Bus Service Improvement Plans: North-west England

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered funding for bus service improvement plans in the North West.

Thank you for chairing the debate, Ms Nokes.

In Warrington, we are proud of our municipal bus company. It provides connections between our homes and communities, between jobs and opportunities, between healthcare facilities and between our friends and families. For those without cars, like me and thousands of my constituents, buses are essential, and good, reliable bus services are a huge part of the wider picture of reducing carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil.

Because millions of people across this country rely on buses—they cannot just hop into a car if services are slashed—and they cannot find extra cash if fares rise, bus cuts mean being cut off. Deregulation and a decade of Tory decline have meant that more than 3,000 bus routes and more than 350,000 passenger journeys have been lost. The majority of short trips, under 5 km, are made by car. As a result, our region has a significant air pollution issue. In the Liverpool city region alone, more than 1,000 deaths a year are linked to that silent killer. On public transport, 80% of journeys are taken by bus, yet bus fares have risen by 40% and routes have been mercilessly cut nationally. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for opening such a vital debate. One route in my patch that has been or is about to be decommissioned is the No. 62 from Runcorn to her patch, Warrington. That just shows that reregulation is vital. I hope that the judicial review today comes out on the side of those who want to give regulation teeth.

[Charlotte Nichols]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. As he says, services being cut means communities being cut off from one another. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long. They have been an afterthought in decisions made far away in Westminster by politicians who have no understanding of them. The shockingly bad services left behind have made public transport increasingly unviable. In Warrington over the last decade, almost 50% of services have been cut. That is absolutely appalling. It means that people in our community—in particular, elderly residents who do not drive—are completely cut off from other parts of the town.

Just a year ago, the Prime Minister and the Transport Secretary launched the “Bus Back Better” strategy and they pledged to provide a great bus service for everyone everywhere. They promised that it would be one of the great acts of levelling up. This was the ambition: £3 billion of transformation funding was supposed to level up buses across England towards London standards, with main road services in towns and cities to run so often that people would not even need a timetable, and better services in the evenings and at weekends; and to provide simple, cheap flat fares that people could pay with a contactless card, and daily and weekly price capping across operators and rail and trams, too.

In Warrington, our Labour-run council has shown real ambition with a plan to increase bus use by between 5% and 15% through excellent council working with partners to make buses more frequent, faster, reliable, cheaper, easier to use and better integrated. This is a local community backing buses.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I want to make a plug if I may, Ms Nokes. The hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) may be well aware of the advances being made in top-of-the-range buses—for instance, Wrightbus buses in Northern Ireland—hydrogen buses, and the technology that is in use there to make bus travel more environmentally friendly and more environmentally effective. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to invest in a reliable, frequent bus service like that in order to get people to forgo car journeys in the knowledge that they will get to their destination in time? Hydrogen buses are the buses of the future; they are not hampered by breakdowns.

[Charlotte Nichols]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and absolutely agree that greening our transport infrastructure is a really important part both of meeting our climate objectives as a country and of ensuring that people have good-quality services they can rely on. I am proud of the fact that in Warrington we have bid to become one of the country’s first all-electric bus towns. Hydrogen for transport also has a really important part to play. With a lot of hydrogen production taking place across the north-west and in the Liverpool city region in particular, it is something that we are very excited about locally. I know that hydrogen trains are being manufactured in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury). We are excited to be leading in the north-west and hope this can be rolled out more widely.

As we await the funding announcement in full, it looks as though Warrington will be one of the lucky places to receive this investment from the Government. Across the length and breadth of the country, particularly in the north-west, many are counting the cost of broken promises, because for all the rhetoric about levelling up, the small print reveals that “Bus Back Better” is in tatters. A letter sent to local transport authority directors by the Department for Transport on 11 January makes it clear that the budget for the transformation of buses—a pot from which local regions can bid for funds—has shrunk from £3 billion to £1.2 billion for the next three years.

The letter that let the cat out of the bag says:

“Prioritisation is inevitable, given the scale of ambition across the country greatly exceeds the amount.”

We know that bids for almost £8 billion have been submitted by local transport authorities, representing a blueprint for transformation up and down the country, but the levelling-up White Paper confirms that communities will see a fraction of that. Despite that, last month the Secretary of State said it was “absolutely incorrect” to say that funding to transform services has been slashed. One of his most senior colleagues, the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, directly contradicted him. In a letter he said:

“Funding specifically pledged for transformation has been substantially reduced.”

