Bus Service Improvement Plans: North-west England

Mike Amesbury Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered funding for bus service improvement plans in the North West.

Thank you for chairing the debate, Ms Nokes.

In Warrington, we are proud of our municipal bus company. It provides connections between our homes and communities, between jobs and opportunities, between healthcare facilities and between our friends and families. For those without cars, like me and thousands of my constituents, buses are essential, and good, reliable bus services are a huge part of the wider picture of reducing carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil.

Because millions of people across this country rely on buses—they cannot just hop into a car if services are slashed—and they cannot find extra cash if fares rise, bus cuts mean being cut off. Deregulation and a decade of Tory decline have meant that more than 3,000 bus routes and more than 350,000 passenger journeys have been lost. The majority of short trips, under 5 km, are made by car. As a result, our region has a significant air pollution issue. In the Liverpool city region alone, more than 1,000 deaths a year are linked to that silent killer. On public transport, 80% of journeys are taken by bus, yet bus fares have risen by 40% and routes have been mercilessly cut nationally. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for opening such a vital debate. One route in my patch that has been or is about to be decommissioned is the No. 62 from Runcorn to her patch, Warrington. That just shows that reregulation is vital. I hope that the judicial review today comes out on the side of those who want to give regulation teeth.

[Charlotte Nichols]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. As he says, services being cut means communities being cut off from one another. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long. They have been an afterthought in decisions made far away in Westminster by politicians who have no understanding of them. The shockingly bad services left behind have made public transport increasingly unviable. In Warrington over the last decade, almost 50% of services have been cut. That is absolutely appalling. It means that people in our community—in particular, elderly residents who do not drive—are completely cut off from other parts of the town.

Just a year ago, the Prime Minister and the Transport Secretary launched the “Bus Back Better” strategy and they pledged to provide a great bus service for everyone everywhere. They promised that it would be one of the great acts of levelling up. This was the ambition: £3 billion of transformation funding was supposed to level up buses across England towards London standards, with main road services in towns and cities to run so often that people would not even need a timetable, and better services in the evenings and at weekends; and to provide simple, cheap flat fares that people could pay with a contactless card, and daily and weekly price capping across operators and rail and trams, too.

In Warrington, our Labour-run council has shown real ambition with a plan to increase bus use by between 5% and 15% through excellent council working with partners to make buses more frequent, faster, reliable, cheaper, easier to use and better integrated. This is a local community backing buses.

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[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Ms Nokes. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning.

Since the Conservatives deregulated buses outside of London in the 1980s, services have suffered. That has been felt on Merseyside where, under the current operating model, private bus companies set routes, ticket prices and timetables. It is a system designed around profit, not passengers, in which services can be withdrawn at short notice if they are not profitable enough.

A report last year by the academic Philip Alston, the former United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, found that the deregulation of buses has

“provided a master class in how not to run an essential public service”,

leaving residents at the mercy of private actors who have total discretion over how to run a bus route or whether to run one at all. That is the Conservative legacy on buses. Since 2010, more than 200 bus services have been lost across the Liverpool city region—a shocking statistic.

A number of my constituents in Wirral West have been in touch with me in recent months about a reduction in the service of the No. 71 bus, which runs from Heswall to Liverpool via Irby. I know from that correspondence just how important these services are to local people. Lost and reduced services can impact on people who need to get to work, to hospital appointments, to school or college or to meet friends.

Public transport is immensely important if we are to tackle climate change and the issue of air quality. It is important that we encourage people to use it, and that will happen only if services are reliable and affordable.

Thanks to the hard work of Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram and local leaders, services in the Liverpool city region are on the way to being publicly controlled again. Last week, members of the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority signed off on proposals for a franchising system to be the preferred method of running bus services. That will bring the system back under local control, allowing the combined authority to specify the network, control fare policy and drastically improve ticketing. I echo the words of Mayor Rotheram, who described the move as “momentous”. He has long advocated a London-style transport system across Merseyside, which is nothing short of what local people deserve.

Transport authorities in the north-west and across the country are waiting to learn their funding allocations for their bus service improvement plans. The Government have said they will announce details on how the funding will be allocated in due course. Authorities have been waiting since October to find out their individual allocations and need to know as soon as possible how much they are getting so that they can put their plans into action.

Analysis by the Confederation of Passenger Transport has suggested that more than £7 billion will be needed to fully deliver the measures that local transport authorities have included in their bus service improvement plans. The Government have set aside £1.2 billion for the plans, creating a huge funding gap between what local authorities want to deliver and the funding that the Government are making available.

Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has asked for £667 million from the Government for its bus service improvement plan. At the heart of the plan are measures to improve affordability, reliability and the environmental impacts of bus services.

The Campaign for Better Transport has said:

“It is doubtful that the current funding available will be sufficient…to achieve real transformation in ambitious authorities.”

When the Minister responds, can she tell us whether she agrees? Will she guarantee that the Government will come forward with the funds that we so desperately need for public transport systems, to make them affordable, reliable, and ensure that they meet the needs of passengers?

[Mike Amesbury]

Does my hon. Friend concur that the regulation, which Steve Rotheram and the leaders have announced, is mightily vital, but it does need those resources for a first-class affordable public transport system in our patch?

[Margaret Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; it is as if he had read the last line of my speech. It is absolutely vital that local authorities get the funding that they need, so that constituents like mine, and those of Weaver Vale, can benefit.