Improving Public Transport

John Milne Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard (Alex Mayer) on her maiden speech, which was lovely to hear. She kept on the theme of buses as well, which is very impressive.

There is a puzzle with rural bus services that needs to be solved. Local residents will all say they are desperate to save their village bus service from closure, yet the local operator will say that footfall keeps going down year on year, and there simply is not enough public subsidy to fill the gap. If everyone wants to use the bus, why are they not actually doing it? The answer is a mix of two things. It is partly the price, but, even more so, it is the service. Service frequency does not sufficiently meet the needs of residents, so they do not take the bus.

Bus services have been in decline ever since Thatcher’s privatisation in the 1980s. While increased car use was always going to have an impact, bus services should have bottomed out years ago. In practice, what we have left today are mostly legacy routes designed to meet the needs of communities from decades ago. We have seen a process of death by a thousand cuts, with incremental cuts in frequency making the bus option less user friendly every year. Across many villages in my constituency of Horsham, it is just not practical any more to rely on buses to get to work. When surveyed in 2021, more than 80% of West Sussex residents said they did not use the bus due to a lack of route options or the infrequency of services.

Gradually, anyone who needs dependable public transport is forced out of rural areas to be replaced by car users, which, in turn, reduces bus usage even further—and the downward spiral continues. As a result, in Horsham and across West Sussex, the local authority has for many years presided over a policy of managed decline, with no serious attempt to reverse or even stabilise things.

This summer, the residents of Partridge Green, a village in the south of my constituency, were surprised to discover that they were about to lose their direct link to Horsham via the No. 17 bus. They learned this with just a couple of weeks’ notice. Nobody consulted them or warned them; they found it out only by studying the new bus timetable when it was issued. Public anger was mainly directed at the local bus operator, but I have to ask: what do we actually expect to happen? It is a private company that needs to make a profit, and the figures said that the cut had to be made. We cannot expect private companies to behave like social enterprises.

Partridge Green residents reacted to the news with an impressive public campaign, which is still ongoing. I attended a large public meeting that had a fair percentage of the entire village population crammed into the local church, and something I heard there really struck me: if only the residents had known the service was in danger, they would have got together to help it, either by using the bus more frequently themselves or by finding some other compromise. However, West Sussex county council gave the residents no warning, so they never had a chance.

This is the killer app we are missing out on: we need to harness the passion of communities to protect their local amenities. Loss of bus services is not the only problem these communities face. Villages are suffering from the removal of banking services, shops, pharmacies, post offices, pubs—you name it. They know they are in a battle, but they are also really motivated to help if only we actually ask them. That may be part of the answer to the long-term decline in service. We need to start by asking what kind of service residents actually want, and what they would use if it actually existed.

I welcome Government promises of increased local funding and control over public transport, but I hope the Government will be realistic in their assessment of local authority capability, when two fifths of councils are on the verge of bankruptcy. We have been fighting a long defensive battle, and, frankly, we have been losing. If we are to have any hope of reversing that, we need a mechanism to go back to the people who actually live in these villages today, and reconstruct the services from the ground up.