Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Goddard of Stockport Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Goddard of Stockport]

2: Clause 4, page 3, line 2, at end insert “, and more than one day”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe the Government on whether there is no longer any minimum period from which the provisions proposed by a franchising authority may be mobilised.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 2 and support my noble friend Lady Brinton’s Amendment 6, as well as my further amendment in this group, Amendment 12. I am seeking to probe the Government with my amendment as to whether there is no longer a minimum period from which the provisions proposed by a franchising authority may be mobilised.

In layman’s terms, can a local authority vary bus routes quicker than in the provisions for the Bee Network of Greater Manchester? The original term under the law then was six months to vary a bus route. That caused real difficulties for Greater Manchester when it was ready to implement new routes connecting communities, new rural routes, and much needed direct bus routes to, for instance, the specialist cancer hospital in Manchester, The Christie, and Wythenshawe Hospital. This legislation would not allow that to happen, and I seek clarity on whether the Government have acted to remove that anomaly.

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[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

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[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I support my noble friend Lord Bradshaw. That is part of what we have done with the Bee Network in Manchester. We now have park-and-rides in parts of the borough where you can park your car all day and the bus comes and takes you straight down the very busy routes. We have increased bus lanes and camera alterations mean that as the bus arrives, traffic lights respond to it. It is that certainty, especially for people going to hospital and other places, that they know they can get there if they leave the car, perhaps a mile or a mile and a half away. It stops congestion at peak times throughout the borough. It is that foresight that local authorities have to embrace.

It is a good idea that if money comes from the Government, it comes with a proviso that you are providing evidence that you can reduce traffic and increase productivity by moving people from A to B without, as my noble friend Lady Pinnock said, waiting hours and hours for a bus that could eventually cost you your job. I fully support my noble friend’s amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to four amendments in this group, Amendments 30, 31, 32 and 69, although, again, I will speak to them out of numerical order. This week I stand down as chairman of the Built Environment Select Committee, and this morning I chaired my last meeting. It is quite curious that somebody very kindly gave me as a memento and a keepsake an original edition of the government-commissioned report, largely written by Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns. It warned that traffic would clog up towns and get in the way and strongly suggested that measures should be introduced. The interesting thing, perhaps, is that the report was published in 1963, 60 years ago. It was a very influential report, but obviously not influential enough if we are still, essentially, making the same claim today. It is possible that there is a political explanation of why the measures that Traffic in Towns proposed have never been implemented as fully as might be wished.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Goddard of Stockport Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I think the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is missing the point slightly. We talk about who is running the buses; people who see the way that Bee Network buses are run in Greater Manchester will unlock the questions that the noble Lord is asking. How do we get to rural routes? How do we cover the distances to schools? How do we go where the privatised bus companies will not, because the profit is not there? Where do you find the money to fill those gaps to make those routes work?

If you bring the buses under your control, the profit that would go to big companies is reinvested. That then funds rural routes and routes to hospitals and schools and for the disadvantaged. It is a simple mathematical thing: instead of putting profits in the hands of shareholders, you put them in the hands of local authorities, which can then do exactly as the noble Lord wants, which is to run the buses profitably.

It is a myth—people have seen what has happened in Greater Manchester and will happen in Yorkshire and other areas—that a transport authority with very little vision will decide that it is easier to go its own way than to deliver what is clearly a better, more punctual service, with better public satisfaction and cheaper fares. Those are the benefits of going down the road that we have taken in Manchester, and I hope the Bill enables other transport authorities to partake of it.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I beg the Committee’s indulgence for a moment to respond to that magnificent expostulation of a classic Marxian view of the world. It is very hard to see how the noble Lord has found himself on the Liberal Democrat Benches when he believes that one has just to eliminate the profit for the surplus released to pay for everything you might want. The truth is that you need an awful lot of subsidy to run socially necessary services to places that have insufficient passengers to justify commercial services. Those subsidies are necessary, whether you release the modest profits that bus companies make or not.

Most of the country relies on private bus operators. Manchester is a special case because of the density of the population. We rely on private bus services and those companies need to flourish. The Government are not remotely thinking about their interests; they are an afterthought. It bodes very ill for the future of bus services in this country that the Government are so inconsiderate of them.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Goddard of Stockport Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 13th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I suppose you could say that this is a modestly frivolous proposal because I do not suppose for a moment that the Minister will agree to it, but I thought it would give us an opportunity to take a little excursion into the history and byways of English bus history and to consider how it is that institutions, once established, can take root in a fashion that means they are almost impossible to abolish. Indeed, they can even engender a degree of affection that means they become almost inbred in the national consciousness, not that there are many people outside the transport industry who are conscious of the traffic commissioners. It is worth bearing in mind that they arose in the bad old days of corporate capitalism and monopoly capitalism, which prevailed particularly in the 1920s when what Americans called trusts were thought of as the rational way of delivering goods and services in the private sector. We adopted that idea, creating monopolies wherever we possibly could in the private sector, unregulated monopolies in many cases, and encouraging them.

