 2011 that fewer than 1% of services face head-to-head competition, which has led to lower-quality services and higher fares.

We know that public control and public ownership is good for our buses. In fact, London’s buses were never deregulated and the publicly controlled service is a longstanding success, with more journeys there than the rest of the country combined: 2.2 billion every year, and a £1.50 hopper fare that can get you right to the other side of the city. Reading’s publicly owned Reading Buses can invest an additional £3m a year in the bus network (around 12-15% of its annual turnover) because it doesn’t pay out dividends to private shareholders. The extra money means better-quality buses, and is one reason why more people take the bus in Reading. Nottingham and Reading – both cities that have publicly owned buses – are in the top three for highest numbers of bus journeys per head in England. Public ownership is already the norm elsewhere in Europe, such as in Germany where publicly owned operators provide 88% of all local public transport journeys.

Legislation passed in 2017 makes public control possible again, at least for those combined authorities with an elected mayor. New publicly owned bus companies were made illegal, which Labour has promised to overturn. We in Greater Manchester fit the bill for a publicly controlled London-style system, and our mayor, Andy Burnham, has said previously that the “deregulation of the bus services has been a complete and utter disaster for the travelling public”.

Public control means local authorities can direct bus companies as to what routes to run and what fares to charge, and the contracts mean less profit is leaked to shareholders. It makes a simple smartcard system with an automatic daily cap on spend possible; it means that services will run after 6pm at night, and on weekends, because you can use profits from busy routes to subsidise socially and economically necessary routes. It means a service that you can depend on, so fewer cars on the road. Public control of our buses could save £340m across the UK, as currently about 10% of the public money we use to fund bus services is goes in shareholder pay-outs, a recent Transport for Quality of Life report showed.

Public control and ownership of our buses works, and it saves public money.

The bus companies like the way it is now and they’re sure to lobby against change. They currently get to cherry-pick profitable routes and make a killing. But, we’re tired of being cut off. Andy Burnham has a huge opportunity to make Labour’s vision for buses a reality and set the example for the rest of the country.