National Bus Strategy: England

Lord Snape Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his warm words about the bus strategy—it is nice to have some. The noble Lord also makes a very important point: because we are giving more local control and accountability for bus services, the ability of local transport operators to put in place their bus service improvement plans will be critical. The noble Lord spoke of their need to share best practice. That is absolutely in the plan: the bus centre of excellence will combine learning from not only the Department for Transport but bus operators and the leading LTAs—which are already well down this track—and it will encourage everyone and ensure that they can move together at the same speed. We do not want what I call the recalcitrant LTAs: the people who have not loved buses as much as the Government have. My ambition is to make sure that we have no recalcitrant LTAs and that across the country everybody levels up so that we have good bus services everywhere.

The noble Lord mentioned demand-responsive transport. He will have seen the £20 million that we have put into 17 bids across the country. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, mentioned them. We published the list of 17 successful places back in early January; all of them have moved into the final stage and secured funding. Demand-responsive transport will be really good for rural areas. The noble Lord wants them to be autonomous, and so do I, but perhaps not just yet.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on the documents. Unlike the spokesperson for the Liberal party, I welcome it. The fact that she has embraced so many policies that the Labour Party has advocated for so many years is entirely to her credit. More power to her elbow, say I. Has the Minister read the Prime Minister’s foreword? I know these things are traditionally written for Prime Ministers, but it is everything we have come to expect from the Prime Minister: a mixture of comedy, hyperbole and demagoguery. Talking about the bus industry it states:

“Outside London, with a few exceptions, that lesson has not been learned.”


He is comparing London to the rest of the country. As a former chairman of a major bus operator, I could have learned some lessons if we had thrown £1 billion in subsidy at buses in Birmingham over the period since deregulation, but we never had the opportunity.

Will the Minister say what happened to the £5 billion that the Prime Minister announced with suitable flair about a year ago? It has now been reduced to £3 billion. It is welcome nevertheless. How will it be distributed? Will there be proper consultation with local authorities and bus operators? Will the Minister accept my congratulations on the paper as far as it goes? Next time we take a bus trip together, which she has promised, I will see if I can sell her a few more Labour Party policies on the journey.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I think good ideas should not be party political. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, mentioned the £5 billion. If he were to read the—I would say “small print” but it was not small print—document, the £5 billion was for cycling, walking and buses, so there was £3 billion for buses and £2 billion for cycling and walking. However, the noble Lord makes a very serious point. I am delighted that the strategy is out of the door, but I am under no illusion: the hard work is about to start because we have £3 billion and we have to think about exactly how we spend it. At the moment we cannot decide that because we do not know what sort of bus service improvement plans are going to be coming forth from the local transport authorities.

The timeline looks like this: by 30 June, each transport authority will say that it is going to have either an enhanced partnership or franchising and that the bus operators are willing to take part; they will then have to work very hard indeed to prepare a bus service improvement plan by 31 October. On the basis of those bus service improvement plans and the amount of funding that is needed in order to provide the sort of revenue funding and capital funding required for those plans, the funding will be distributed. Of course, it could also be the case that bus lanes could be bolstered through a levelling up fund, so there is a lot of opportunity for local transport authorities at the moment to take buses by the scruff of the neck and bring them into the 21st century and beyond.