Bus Services

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, it is always good to follow the noble Lord, Lord Snape, on transport issues, but I really want to congratulate my noble friend Lady Randerson on securing this debate—although it is in the last gasp of this parliamentary Session, it is still very worth while.

I want to tell a story about a local service in my own patch of east Lancashire in the town of Colne—the Colne town services—because I think that there are some lessons to draw from local experience. I shall talk particularly about what is now called the 95 service, which nowadays runs from Burnley, via the hospital to Nelson, goes round the houses in Nelson, across the boundary into Colne, past the large store at Boundary Mill then, when it goes to Colne, round the estates on the northern side of Colne, up Colne to the town centre, then plunges down into Waterside—I should declare as an interest that that is the ward I still represent on Pendle Council by the skin of my teeth, or almost the skin of my teeth; we fought them off—and round the houses down the south side then back up Colne. By the way, as I keep saying “up Colne”, noble Lords will realise that Colne is one of England’s few hill towns; the town centre is on the top of the ridge.

This is one of the urban round-the-houses services that date from 1986. The Transport Act 1985 was very controversial—and has been since—as regards the introduction of competition in local bus services, but one of the great advantages, for those councils and transport authorities willing to take advantage, was the strategic and financial roles that the county councils were given in subsidising unremunerative services. In Lancashire in the mid-1980s, there was a minority Labour administration in the county council, supported to a degree by the group that I was a member of, the Liberals, which held the balance of power. Thanks to a number of determined and visionary councillors in both those parties, the county grasped the nettle, grasped the opportunities of that new Bill and led the way in providing subsidised services across the county. I pay particular tribute to my colleague David Whipp, whose vision resulted in new town services coming into effect. The county took over the rural and village services, which had previously been cross-subsidised, but the real innovation throughout the county—from places such as Ormskirk, to Clitheroe, to Barnoldswick, to Colne—were the new town services. Smaller buses ran round the estates and streets where buses had not really been seen before. They have been a great success but, inevitably, they do not make a lot of money in most cases.

Originally, the Colne services were a couple of circuits—called the Colne hopper, if I remember rightly. Over the years, and this is important, the local authority has obtained Section 106 and other moneys from development to help subsidise these services and keep a good service going. One of these subsidies, from the new Boundary Mill store on the boundary of Nelson and Colne, resulted in the county linking the town services in both Nelson and Colne and through into Burnley as the 95 service, known as the Pendle Green Line. After five years, the main Section 106 money that went into providing this really good service was used up, but the county experts were able to rationalise the route and it continued to run with county subsidisation to the absolute benefit of all people—shoppers, young people, people going to the hospital, and so on. It has been a great success.

But then came the budget cuts. For the past two or three years, the reduction in funding for Lancashire County Council has resulted in the screws being put on the subsidised services. Fortuitously, in my view, there is again a Labour minority administration at the county hall, which again requires support from the balance-of-power Liberal Democrat group, of which I am no longer a member. That group has used its power to resist some of the cuts that were being proposed to these bus services. But at the end of last year, to the shock of everybody in the county, the Labour administration announced a proposal to abolish all subsidies in the council because of the need to save something like £55 million—a lot of money even nowadays—in its budget this year, and the county budget for subsidising bus services, which was more than £7 million, was under direct threat. To be fair, this threat flushed out operators, who said, “Okay, we will run a registered commercial service” for some services which had previously been subsidised. Over 30 years the system had got a bit flabby—there is no doubt about that—but the proposals that the county council put forward were devastating. My favourite service, the 95, which I had been involved in setting up so many years before, was under threat again.

However, because no party has overall control of the county council and because of the enormous number of local campaigns to save this service and others—petitions on the internet, on the buses and at the bus stops; people spontaneously turning up at bus stops with placards and holding them all day as the buses came past; there is fantastic public support for these services—compromises had to be reached. The county eventually put £2 million to one side and in Pendle the borough council leadership in the different parties got together with the county councillors. We put together an alternative proposal for the 95, which I wrote up and sent off, and it formed the basis of the new service that we have. So we saved the service. I am particularly proud that we saved the service going down the great steep hills into Waterside. We now have some new Section 106 money to help keep it going a bit longer. Despite the fact that one leading county councillor said that people who voted Liberal Democrat to save these services ought to rot in hell, I do not think that that was a majority view even among the Labour leadership at the county council.

What are the lessons from all this? The first lesson is that these kinds of services, particularly in the light of the budget cuts, are very fragile. It is easy for them to go and once they have gone it will be very difficult ever to get them back. At every possible level—the transport authorities, councillors in the community, campaigners and the local bus operators themselves—have to get together to try to find ways of running these services as efficiently and economically as possible, but to keep them going. But it is very difficult.

The second lesson leads on from that. We could not have done it if we were a big unitary authority. We have been able to do it because we have a lot of councillors—we have a small district council, a town council and relatively small wards—and the councillors from all the parties worked together to put the pressure on and to work out ways of doing it and to help people in the community to campaign. Without that, if we had been a big unitary authority with very few councillors left, as so many places such as Cornwall and Northumberland now are, it would have been much more difficult. That is a second lesson, which is nothing to do with buses directly but to do with the structure of the local democratic set-up.

The third lesson is that, despite all this, if the central government cuts continue at their present level for another three or four years, it will be impossible to save these services because the county councils will inevitably put all their much reduced money into the things that they have to do. They do not have to provide bus services; all the things they have to do, such as social care, will take priority. So no matter how much campaigning there is and how many people like me there are on the ground, stirring people up to campaign and trying to work out ways of saving these services, it simply will not happen. The Government have to understand that they will have to regard local bus services as a priority if they are to survive.

My final point is that the real subsidies to these services come from senior bus passes, not from the direct subsidies to the operators. People say, “Why should all these well-off pensioners get bus passes?”, but if the Government start to mess about with senior bus passes, all these services in towns and villages will go overnight.