Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill and join the widespread tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, that we have heard from the Minister and around the House.

Noble Lords may be a little surprised to see me as transport is not usually my territory, but I can reassure them that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb is recovering very well from her hip operation. She will hopefully be back on Monday. I expect that she will take forward later stages of the Bill, but in the meantime your Lordships get me.

Introducing the Bill, the Minister reflected on the fact that three parties had promises about bus services in their manifestos. I will have to add to that and say that the Green Party put bus services absolutely front and centre of its manifesto. I will highlight two things from that manifesto. One was a focus on village bus services. It promised a service to every village in the land. The second thing was free bus travel for under-18s. I point noble Lords to the success of the Scottish Greens. From their place in government, they were able to bring in free bus travel for under-22s in Scotland. That has seen a real step forward in introducing young people to bus services and building it into a standard part of their lives. That free offer has been really successful, really useful and really valued.

Quite a number of noble Lords have said, “Well, there’s the cities, and they can do these things, but we’ve got to be realistic about what rural areas can do”. It is important not to underrate the capacity of rural bus services and rural institutions to oversee them. I will give a practical example. After the shock of the Covid pandemic, the Green-led Herefordshire county council made all buses free at weekends and put on extra weekend services. They used £1 million from the Covid recovery fund to do that. Of course, we are talking about Herefordshire, a heavily rural area, with towns and villages. Nearly 170,000 journeys were taken on the 12 new Sunday bus services and, after the scheme ended, five of the most popular services continued to run seven days a week. So, if you provide the services and give people the real cost benefit of those services, they will adopt them and make them a regular part of their lives. That is as true of rural areas as it is of city areas.

Coming to the broader picture, I will revisit a figure that I suspect several people have already cited: in 2023-24, there were 3.6 billion passenger journeys. Buses are how people get around. But this figure has seen a massive decline. The mileage for the year to the most recent March was down a quarter since 2010. We have heard a lot of hot air over recent decades about the claimed “war on the motorist”, but, instead, we have actually had a butchering of the buses. I started with the figure from 2010, because I am afraid we know where the responsibility for that butchering of the buses lies: the party that was in control at the time. Behind that has been an ideological position where bus services, particularly outside London, have been run for private profit rather than for the public good. This is one more privatisation disaster that has absolutely failed. To a limited degree at least, the Bill is, happily, finally undoing that loss of local control and local democracy that was represented by privatisation.

Like a number of noble Lords, I will briefly focus on how buses are particularly important to lower-income households, jobseekers, women and older people. They are crucial for public health—I do not think anyone has used that phrase yet—because we have a widely acknowledged loneliness epidemic. If we think about one prescription to tackle that, bus services being readily available to people is an important part of that measure.

On that, I want to pick up a particular point with the Minister. We are coming back to funding, and I understand that this may not be central to the Bill, but it is an important and relatively cheap point. The statutory concessionary bus fare for free travel for pensioners and disabled people runs on weekdays between 9.30 am and 11 pm. We all know about medical appointments that may require travel before 9.30 am, and we know that many older people often provide childcare to enable family members to take paid employment. They may well need to travel before 9.30 am. Will the Minister look at making what would be quite a modest investment to ensure that that concessionary free travel is available to everyone, which would surely have a high level of public benefit?

Many people have raised the rise in fares from £2 to £3. It is worth highlighting that the £3 level is, under current government arrangements, due to end in December this year. That does not give people a long-term sense of planning. Surely, the sensible thing to do would be, ideally, to go back to £2 but at least to provide long-term certainty—for operators, local councils, communities and individual travellers—that the £3 bus fare will stay.

Like many noble Lords, I received a large number of briefings and will highlight those from the Green Alliance, the Campaign for Better Transport and the Urban Transport Group. The Green position, and that of those briefings, sets out that the Bill is heading in the right direction but is not going nearly far or fast enough. One thing that is missing is the failure to encourage the recovery of lost routes. Local authorities need to be able to identify where the holes are and to fill them in, but the Bill does not provide for that. Absolutely rightly, there is also a call for a bus service guarantee, to guarantee that all communities have a minimum level of bus service. That comes back to the village point that I started with.

Noble Lords would expect me, as a Green, to focus on the need for a firm date for zero-emission buses. This is such an obvious step both for public health and for reliability and certainty. For new buses, high levels of reliability are really important, as well as clean air.

Finally, we have talked quite a bit about bus stops. I will jump on a favourite little hobby horse of mine: the assumption that everyone has a mobile phone that will give them reliable information about bus arrivals. That is not true in London; it is not true at the bus stop that I use most mornings. Having signage at bus stops where possible, or at least proper guidelines and timetables, is crucial to enable people to use buses.

I have to highlight the situation in South Yorkshire, which has been terribly hit by that butchering of the buses. We have seen a bus mileage decline of 42% across the region. The bus services in South Yorkshire have got close to what you would have to describe as collapse. There is a plan to take franchising forward, but it will take a very long time. The Bill will possibly assist, but I would be interested in anything that the Minister can say particularly about helping South Yorkshire to put back those crucial services, in an area where people really need them to get to work and get around.

I will raise a point that I do not think anyone else has raised specifically. Some noble Lords may know about a campaign—it is starting in London but should apply around the country—for a London bus driver Bill of Rights to be included in the TfL framework bus contract. I am aware that this Bill does not cover London, but the issues that this campaign raises none the less apply for bus drivers around the country. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, pointed out that bus drivers are an ageing group of people, and we need to make sure that this career appeals to people coming in for the future.

I give noble Lords advance notice that, on 29 January, a march will start from Victoria station, where, a year ago, a pedestrian was killed by a route 13 RATP bus operating under contract for TfL. At least 87 other victims have been killed in preventable bus safety accidents in London since 2016. Of course, this is of great concern to the drivers, given the conditions of the contract, which they feel are dangerous. I note that the drivers will be marching to Parliament Square, so look out for them on 29 January.

The Bill does not have any of the data transparency or safety reporting requirements that the House of Lords tried to incorporate in the Bus Services Act 2017, so my noble friend will very likely bring up that issue in particular at further stages of the Bill.