Transport: Investment Plans

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how bus and rail passengers will benefit from the investment plans for the transport network announced on 9 March.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about this subject today. I promise that I shall say something different in the next debate, which has been fixed for the first day when we come back after the holiday. It is a mistake—I do not know whose mistake it is—but I shall make sure I do not repeat myself, and I am sure the Minister will not either.

I was persuaded to put down this subject for debate because of the launch by the Secretary of State on 9 March of a big investment plan in

“transformational transport schemes over the next 2 financial years across the country”.

I thought that was rather good, but when I looked into it, I had the feeling that there is lots of talk and lots of big figures—which we hear not just in transport but from many other people—but I want to question whether those schemes actually happen on the ground, where people want them to happen.

On the £40 billion over two years, it was confirmed in a Written Answer I received, HL6611, that it was the same budget over two years, and that included an extra £200 million for potholes—I am sure that is welcome. As for the rest of it, is the transformation growth or a cut? On the railways, the Midland main line electrification to Sheffield has been cancelled or postponed. For major roads, the statement says that they have cut £8 billion. We can have opinions on all this, but is it “transformational”? I am told that active travel has been cut by £3 billion, and lots of bypasses are referred to in the press release as being cut.

On buses, which are really important and on which I want to concentrate to a large extent today, the Confederation of Passenger Transport says that grants will now be 20% lower in real terms than they were 10 years ago. It may be that HS2 is mopping up all the budget, but leaving that aside, do all these cuts deliver for the customers?

I want to explore what the customers want, who they are and how they will benefit—this is transport customers all the way through. People need to travel—short, medium and long distances, and several times a day sometimes—to school, college, work or shopping, and sometimes once a year for a holiday. They also need to travel for important things such as doctors and hospitals, to visit friends or for caring et cetera. They are very similar to the needs that the NHS provides for. Many of those transport journeys are pretty essential.

We can walk, cycle or use scooters—I will leave that aside—but public transport is what everybody else will use for distances greater than the smallest ones if they do not own a car or cannot afford to run it. It needs to be safe, affordable and reliable.

It is always my impression when travelling around Europe that the charges and reliability of public transport are very much better than in this country. Some of it is very cheap. It seems to be the best way of getting around safely—and towards net-zero carbon—but we do not seem to care so much about those with no access to a car.

I welcome the Government’s new bus plan, as far as it goes, but to some extent it is another short-term fix. It does not enable people to plan where they might go to school, shop, work or live, and it does not cover all of England. When people want to use buses, they need certainty. The Transport Committee report published this morning commented of the bus service improvement plans:

“Local areas were asked to be ambitious, but the Department has not matched this level of ambition in the funding it has made available, pitting local areas against each other for a share of an inadequate pot.”


It also says that half the country has missed out. I hope that is not the case; perhaps the Minister has an answer to that.

One really bad example of the failure of buses is the community transport Dial-a-Lift funding in Northern Ireland. I know that the Minister is not responsible for transport there, but she could advise her colleague who is. They have cut the funding for Dial-a-Lift completely from the end of April and all the staff have probably been given the sack. This is because of the trouble with the Windsor Framework; I will not go into that, as we heard plenty about it yesterday, but it is a serious problem.

I will give an example. A young single mother in south-east Fermanagh has a 52-mile journey to hospital with her acutely ill six year-old son. She has no money or car; there is no public transport and the taxi service is a £60 to £65 fare. What happens to the child if she does not get there? A female wheelchair user had the same problem; a return fare in a taxi would cost £100. Previously, community transport provided all this. I have a bit of experience of this in Cornwall. The community transport people are really good; they are an essential part of the lives of people who do not have a car and cannot afford one. They reminded me that the Northern Ireland scheme was set up 25 years ago, which is a significant date in the Northern Ireland calendar. I hope the Minister can follow that up with her colleague and make sure that it does not happen here.

Our real challenge is in spending money on the railways, which I will not say much about. The National Audit Office has suggested that there needs to be a reset button on Euston; I suggest it should be a “Delete” button and send everyone to Old Oak Common, which everyone knows is a much better place. The key for railways is that there needs to be a much greater improvement in the services that people want to use every day to get to work, school, shopping or whatever. I have always had an ambition that this country would have a network of local services in the Midlands and the north as good as what we have in the south-east of England. But we do not have that yet, or any budget for it. It is very sad that HS2 seems to be swallowing all the money.

In conclusion, we need a long-term bus strategy. Who will provide it? That will depend on the next election. The Labour Party has produced some really excellent ideas about who should own it. The key is that it should be reliable, affordable and properly funded, delivered locally but with one consistent policy, and not dependent on how well the local authority has submitted its application—they are strapped for cash and time. It needs to provide a service for those who need it and do not have a car or do not want to use one—it is good for the environment, anyway. We need a long-term plan for the railways in the Midlands and the north, as many of us have said for a very long time.

I wonder whether some of the problem with transport is that politicians—we are all politicians—whether local or national, need to understand the needs of their electorate for local, cost-effective public transport and to put their regular daily journeys into a better state, rather than going once a week or once a month to places such as London.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I will of course look very carefully at the National Audit Office report. I do not know that it is saying that it believes that the line is unlikely to go beyond Birmingham; again, I would not know where its evidence would come from for a statement such as that.

We have an opportunity to improve the rail and local transport networks and to adapt to the needs of passengers today. There is a rare chance of some sort of redesign so that the system is fit for the future, because, as I said at the outset, I think all noble Lords want the same thing.

