Decarbonising Rural Transport

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered decarbonising rural transport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, which is so important to those of us who live in rural constituencies like mine.

Transport is the United Kingdom’s highest-emitting sector and is responsible for a quarter of our emissions. If we want to achieve net zero by 2050, we need to reduce emissions from our cars, vans and lorries, but we also need to recognise that rural transport is different from urban, and that reliance on cars is so much higher in rural areas. Therefore, we need to include rurality as a factor in more decisions on how we move to decarbonise our transportation.

Public transport is limited in rural Britain, and given the sparsity of population, expanding it along the lines of transport in our towns and cities is not, in general, financially viable, or even welcome—for example, sending enormous buses through tiny country lanes—but we must find ways to extend routes, provide smaller vehicles or car shares, and reintroduce train lines, especially where there has been large growth in housing, such as between Bideford and Barnstaple in my constituency of North Devon.

[Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)]

East Sussex County Council has an excellent bus service improvement plan, one of whose objectives is progressively to support operators to increase the number of zero-emission buses used on the network and to upgrade diesel buses to Euro 6 standard as part of the drive to achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050.

Does my hon. Friend agree that, in order to fulfil that objective, further Government funding opportunities will be required to introduce battery electric buses or hydrogen fuel cell buses, and for retrofitting to Euro 6 specification, and that decarbonisation of rural transport should not be restricted to local buses but should include trains? Does she further agree that the extension of HS1 from Ashford to Rye, Hastings and Bexhill, which will decarbonise and make the journey faster, is essential?

[Selaine Saxby]

My hon. Friend is entirely right that all of us in rural constituencies have plans that we need our councils to deliver to facilitate the decarbonisation of our rural transport network. The challenge we face is that, unfortunately, there is not always the funding to support those fantastic rural transport schemes, although I hope the Minister will reassure us on that point. I will come to some of my own suggestions for the bus network in Devon.

Active travel is an opportunity for some, but the distances involved in rural commuting by bike mean that it is not always an option for everyone. In my constituency of North Devon, 2.4% of work journeys are made by bike, which is a surprisingly high percentage for such a rural area, but realistically, active travel is unlikely to replace huge numbers of car journeys unless it is integrated into a wider transport solution.

I will return to the opportunities to tackle the issues of public transport and active travel, but we need to be realistic: rural Britain will continue to rely on its cars for the foreseeable future.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. Limited public transport options in rural communities mean that, as the hon. Lady says, many residents depend on their car for everything—getting to work, going to the doctor, seeing family and friends. Does she agree that any strategy to decarbonise rural transport needs to improve connectivity so that social isolation is not inadvertently increased?

[Selaine Saxby]

I agree entirely that there are so many more challenges around rural connectivity. If we are to continue to rely on our cars, we need to decarbonise them, but the roll-out of electric charging points in rural Britain lags behind that in towns, and when the distances we travel per day are so much greater, investing in an electric vehicle is a far harder decision to take.

Only 1.5% of North Devon residents have gone fully electric, compared with 2.1% nationally. I have a hybrid, as the majority of electric vehicles would not get me to Westminster each week, and I am not sure I would ever get to Exmoor in my constituency and back home as there are no charging points where I live. The nearest one is 5 miles away. To plug in at home, I would need to lay my own cable down 20 feet of path every evening, and I am not sure my schedule accommodates that.

While the Transport Minister is here, I want to highlight the appalling state of the roads in Devon. I am fully aware that we have the longest road network in the United Kingdom by 2,000 miles and that the council is working flat out to try to repair the proliferation of potholes that we have seen this winter. Not only has the weather contributed but we need to recognise that in rural Britain we have enormous farm vehicles on tiny lanes and we therefore create even more potholes, yet our council is not assigned long-term funding solutions to tackle them.

