Rural Bus Services

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, when we talk about sustainable rural communities, we are covering a very wide range of communities where how we define sustainability and the things we need to do to achieve it can be very different. Social, economic and technological changes are as inevitable in rural areas as they are in towns and cities, and harking back to what we used to have is likely to prove unfruitful.

I live in a very small village in Suffolk with a population of 275. Our facilities are a post box and the parish church with its associated church room. It is not just a place of worship; it is the focal point of our social life. The 1901 census showed that the village had a population of 229. Even then, we were not able to sustain a shop or a pub. Every employment listed was related to the local farms. Around 95% of the population were born in Suffolk, and most of them in the village. The incomers lived in the rectory.

The village is not much larger now but its inhabitants come from across the United Kingdom and from abroad. The range of occupations is wide, and the uniting factor is that we have all chosen to live in the village, notwithstanding its lack of facilities. We expect to have to travel. I do not know how long it is since we had a decent bus service. When my now husband first came to the village about a decade ago, he asked, “When is the next bus?”. “Thursday”, I told him, but we do not even have that now.

Of course, we need alternatives to the private car, and that gap is filled by neighbours, by local taxis and by a demand-responsive community transport system. However, as we have heard, councils have been forced to divert money from discretionary schemes such as community bus services in order to fund the statutory scheme, which increasingly is not available in rural areas. If you ask the residents in my village what they need to keep their community sustainable, they tell you that it is better broadband access.

Just down the lane is a village around eight times larger. It has a range of facilities, and sustainability there is rather different. The residents there want planning policies which preserve the space between them and the nearby town so that they keep their village identity. Having always had a good bus service, they want to keep it. People have chosen to live there because of the location and the services, and the bus service now being under threat is posing a major problem for those who rely on it.

I am afraid that “rural proofing” by government is a total myth. During the passage of the Bus Services Bill, the question of rural public transport was raised and the Minister referred to the statutory guidance. To his embarrassment, when it was published it contained two lines about rural buses. The Bill could have provided a really good opportunity to bring the benefits of area-wide franchising to rural areas—in effect permitting a cross-subsidy with more profitable routes—but, because the opportunity is limited to areas with elected mayors, places like mine are not likely to benefit.

Whole swathes of government policy are based on the assumption that accessibility is easy, when for those in rural areas it is not. Government should not assume that poverty and social inequality are something you find only in towns—they are real and harder to spot in rural villages because families are often very isolated. The Suffolk Community Foundation has done superb work on this in its Hidden Needs reports.

Sustainability is very much about diversity—of age, occupation, background and economic situation. Keeping that diversity, especially in very small communities, does not need dramatic government intervention, but it does need proper attention to the detail of legislation and policy to make sure that they are genuinely rural-proofed.