I will now turn to comments about HS2. The Transport Secretary has been very clear that Old Oak Common will act as a temporary London terminus while Euston is completed, but I do not think that any noble Lord should be under the impression that this will somehow be substandard. It will be probably the best-connected and largest new railway station ever built in the UK; it will have 14 platforms—six high speed and eight conventional—and it will be a transport superhub, providing connections to Heathrow via the Elizabeth line and, of course, high-speed rail services through to various parts of the country.

It was already planned that Euston would open later than Old Oak Common. However, we have decided not to proceed to full construction of Euston station in the next two years, which is the period that the Statement looked at, due to affordability and profiling issues. There is an opportunity to look again at the Euston station design to ensure that it is affordable and delivers for both the local community and passengers.

Following this debate, I will set out in a letter as much as I can about the phasing for the different elements of High Speed 2, including going to Crewe and beyond. It is important to put that on record.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her offer to write a letter. Will she also comment on the lack of a firm design for not the station itself but the approaches to Euston? My information is that there is no option that is actually safe to build, and that is quite critical.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I will certainly include that in the letter. I do not have anything with me today.

I turn now to buses, which, as many noble Lords have pointed out, are the absolute backbone of our public transport system. The national bus strategy, which we published back in March 2021, is a long-term strategy. It is important to understand the role of the BSIPs—bus service improvement plans. We asked all local transport authorities to prepare one, which they did, and we used them to look at how to prioritise funding. To a certain extent, there was no bidding process: we did not ask for bids but to review all the bus service improvement plans.

Noble Lords may ask themselves, “Where did these bus service improvement plans come from? Who inputted into them?” We were clear in the national bus strategy that they must have the input of local people; there had to be a passenger board, or whatever they wanted to call it. Listening to the input of local people and businesses allows the bus service improvement plan to have local accountability. I have heard two different things today: that we need to give more powers to local authorities but also that national government should take control of the bus network, as some noble Lords have suggested. Local accountability is really important.

Funding is absolutely key. The Government are spending an additional £3 billion. This is the largest investment in buses in a generation, and it is on top of funding that still goes out to local transport authorities or bus operators to support fares, such as the bus service operating grant of £250 million a year, and the concessions payment of about £1 billion a year. Local transport authorities also get funding in the block grant for tendered services. Unfortunately, some local authorities, particularly rural ones, decide not to use that money on tendered services. That is a disappointment, and local people should be holding those councils to account for those things.

Therefore, with the bus service improvement plans and subsequently the enhanced partnerships, which are a partnership between the transport authority and the bus operator taking into account what has been said by the passengers, that is how bus networks are planned locally. So it is not quite right to say that it is left to the market, because local transport authorities have quite a significant amount of leverage over the bus operators in agreeing what the enhanced partnerships should say, and 75% of enhanced partnerships have now been “made”—that is, they are in existence. Of course, if the enhanced partnership is not working or it is not what the local authority wants to do, it is at liberty to start franchising, and we know that places such as Greater Manchester have already done that. So there are many ways in which local transport authorities can exert power over the bus network to provide what their local people want.

I accept, as I did earlier today in the Oral Question, that the funding is short term at the moment, until 30 June, and that there is an enormous amount of analysis to be done: the impact of the £2 bus fare cap will be important—but also some of the BSIP funding, the revenue side of it in particular, is being used to support fares in places such as Manchester, Liverpool, West Yorkshire and Lancashire, so that will be important. The capital spending from BSIP will take slightly longer to come in, because that is all about bus priority, bus lanes and all those sorts of things, so we need to give that a little more time. However, the market is still in transition, so we are analysing where we are and looking at what any long-term future support might look like.

I know that the right reverend Prelate is a great champion of rural areas, and he was concerned that rural authorities would not have the resources to be able to do the BSIPs that we ask them to do. In fact, we gave them the money to provide the resources for that. We gave them £23 million to work up their BSIPs and enhanced partnerships and, subsequently, we gave all the local authorities that were not successful in getting funding—about half of them—£11 million to make sure that they could roll out the bus service improvement plans that they had. There are many things that they could do to improve services which do not necessarily require funding.

The right reverend Prelate will have heard me speak before about demand-responsive transport in rural areas—the bus fare cap is very good for rural areas, particularly on longer routes—and the BSOG really supports fares in rural areas as well. In addition, community transport is important in rural areas, which is also taken into account in any BSIP.

I am very conscious that I have 45 seconds in which to do rail. I recognise the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, in this area and his great interest in rail, and from a DfT perspective we recognise that performance needs to improve across the system. We have had numerous conversations about Avanti and TPE, and we know the impact of removal of rest-day working there. However, at the heart of it are the passengers, and GBR, the transition team for Great British Railways, is looking at that 30-year vision for our railways. We continue to invest billions of pounds in our railways for the sorts of local railways that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, wants to see. Now we have to look through the RNEP, make the correct decisions based on current passenger numbers, which again are not the same all over the country—some areas are seeing higher passenger return then others. Therefore the RNEP is being reviewed by Ministers at the moment and that will be published; the investment will continue, and that is part of the £40 million.

I note that I have gone over my 12 minutes. I know that there are many things that I have not been able to cover but I will certainly write a letter. Once again, I am always grateful to talk about railways and local transport—both subjects that are very close to my heart.