The short-term approach to funding, with inadequate rural weighting, makes the cost of repairing each pothole far higher. At this time, Devon is moving teams off scheduled roadworks as we cannot take on full-time highways teams due to the uncertainty around long-term funding. I hope that the Minister will be able to take that away and see what more can be done to address the entirely unacceptable state of our roads. If there were an Ofsted inspection of roads, I suspect we would go into special measures, yet the current funding mechanism contributes to that. The damage that potholes do to vehicles is also hugely expensive to motorists and the council, which is no doubt reimbursing a growing number of inconvenienced motorists with damaged tyres. And it deters people from switching to active travel solutions because of the potential risk of falling due to a pothole.

I spend a lot of time in this place talking about connectivity, often the communication kind, but our transport connections are vital. The lack of decarbonised public transport is impacting on decarbonising our travel.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing a really important debate. When it comes to decarbonising public transport, bus use is massively important in rural communities like hers and mine. I am sure she will agree with me that the Government’s £2 cap on bus fares is a positive thing and it is positive that it has been extended to June, but even more positive would be to extend it beyond that. But it is of no use whatever if someone lives in a community where there is no bus service. When I think about places in my own community such as the Cartmel peninsula and areas in Cumbria such as the Eden valley, there is a lack of options when it comes to bus services—far too few or none at all—so it would make sense to give local authorities like the new Westmorland and Furness Council the power to start and run their own bus services to fill in the gaps and people could spend their £2 on bus services that actually exist.

[Selaine Saxby]

I agree with the hon. Member. There is so much more that could be done. With so many of these rural transport issues, we need local solutions and for local communities to be able to share their best practice, because there are some great local bus solutions up and down the country. I have a remote district council that is detached from the county council, which is where highways sits. How do we join up those pieces? More could be done to come up with innovative solutions, which already exist in places, but are not universally available. Indeed, bus travel in my constituency is not universally available, let alone decarbonised, and that makes things as basic as getting to school both expensive and problematic.

Our bus company, which I recently met, notes that people are tending to make fewer trips than they did before the pandemic and also tending to make shorter and more local journeys as opposed to long-distance trips on a daily basis. Public transport providers have had to adapt to that, but our communities still rightfully expect the same connections to exist as they did before the pandemic, or even new connections to be developed as society has changed.

Broadly in my constituency the patronage has recovered to about 80% to 90% of pre-pandemic levels, but with concessionary journeys recovering only to around 70%. That recovery creates a challenge in rural settings where margins were stretched or non-existent before the pandemic. Funding needs to respect rurality and the higher costs of operating the routes. That could be done through paying bus service operator grants on a mile or kilometre basis as opposed to per litre of fuel to cover costs. I am assured that the industry wishes to engage with the Department on those points so that a longer-term settlement can be reached to support rural services on a longer-term basis as opposed to the current cycle of short-term funding that we are in, even though that funding is greatly appreciated.

The current Get Around for £2 is fabulous. In my constituency people can do a fantastic trip from Barnstaple to Lynton for just £2—a full 26 miles—or get to Exeter on the bus for £2. In normal times, to get from Ilfracombe, which has recently lost its last bank, to Barnstaple for the nearest branch, is two to three times more than the current £2 rate. We need to find a way to facilitate access to services for remote rural communities. In other communities, such as Woolacombe, employers provide buses for their teams to get to work, because there are no public transport options.

In the peak of the tourist season, overlaid with parking challenges and air pollution, huge queues of visitors and locals try to get to our beautiful beaches. Although the availability of public transport is my primary concern, decarbonisation of it is an entirely different matter, as rural bus journeys are significantly longer than urban ones. Capital investment in suitable vehicles is by definition going to be higher in rural Britain.

I recently spoke here about introducing a rail link from Barnstaple to Bideford. We also unsuccessfully submitted an inquiry into putting in a light rail link from Braunton to Barnstaple. Time and again, those projects do not progress; one cannot help but think that our rurality and population sparsity are factors. I hope that the Department for Transport will continue its positive work in active travel, with the latest round of funding of £200 million including rurality as a factor for the first time.