So it came to be that the thought that capitalism unbridled would produce reckless and wasteful competition arose in the bus industry nationally—or among those observing the bus industry—that it needed to be properly organised on a rational basis and that the way to do this would be to appoint an authority that would be able to decide who could run a bus, where they could run the bus and what fares they could charge. As this was a gentle form of English socialism, it was not a national authority but rather 12—I think it was 12— regional authorities in the shape of a traffic commissioner, whose job it was to do all this work and decide who could run a bus and where.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

I have seen the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is not addressing it; he is giving us a history lesson. We had this in the football debate where we had 25 minutes of someone describing the difference between a badge and a crest. It was an excellent presentation on the fleur-de-lis and the history of football crests, but it served no purpose whatever towards the football Bill and, at the end, the amendment was withdrawn. I think that sometimes Members need to be mindful of the time and effort that other Members put into sitting in these Committees and should perhaps use a bit less frivolous description just to prolong the meeting. It is absolutely contrary to the spirit of how these Committees are supposed to work. To probe the Government is fair, but to go into a history lesson on the role of traffic commissioners is unacceptable.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Goddard of Stockport Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I point out that it is not my choice that this is the single amendment in the group. I believe there was some degrouping, which left this amendment stranded as the sole survivor of a group.

The principle of bus franchising is one that we on these Benches fully support. The reason for abandoning the privatised model introduced 40 years ago is that it has quite simply not worked. There is no competition between bus companies, as each has gradually dominated particular routes and given up on those that are less well used. Under that model—which exists everywhere in England, except in London—there is a spiralling downwards of the expectation of a regular and reliable bus service. The consequence is the growing frustration of those who absolutely rely on buses, and it puts off from using buses those who would like to.

Franchising will provide the powers for local transport authorities to ensure growing improvement in bus reliability and connectivity. It will not be achieved overnight, but progress will stall without additional funding from the Government. The £670 million that the Government announced will be allocated in the coming financial year for improving bus services is a start, but the majority of that funding, as I understand it from government figures, is earmarked for capital expenditure. What is desperately needed is revenue funding to support more operators in providing additional services on which people can rely.

My concerns are shared by professionals in the industry. Graham Vidler, head of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, which represents the bus industry, said:

“In most franchising arrangements it’s the local authority who takes the revenue risk, so if passenger numbers aren’t where they expect to be, they and their council tax payers take the hit”.


I am sure the Minister has this in sight, but my concern, which is shared by the industry, is that it will be left without funding to get this franchising scheme on the road and working well—hence my Amendment 10 asks for an assessment of the adequacy of central government funding. This must include an evaluation of funding sufficiency and

“an analysis of the funding required to maintain or improve”

bus services everywhere.

I hope the Minister can say that there is a big pot of money waiting in the Department for Transport, which he has the keys to, and that he will unlock it and enable us to have the bus services that this country deserves but does not have. Bus services that people can rely on will enable more people to move out of private transport on to public bus services, to the benefit of the environment as much as anything else. I look forward to hearing the response of the Minister. I beg to move.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, I support the excellent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. It gave a dose of realism—there is nothing for free in this world and we all know that.

In Committee, enormous numbers were bandied around on the cost of franchising, so I did some research. The Greater Manchester franchising bill was £134 million. That money came entirely from Greater Manchester; there was not a penny of government money involved, so it can be done. In Greater Manchester, they did it with £78 million from the mayoral earn back fund from GMCA’s devolution agreement; £33.7 million from the mayoral precepts; £17 million from local authorities; and £5 million of existing and forecast business rates. It can be done from within, but, where there is not a mature combined authority, it is more difficult. That is where the Government need to step in and give funding.

The question might be asked: why would we do that? From the very start, this debate has been about the public and making transport more accessible and reliable. All I can tell you from Greater Manchester is that patronage, revenue and punctuality are up and the cost of running the network per kilometre is one-third lower than when it was run by private operators. If we had not franchised in Greater Manchester, we would have a smaller bus network, which stifles growth, and a more expensive network, which supports no one.

This is not a lot of money, and I just hope that the Government can look at this. Everything is about capital expenditure, but sometimes you have to create the opportunity for revenue, which can be delivered by having a better bus service going where people want it to go: hospitals, outlying villages and where people live and commute to work from. That is the difference. In Greater Manchester, we now have a night bus that goes to north Manchester—it never did before, but for people to get employment and jobs it is invaluable. It shows that, with imagination and the right funding, franchising does work, but sometimes it needs a bit of help from the Government.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friends Lady Pinnock and Lord Goddard have raised, with Amendment 10, the elephant in the room: the adequacy of central government funding to support local bus services. While this legislation has the potential to transform bus services and empower local transport authorities, ultimately money is needed for this. This is not the view just of local and regional government—they would say that, wouldn’t they?—but the bus industry as well. Securing long-term clarity and certainty around funding for the sector—revenue and capital—will help enhance the benefits delivered to local communities. I look forward to the Minister’s thoughts on this amendment.