Public Transport in Towns and Cities

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, his predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the members of the Built Environment Committee for their thorough, detailed and evidence-based review of the current context of public transport in our towns and cities. This review comes at a critical time for public transport, as we consider considerable changes to travel patterns as we emerge from the Covid pandemic. I also thank the Institution of Civil Engineers, mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for its helpful briefing, and our Library, which, as ever, provided a succinct and relevant briefing.

I grew up in a planned new town with 45 kilometres of cycleway infrastructure, which I know many towns would give their eye teeth for, and the then council-owned SuperBus service, which disappeared with privatisation. I consider it a very fortunate, good model of transport. In considering this subject, we must always be extremely careful not to underestimate the vital importance of all aspects of public transport. A notable statistic that stood out for me was the National Audit Office’s conclusion that bus services alone affect the performance of two-thirds of government departments. I would go so far as to say that public transport is a key pillar of levelling up, sitting alongside jobs and skills, housing, health, education, community safety and climate change.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to the contribution that good bus services have made in London to social mobility and the economy. As he said, nearly two-thirds of all journeys on public transport are by bus. Yet, as the Campaign for Better Transport points out, bus miles have declined by 27% since the pandemic, with over 5,000 routes lost. The Select Committee sets out clearly in its report that when the pandemic support funding ends—I appreciate that the cliff edge has been moved to June; that was greatly appreciated—we could see even further reductions of 20% in bus services. As the poorest 20% of households make three times as many trips by bus as the richest 20%, this could have a further devastating impact on levelling up. If you take a job or college place based on being able to access it by bus, and then that bus service is cut, your access to that opportunity is severed. These points were referred to by the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Carrington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, gave another worrying example of their impact.

There can be no doubt that the hollowing out of local government funding over successive years since 2010 has inflicted deep and lasting damage on the provision of effective and efficient public transport for our communities. With un-ringfenced budgets, the pressures on adult care and children’s services are overwhelming local authority budgets, resulting in cuts to areas such as transport subsidies. As has been debated this afternoon, funding for transport is at best contradictory and, at worst, chaotic and wasteful.

My noble friend Lord Grocott referred to issues around “London versus the rest”. I also wanted to mention the importance of differentiating between towns and cities in relation to public transport, not to mention interconnectivity with rural areas. Towns can feel like the Cinderella of public transport systems; they miss out on competitive funding pots because their local authorities do not have the resources to put bids together and, in two-tier areas, they have to compete with surrounding districts for funding. The prospect of London-style public transport—even Manchester-style public transport would be quite good—can seem like a distant dream in our towns, where services are infrequent, unreliable and expensive, or in rural areas, where they are non-existent. Even creative solutions such as demand-responsive transport can flounder because of over-demand and congestion.

It is clear from the report that changing public transport needs post pandemic need radically new thinking and approaches. Our services are geared to nine-to-five weekday commuting, when the whole pattern of working and leisure travel has changed. In truth, this was starting to happen before Covid, but it has accelerated considerably. The Institution of Civil Engineers points out the importance of data gathering and analysis post Covid; these points are examined in detail in the report. I am interested to hear the Minister’s response on how this is being undertaken by the DfT and whether she yet has any sense of how long it will be before a settled, post-pandemic picture of public transport use emerges.

It is impossible to do justice to such a comprehensive report in a few minutes, so I will focus on passenger experience, funding and devolution. With the complex systems and structures around public transport provision in the UK, it is all too easy for the passenger experience to get lost. Although bus service improvement plans are a step in the right direction, what reassurance is there of robust bus user consultation processes? The same applies to train and other public transport modes. Too often, it seems to be left to passengers to form their own pressure groups to drive the changes that they want to see.

In my local community people tell me that, although they would like very frequent services, they would much rather have a sharp focus on reliability and travel information that they can rely on and—as the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, referred to—affordable and stable fares, transport systems that connect with each other and with walking and cycling routes, and to feel safe. I have some experience of this, having just finished the production of a bus interchange that links in with cycling. The railway station has covered waiting accommodation, Changing Places-type toilets and other facilities linking with mobility scooters to get people around once they get to the bus station. Can the Minister comment on how close we are to an integrated transport strategy? Could that help enable the data sharing needed to provide good passenger travel information?

I was particularly pleased to see the issue of safety being taken very seriously by the Select Committee, a point highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. Changing work and leisure patterns mean that public transport is often needed in the evenings, and the combination of unreliable services, stations, stops and interchanges that do not feel safe and the fact that many local authorities have decided for budget reasons to turn off street lights at night all mitigate against women and other vulnerable users feeling safe to use public transport.

The ambition to bring local transport systems

“significantly closer to the standards of London”

is laudable if somewhat incomprehensible to those who live in rural areas that may have scarce or non-existent public transport. Nevertheless, let us be optimistic. If improvements are to be made, it will require a herculean effort of disentangling the complexities of funding and the disparities mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott.

The Select Committee is right to set out the key challenges. They include evaluation of the investment in capital schemes, on which the committee had some very interesting evidence from Professor Preston, who discussed the issues of social cost benefits of transport schemes relating to public health, environment, access to jobs and skills, and quoted a KPMG study showing a 3:1 social benefit over cost. There is the further cliff edge for support for bus services funding, now extended to June 2023, but can the Minister elaborate further on what will happen after that? Then there is the competitive bidding process for funding, which disadvantages those areas most in need of stable, sustainable public transport.

There is also the failure to deliver less than half of the £3 billion that local authorities were expecting for bus service improvement plans. I have seen the table setting out the combined total, but that does not help the local authorities that wanted to be ambitious with their improvement plans or those that got no funding at all. Encouraging local authorities to bid for levelling-up funds for public transport just exchanges one competitive funding pot with another. Can the Minister comment on how the DfT will respond to the Select Committee’s recommendation that it should switch from funding pots—or bidding bingo, as I prefer to call it—to provision in block grants, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and others? I note that we are told that we may see a paper on this later this year, but it is pretty urgent that we get on with that.

On the point about concessionary fares, which was raised by noble Lords this afternoon, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. The fantastic contribution that concessionary fares make to well-being for those who benefit is remarkable. I hope that the Minister will confirm that it is not the intention of the Government to use this method to fill the funding gap.

Lastly, on devolution—for which I am a passionate advocate, as many noble Lords will know—the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill going through your Lordships’ House has the opportunity and the potential to ensure that the Select Committee’s key recommendation on effective integration of land use and transport planning can be realised. In fact, we will be discussing some of these issues tomorrow in Committee. As Manchester has been able to go further with this than other local authorities, it was interesting to read Andy Burnham’s evidence to the Select Committee. In advocating franchising, he pointed out that his case was strengthened

“because large subsidies are being paid at the moment to various operators in the deregulated model”,

which, in his view,

“delivers very limited returns for the public”.

He also asked whether public operators would be allowed to take part in the franchising schemes as well. I am interested in the Minister’s view on that.

I look forward to the Minister’s responses to all the points made this afternoon. It is absolutely right that we should link transport planning with local plans. There are some difficulties with that, particularly in two-tier areas, but we work together and co-operate well on issues like that. We may need to articulate that in debates on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Lords, Lord Haselhurst and Lord Shipley, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Faulkner, for their very strong advocacy of that system.

We cannot all live in Paris, which we heard about earlier, although some of us might not be averse to that—I certainly would not, but it is important that we have accessible, reliable and safe transport networks, which are essential to help us to achieve our long-term strategic objectives. Decarbonising the economy is not the least of those, but there are also the sustainable development goals. If the recommendations of this report are implemented, they will take us some way towards that, and I look forward to hearing the responses from the Minister.