The previous cycling Minister visited north Devon’s iconic Tarka trail. Completing a stretch of that trail would see the north and south coasts of Devon fully connected. The project was ranked second out of six submitted by Devon County Council. The council team met the Minister to explain their frustration at having the five Exeter-based projects succeed, yet the second highest priority project rejected. I am delighted that rurality is now being considered following the Minister’s visit, and that the Tarka trail project is now being resubmitted. I hope that Active Travel England and the Department will look favourably upon it, and take further steps to enable more active travel solutions come to fruition in rural Britain.

Large counties such as Devon, with big urban centres and an enormous rural hinterland, need different approaches for those two elements. As a community, we would benefit hugely from electric bikes, which can undertake longer, hillier journeys and enable people who may not be able to cycle so far on a traditional bike to do so. Again, electric bike hire facilities are available at transport hubs in Exeter but not Barnstaple.

To begin to decarbonise our transport network, we need to look to transport hubs, where active travel can potentially be the first or last mile. To do that, our buses and trains should be better at taking bikes, hubs should have better bike storage and there should be electric vehicle chargers, if travellers are connecting to buses or trains, alongside public toilets.

[Tim Farron]

I am taking advantage of the hon. Lady’s generosity, for which I am grateful. I am in full agreement with what she says about transport hubs, where there can be electric bikes, non-electric bikes, and bus and rail interchanges. In our community, we have several railway lines: Settle to Carlisle, the Furness line, the Lakes line and the main line. My great concern is that we stand to lose railway station ticket offices at Grange, Appleby and Windermere. Would those not be great places to have hubs? Is that not a good argument to ensure we maintain fully-staffed railway stations in rural communities?

[Selaine Saxby]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is important to look at rurality in how we deal with all infrastructure developments. I know that my own ticket office in Barnstaple has concerns. I have only one trainline, so his constituency is particularly well connected. We need to recognise that, where there is a sparse population, ticket offices are working less than in a busy town centre. We need to be more innovative in our approach, to ensure that residents who do not use trains so often can comfortably use the train station and transport hubs.

I was coming on to say that facilities such as public toilets are a vital part of transport hubs. Barnstaple’s bus station toilets have not reopened since March 2020. If we are serious about encouraging public transport usage and decarbonising our transport, we need to recognise that longer journeys, with longer waits between buses and trains, require these additional facilities to be present, particularly for our older residents. The lack of hubs that are safe, warm and have the right facilities makes using public transport far harder in locations such as North Devon at this time.

Far too many routes in rural Britain are single-carriageway, 60-mile-an-hour roads. If we are to tackle that head-on, to facilitate safer cycling and walking on those roads, we need additional paths to be constructed to facilitate things such as safe school journeys on foot or bike. Although today’s debate focuses on decarbonisation, we could also consider the health benefits of an active travel mode to work or school, which often seem to be somewhat neglected.

I recognise that, as was mentioned earlier, there are examples across the UK of great rural transport schemes. However, as with so many matters around rurality, as discussed in the debate that I led on levelling up rural Britain, it is harder for these examples of best practice to be shared between councils and communities. I hope that as we move towards decarbonising our transportation, more support is given to overstretched councils to share best practice and roll out solutions to rural as well as urban Britain and find funding solutions that give councils the ability to deliver a decarbonisation plan that reflects rurality, alongside an acceptance that the costs per capita will differ. In areas reliant on their tourists, the population swells enormously in the summer, which, again, is rarely reflected in funding settlements or even the calculation of carbon pollution.

Rural Britain deserves to see its transport decarbonised. Our productivity is reduced because of the poor transport links. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister has plans in his Department to ensure that rurality is rapidly included in future funding announcements and that there are long-term settlements lying ahead—it was so warmly welcomed to have rurality mentioned in the current round of active travel funding—because we all want to level up and decarbonise transport in rural Britain.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for securing the debate. I think we all agree that this is a really important topic, and it is good to have the opportunity to air the issues.

I am sure we are all aware that domestic transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. The Department for Transport’s 2022 statistical estimates report that cars emit more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than trains and coaches, for the obvious reason that trains and coaches convey more people, so maximising the number of people in a vehicle for each journey is a really important part of meeting our emissions targets. The example that the Department gives is a long-distance one: on a journey between London and Glasgow, the average petrol car emits over four times more CO₂ than the equivalent journey by coach for each person, or 3.3 times more CO₂ per passenger than an electric car, once it has been taken into account that we do not generate all our electricity in a totally green way.