He concluded that he is “gravely concerned” that, far from seeing transformation, many areas face losing their services altogether.

I mentioned the 50% loss of passenger numbers in Warrington. With the price of labour and fuel currently extremely high, it will be difficult for operators to hold down fares and for routes to continue, particularly those that serve more deprived areas where the profit margins are smaller.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for securing today’s debate. May I give an example of the daily commute of one of my constituents? They get on at Farnworth train station to go to Moses Gate. They get off and take the 521 bus, operated by Vision Bus, for about 20 minutes. They then walk 10 minutes to Ladywood School in Little Lever to drop off their child. To get back into Bolton town centre in time for work, they walk 15 minutes to the bus stop and jump on the 524, operated by Diamond Bus, which takes 25 minutes. Quite often, the buses do not turn up or they are cancelled. People end up being late for work and some have even lost their jobs. Does my hon. Friend recognise that that is a concerning situation for many people in our region?

[Charlotte Nichols]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I could not agree more, particularly when we look at the deregulation of bus services, with operators in some regions scrabbling for the same fares and most affordable routes rather than what best serves their community, so we end up with a mismatch of multiple operators running the same route.

The Manchester Oxford Road corridor is the busiest bus corridor in Europe, yet people a mile away are left without bus services to get into Manchester city centre. For towns and cities that have multiple operators, it is an even bigger issue. When I lived in Salford, for example, the franchise changed from First to Stagecoach on part of my route. Overnight, my monthly bus pass trebled in cost, because I could no longer buy a First-only bus pass. Because I had to change from First on to Stagecoach, I had to buy one of the much more expensive multi-operator passes. That is an issue across our region. I am glad that the Labour metro Mayors for the Liverpool city region and for the Greater Manchester region are looking to address that within their combined authorities.

From Greater Manchester to Lancaster, places bypassed by good public transport for far too long have been demanding real change. They put forward an ambitious blueprint to use buses to connect people to jobs, families and opportunities, and tackle the climate crisis in the process. Despite the challenges, they have plans to completely overhaul and reregulate the bus network as part of the bus service improvement plan. It was supposed to be about improved accessibility across the network, including level access from train to platform, and it is part of the work that is beginning on networks of cycling and walking routes across our region.

Labour leaders in power in towns and cities nationwide have real ambition to reverse the decline that we have seen under the Tories. We want a London-style system and to make buses quicker, cheaper, greener and more reliable, but we need a Government whose ambition matches our own. It is now becoming clear that, far from matching the ambition of our communities, Ministers have pulled the rug out from underneath them. Will the Minister now own up and admit what the Transport Secretary will not: that many areas will now not see a single penny of the transformation funding? Will she today detail exactly how much local transport authorities are set to see in transformation funding, and come clean that there will be areas in the north-west that will miss out altogether?

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlotte Nichols]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for their contributions to today’s debate. Although we represent very different and diverse communities across north-west England—and even further north-west, in the case of the hon. Member for Strangford —the story for buses is the same.

Having to take multiple bus services for a journey that would be straightforward by car is a daily reality across our region, not least because of a lack of orbital routes, as they tend to be less profitable, but also because of a lack of connecting services between our towns and cities. Levelling up requires the investment to enable integrated, affordable and green public transport. I am glad that the Minister highlighted some of the incredible achievements of Warrington’s Own Buses, but so much of that is possible because we do not have the broken franchise model that causes so many of the problems elsewhere that we have heard about today. I believe that we are now one of only 10 municipal bus companies left, which means that we seek to operate in the public interest, not for private profit.

In Warrington, Government covid subsidy funding is now secured through to September 2022, but there could well be a cliff edge after that, particularly if fuel costs continue to skyrocket and the funding spoken about today just keeps us where we are. We need to receive our full funding ask through the BSIP—the bus service improvement plan—including capital and operating expenditure funding streams if we are to be able to improve. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston was exactly right to highlight the fact that, for hon. Members who split our week between London and our north-west constituencies, the gulf between the service provision at home and the service provision here is staggering. If it is good enough for London, it is good enough for the north-west. I hope the Minister will take away our concerns and comments to her Department and ensure that the Government’s ambition finally begins to be met in our regions.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered funding for bus service improvement plans in the North West.