Rural Bus Services

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for bringing this matter before the House.

We can take as read the importance of public transport to the carless in the countryside—the poor, the old, the young, the disabled, and so on. Without public transport they cannot access work, food, doctors, medicines, education, training, banks, lawyers, accountants, cash machines or just meetings with family and friends.

Equally, we are all aware that the deliverers of public and private services are cutting back the number of outlets they have in rural England. My local paper has just announced eight more bank closures; our local police station has just been closed; post offices are getting fewer; there is another wave of court closures coming; small rural health centres are threatened; jobcentres get fewer, as do small local pharmacies and so on. It is clear that the candle of rural life is being burnt away at both ends because, just as all these services are getting further removed from their rural customers, at the one end, so the provision of public transport is being diminished at the other.

I wish to make two points. The first is about rural-proofing and joined-up government. Any department or local authority cutting back on local services must rural-proof their policies. This means understanding the consequences for the carless, who I have described, who can no longer reach the services being “rationalised”.

The decision-makers in both central and local government must analyse what local public transport exists and ensure that the local transport authority is aware of the importance of the transport assumptions that they, the rationalisers, have made. Equally, the LTA, when examining its local transport grid and assessing its priorities for subsidy and support, must take account of the assumptions that have been made by the local health authority, the local courts and so on. I could even suggest that if one department or local service is saving money by closing a particular outlet, maybe it ought to contribute to keeping going the bus services to the surviving outlets on which it has, or at least should have, based its assumptions. Just because you are saving money, you have no right to thrust extra costs on to others, including the LTA. That is my main point.

My second point is an optimistic look into the future. In 15 or so years’ time, driverless cars will have changed the way we get around. For a start, regular bus routes could be served by cheap to run driverless mobility pods, as we will learn to call them, with automated mechanisms both in the vehicle and along the route. Then it is likely that fewer people will own a car. There will be a new agenda for motoring. Like an Uber taxi, one will order a cheap driverless car to turn up and take you wherever you want whenever you want. You will not have to park it. It will park itself, if it needs to. You will not be responsible for maintaining, licensing or insuring the vehicle.

The ramifications for the rural agenda here are enormous and the LTAs should soon start thinking about the sort of service they can offer and maybe even the fleet of cars they might need to own. I will say no more about that but leave it as food for thought.

I will end with a story of my time at the Countryside Agency. I was meeting a group of Yorkshire parish chairmen and somehow the conversation drifted to the problems of the disaffected rural youth who could not get into towns to join youth clubs, football clubs and so on because there was no evening bus service. Trying to bring a rather taciturn chairman into the conversation, I asked him when the last bus went from his parish to Harrogate. He looked at me blankly and after a moment he said, “1987, mate”. It rather killed the conversation.

Sadly, the direction of decline since then has done nothing to alleviate his concerns but, hopefully, automatic vehicles will offer a bright new future to the next generation of rural young.