Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [Lords]

Paul Kohler Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)]

As other Members have noted, buses are the most used form of public transport, and in much of the country they are the only option available. Outside London, however, bus use is in sharp decline, with more than 1 billion fewer passenger journeys in 2023 than in 2015. That is not because of insufficient demand, but because of the Conservative policy of deregulation that put profit before people, allowing private operators to cream off the valuable routes with scant regard for the needs of the wider community, resulting in increased fares and reduced or completely abandoned services for many—unless, of course, the local authority, starved of access to the profitable routes, met the costs of the unprofitable ones.

[Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)]

That is exactly what has happened in Cornwall. The No. 11 and No. 12 bus served lots of rural towns and villages to Derriford hospital, but it has been salami-sliced—I have just got off the phone to Go Cornwall Bus—after years of underfunding. My constituent Mary in Padstow relies on that service to get her breast cancer treatment at Derriford, and she can no longer afford to get to the hospital, which would involve spending hundreds of pounds on taxis. Does my hon. Friend agree that in rural areas like mine, we need ringfenced funding to protect those key healthcare routes?

[Mr Kohler]

Those are exactly the kinds of issues that must be addressed, and this Bill does not do enough to achieve that. I will come back to that in a moment.

In rural areas, the story is often one of total disconnection, with communities cut off and people unable to get to work or hospital appointments, or to visit friends or relations.

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in rural constituencies like mine, bus routes are an absolute lifeline and a route out of poverty? When the 84 and 85 bus route was cut last year, it meant not only that people could not get to medical appointments or to work, but that students had to drop out of the college courses that would have enabled them to escape from poverty. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to make sure that this Bill enables an affordable, joined-up and genuinely useful rural transport network?

[Mr Kohler]

I completely agree. The point is that this is about not only getting people out of poverty but growing the economy. People need access to bus routes; otherwise they are left with expensive and much more environmentally damaging private transport.

Put simply, a poor or non-existent bus service is not just an inconvenience. It is a barrier to opportunity, a brake on economic growth, and an obstacle to achieving net zero. Given the decline in local bus services under the Conservatives, my party and I warmly welcome the Government’s renewed focus on this issue. The Bill includes measures that are long overdue and that my party will support.

[Anna Dixon]

Much has been made about the decline in bus usage. The pattern is similar in West Yorkshire, where between 2011 and 2022 there was a reduction of some 60 million journeys. There has been lots of mention of Greater Manchester, but West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin’s bus service improvement plan has already seen a 4% increase in bus usage. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that approaches that devolve responsibility and make it easier for mayors and local authorities to take over public control through franchising are the route to improved usage and, ultimately, the delivery of better buses?

[Mr Kohler]

I do agree. It is also about funding, which we must explore; but, yes, my party believes in localism—bringing things down to the local level is crucial.

It needs to be stated from the off that the Bill does not go far enough. It falls short of delivering the comprehensive, transformative change that our bus network desperately needs—and thus, I urge the Minister, even at this late hour, to be even more ambitious.

I will now outline the measures in the Bill that my party supports. Local government, not Whitehall, know what is best for their area. That is why my party has long championed localism, which is all about providing communities with the necessary tools to realise their potential. The Bill’s provisions to improve, streamline and extend franchising rights to all local transport authorities is consequently long overdue and supported on the Liberal Democrat Benches.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating the community in north Taunton on getting the first No. 1 bus of the morning—the 6.22 am service—restored? I had the joy of experiencing it this morning, tinged only with the tiredness that results from having got the 6.22. Does he agree that we need specific funding so that bus services can properly connect with hospitals, such as Taunton’s Musgrove Park hospital and many others?

[Mr Kohler]

I am happy to join my hon. Friend in congratulating the community on its success, and I agree that we need funding for these critical services.

The placing of socially necessary services on a statutory footing is a beneficial change to the enhanced partnership model, as it ensures that local authorities assess the impact of service changes and consider alternatives. The Bill also rightly lifts the outdated, ideologically-driven ban on municipally-owned bus companies, empowering local authorities who wish to use it, rather than infantilising them. Taken as a whole, the measures create an improved set of options from which local authorities can choose the approach that works best for them.

As the Secretary of State noted, it is important to realise that this is not, and must not become, a one-size-fits-all approach. Not every local authority will wish to pursue franchising, establish a bus company or abandon the partnership model. What works for Greater Manchester or London may not work for Oxfordshire or Cornwall. It must be up to local leaders and, ultimately, local communities to decide what works best for them. I welcome the fact that the Government are not mandating a certain approach.

Therein lies the challenge: empowering local authorities in law is one thing, but enabling them in practice is quite another. Although the Bill hands councils a set of keys to a new bus network, it does not ensure that there is fuel in the tank. Franchising is complex, resource-intensive and unfamiliar to the vast majority of local authorities. It requires legal expertise, commercial understanding, operational planning and, above all, funding. The Department for Transport has acknowledged those difficulties, yet this legislation provides little to help overcome them.

The Government’s laudable desire to increase their own capacity to advise councils is welcome, but I am not convinced that they are doing enough. The recently established Bus Centre of Excellence, which we will no doubt hear much about during the passage of the Bill, is a positive development, but does it really have the necessary capacity and resources to provide meaningful support to all those who might need it? If we are to see franchising become a viable option beyond a handful of combined authorities, we must take bolder steps to offer councils without either the expertise or the finances more than just a helpline or homilies on best practice.

Every hon. Member in this House knows how overstretched their local authorities are—with the exception of our colleagues from Reform, of course, who are sadly absent from today’s debate, no doubt too busy frantically searching for the untapped resources and savings they confidently promised they would discover in their new fiefdoms. As for the rest of us, we know that most local authorities lack the finances, expertise and bandwidth to use the tools the Bill provides. As a result, only the local authorities that already have the capacity to do so will use them, which will exacerbate regional disparities, not reduce them.

