Bus Services: North-east England

Andy McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) on securing this important debate. Considering that more journeys are made on buses than any other form of public transport, we do not really give them much attention in this place. Perhaps it is because those who live and work in London are not aware of their luck in having an inexpensive and reliable bus network, unlike much of the rest of the country.

London successfully resisted the Thatcher Government’s deregulation of buses in 1986, but in the north-east we were not so fortunate. Thanks to the maintenance of regulation, London’s franchised services outperform the rest of the country, with Transport for London and the Mayor setting routes and fares, and therefore ensuring that buses in the capital are run for people, not simply for private profit. Under a regulated system, bus routes are not restricted to narrow, profitable corridors; people are provided with crucial and necessary services, which means that wider benefits are reaped in both social and economic terms.

By connecting people with each other and their schools, workplaces, shops and hospitals, we can build flourishing communities. Ensuring that we make the most of new industries also requires planning for bus service provision. For that joined-up thinking to work, re-regulation is required. Yet for all their talk about giving local authorities and people more power over their lives, the Conservatives have slashed funding for council services that pays for our vital services, such as buses. They have also continued to deny local authorities the powers they need to serve their communities.

In Middlesbrough and across Tees Valley we have, in effect, a duopoly of Stagecoach and Arriva, whose principal purpose and duty is the extraction of profits for their shareholders—ironically, in the case of Arriva, the German state-owned transport company. We are left with the situation where bus passengers in London can pay fares of as little as £1.55 to travel across the city with that money going back into TfL’s coffers, while for those in the north-east and certainly in Middlesbrough, £2 will get you about a mile and a half down the road if you are lucky.

The Tory 2019 manifesto also promised to match the money in the Tees Valley that would otherwise have been received from the EU shared prosperity fund. The reality is that we are losing out to the tune of £900 million, just as we have done over the past decade of Tory rule, as we have received well below the average in transport investment in terms of current and capital spending.

Last year, our region received the lowest amount of transport investment overall. Compared with almost £8 billion spent by the Government on transport in London, the north-east received around one-tenth of the amount, which works out at almost one-third as much per head.

We also have a problem with what Conservative politicians in our region are choosing to spend money on. The decision of the Tees Valley Mayor to purchase Teesside airport initially cost the taxpayer £40 million, but with a £14 million loss last year, it required a further injection of a further £10 million at the taxpayers’ expense.

At the general election, Labour brought forward a comprehensive plan to electrify all buses operating in England at a cost of about £114,000 per bus. A rough estimate of the cost of electrifying the 330 buses operating in the Tees Valley comes to under £38 million. Instead of obsessing about the airport, the Tees Valley Mayor could and should have paid attention to using the powers he has to re-regulate our buses and make them work for passengers and not private profit, and to decarbonising our fleet to improve the air quality of our communities and help us meet our broader climate commitments.

The Government talk a great deal about “taking back control” but that is really about them and corporate entities having control over people’s lives, not about giving power back to the people, as evidenced by the Government undermining Transport for the North. They brag about levelling up, but after 11 years of Tory Government, the reality is that the inequalities in transport provision and the betrayal of the north continue unabated. We see that in the disastrous integrated rail plan and the continuing failure to invest properly in bus services.

Bus services are massively important in my community and I urge the Minister to encourage her Mayor to break away from this failed deregulated system and embrace the success and opportunities that re-regulated and municipal services present to our local economies and communities, and that have been widely embraced in so many developed nations across the world. If we look across the channel, there are endless examples of how that has revitalised communities. I urge the Government to take heed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Trudy Harrison)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd; I hope to do justice to the points that have been raised. I congratulate the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) on securing this debate on the provision of bus services in the north-east. It is rather refreshing to hear all the support for buses. As a fellow northerner and a fellow rural MP, I, too, welcome the intensive interest in bus transport. As the Prime Minister set out in his 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, buses—

[Andy McDonald]

Will the Minister give way?

[Trudy Harrison]

I have only just begun, but I will give the hon. Gentleman the honour.

[Andy McDonald]

I am very grateful. The Minister is applauding the interest in bus service provision in the north-east of England. It will not have escaped her attention that the Opposition Benches are full of Labour MPs from the north-east, but there is no one on the Government Benches. How is that a commitment to transport in the north-east of England?

[Trudy Harrison]

Let me talk about the commitment from this Government. Connecting people every day to jobs, studies and vital local services is absolutely why we value buses. The benefits are clear. They are at the very centre of our public transport system, and in 2019-20 there were more than twice as many passenger journeys by bus as by rail.

Covid-19 has had a huge impact here, as it has elsewhere, and the Government have provided an unprecedented amount of support for the bus sector, which the hon. Member for Blaydon referred to. Through the pandemic, more than £1.5 billion has been announced to date. That has been essential to keep bus services running and to get workers to jobs, children to schools and people to vital services. Without that support, bus services would have operated at a loss or would have stopped running entirely.

But we do not just want to go back to how bus services were before covid. There are huge opportunities to change the way that bus services operate and we want to make them better. That is why the commitment to buses is evident in the already mentioned “Bus Back Better” national bus strategy, which was published in March this year. It explains how we will see these services being more frequent, more reliable, easier to understand and use, better co-ordinated and cheaper. The point about comparing and contrasting London prices with those elsewhere in the country has been made many times.

Our central aim is to get more people travelling by bus—to not just get patronage back, but increase it—but we will achieve that only if we can make the bus a practical and attractive alternative to the car for many people.