Even if we overcome such problems, that will not remove the continuing role of central Government in securing access and affordability. That is why the Government’s reckless decision to raise the national bus fare cap from £2 to £3 casts a dark shadow over the Bill. The original £2 cap was not only popular but effective. It reduced costs for passengers and helped to bring people back on to the bus network. It was precisely the kind of policy of which we need more, not less. Increasing fares by £1 per trip may not sound prohibitive, but for those on low incomes or families making multiple journeys, the change represents a significant cost increase, adding £20 to the cost of a weekly commute to anyone who has to take two buses to work while only saving the Government £150 million.

Let us be clear: this increase is regressive. It will hit the poorest hardest, particularly at a time of a cost of living crisis. Surely the Government should commit to preserving affordability, not undermining it, as raising fares in the absence of service improvements risks entrenching decline, not reversing it. Even more worryingly, rumours are now doing the rounds that the fare cap may be removed altogether. That would be a catastrophic mistake. We must not allow the progress of recent years to unravel in a Treasury-pleasing piece of virtue signalling that will only save the Exchequer a further £150 million.

A thriving, affordable bus network is not a luxury but an essential public service. This Bill must ensure that that is the case. Nowhere is that more true than in our rural areas. As we have seen for years, the current unregulated bus market is failing small villages and remote hamlets, serving them neither efficiently nor sufficiently.

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to do more to protect section 22 community bus services such as West Oxfordshire Community Transport, which are now facing a mountain of bureaucracy to re-tender for routes that it built up from scratch against commercial bus operators that have all the abilities to pitch and win, leaving community bus operators high and dry?

[Mr Kohler]

I do agree. We must do all we can to reduce bureaucracy. The Bill goes some way towards that, but it needs to do more.

The Bill as it stands provides nothing specific for rural areas—no dedicated rural funding stream and no obligation to maintain coverage. It is clear that if we are to be ambitious and achieve the economic growth that rural areas need, we must ensure that local authorities have the ambition and financial means to improve public transport. The Bill is missing an opportunity in failing to do so.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

One of the consequences for my constituents of losing services like the 84/85, the T2 and the 622 is that they are cut off from health services. Does my hon. Friend agree that such access should be a priority for investment, and that a focus on the increase in passenger numbers when judging investment choices disadvantages rural areas?

[Mr Kohler]

I agree. We must not focus only on passenger numbers. It is also about connectivity, and about making sure that rural areas thrive.

[Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)]

I would like to concentrate not just on purely rural areas, but on places like Surrey. In my constituency, the 514 bus connects Esher and Molesey, two important centres of our community, but it runs only twice on weekdays and once on a Saturday. On Sundays it is never to be seen. The service was severely cut back in 2016. To travel a distance of a mile and a half, people have to get a bus more than five miles into London and out again, which takes 40 minutes—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I have made this point before, but interventions really must be shorter than that. There are many hon. Members who wish to get in.

[Mr Kohler]

I will simply say that I agree with my hon. Friend.

Hon. Members have spoken about rural areas suffering. From 2015 to 2023, Shropshire lost 63% of its bus miles, the largest decline in any part of England. No doubt that was one reason among many that Shropshire voters decided that they had had enough of the Conservatives. In May, they voted a majority Liberal Democrat administration in for the first time.

Although the bus service in Shropshire is one of the worst in the country, it is by no means an isolated case. I have heard from colleagues and residents across the country, just as the House has heard today, that in rural areas such as Norfolk, Somerset and Hampshire, having no buses—or one bus a day, if residents are lucky—has sadly become the norm for many villages. This is not just inconvenient; it is holding back our rural economies and stifling growth. I fear that the measures in the Bill will not be sufficient to reverse that decline.

Lastly, I want to address accessibility, an issue on which my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place and other noble Lords have made good progress and have secured a number of improvements. As originally drafted, the Bill included positive provision on the mandatory training of staff, both in supporting disabled passengers and in tackling antisocial behaviour on board. We support those measures, but the Liberal Democrats believe that true accessibility means more than awareness training; it means fully accessible vehicles, clear signage and announcements, and accessible journey planning tools. Critically, it means accessible infrastructure, from bus stops to ticket machines.

The excellent amendment to ensure accessibility guidance on the provision of floating bus stops, which if badly designed can prove a real hazard to disabled people, was inserted after representations from the Lib Dem transport lead in the Lords, Baroness Pidgeon. The inclusion of bus network accessibility plans, after pressure from Baroness Brinton among others, is an important amendment that will go some way towards helping us to understand the barriers that disabled residents face in accessing a vital lifeline. We must not be complacent, however. I anticipate that more work will need to be done in Committee, as the Secretary of State has intimated, to probe the Bill’s provisions and ensure that they are as effective as they can be.

I will conclude where I began. My party and I welcome many aspects of the Bill. After years of Tory neglect, provisions to give local authorities more control of and input into their local bus networks are long overdue and clearly sensible, but we cannot give local authorities tantalising new powers without a practical means of using them. That will require sustained investment and reform of the funding models. I acknowledge that the Government have promised to include longer-term funding settlements in the spring spending review, but noises off suggest that those are unlikely to address the shortfall in local government funding.

The Bill will provide the necessary tools, but if councils are to build something effective with them, they will need not just legislation, but the finance, expertise and flexibility required to give effect to their vision and address their communities’ needs. I urge the Secretary of State to go back to the Treasury and ask for more, because financing a viable bus network is key to growing our economy.