In rural areas, it is proving really difficult to get such efficiencies and cut the greenhouse gases that we emit because of the high level of dependency on private cars, which are mostly non-electric. Our bus services are already very poor and have been driven to the verge of extinction by the covid pandemic, and it is well documented that usage has not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In Shropshire, services have continued to be cut since 2020 because they are no longer considered commercially viable. Obviously, we are not just talking about the tiny hamlets where everyone accepts it would be uneconomical and unsuitable for a large bus to trundle through; market towns of under 20,000 or 30,000 people are suffering as well.

North Shropshire has five market towns with fewer than 20,000 people, which contain about half the population of the area. There are also a significant number of larger villages that sit on main roads, and they are all pretty poorly served. There is only one bus service running in the whole county on a Sunday, and the weekday and Saturday services have been reduced, with early and end-of-day services being cut back. Even some Saturday services are at risk: the service from Shrewsbury to Market Drayton in my constituency, and on to Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent, is at risk of being axed on a Saturday. It has been given an interim stay of execution by Shropshire Council, but given that the council has missed on the bus back better funding and money from its bus improvement plan as part of the levelling-up bid, it is now looking to make cuts of at least £150 million over the next three years, and I fear for route’s future. As the hon. Member for North Devon said, we need to take into account that Government grants for public transport in rural areas are more expensive than grants for urban areas. We need to accept that and consider whether the need requires them.

[Selaine Saxby]

Does the hon. Lady agree that, far too often, our rural bus routes are the first thing that is threatened when our large rural councils face funding pressures?

[Helen Morgan]

Yes, I agree. We have absolutely seen that in North Shropshire and across the rest of the county. It is causing us a number of different issues, in addition to those of climate emissions. Already in my constituency, it is no longer possible to access one of our two key hospitals in Telford from Oswestry without changing services at least twice. There is no direct public transport service at all between Market Drayton, a town of around 12,000 people, and the sizeable town of Telford, where there are all sorts of extra services that people might want to access.

The impact of those poor and continually reducing services is twofold. First, a private car is a necessary part of life in the countryside or in one of the smaller towns, and many households have to find the money for at least two if the adults in those households work in separate directions. Once they have forked out for a private car and accepted the expense of running it, they are less likely to use the available public transport, so we are in a downward spiral of cuts to public transport as it becomes more and more uneconomic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Selaine Saxby]

It has been a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Davies. I thank the Minister for his response and for his Department’s recognition of rurality, because it is the first time that a Department has focused on that in its funding decision. I very much hope that with him at the helm, it can do more in some other areas that we have touched on this morning, because I know that the constituents I represent care deeply about their environment and are really passionate about being able to decarbonise their transport networks. For that to happen, it is important to find rural solutions that work and deliver better value for money. Although I fully respect that the Minister could not possibly comment on things going on in the Treasury ahead of the Budget, I hope that he might have a quiet word to say that a longer-term funding solution would deliver far better value for money in areas such as rural transportation.

I want to reiterate points from colleagues, which perhaps the Minister could pass on. I did not focus too much on the grid, because it is not in his portfolio, but I fully agree with hon. Members’ comments that the grid is a real concern if we are to deliver an electric transport solution. The hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) talked about hubs and the number of bus changes that people have to make on longer journeys in rural Britain. Although I warmly welcome the Minister’s observation on services to the hospital in Barnstaple, most of those services involve a change at Barnstaple bus station, where the toilets are still closed. As we look to rural solutions, we need to find better ways to ensure that such hubs work. I know that, like me, he is passionate about active travel, but we all accept that we will not do all our journeys in rural Britain on a bicycle. However, we could do the opening or closing mile of those journeys on one if our hubs worked better.

I thank hon. Members for their time and participation, and I particularly thank the Minister for his response.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered decarbonising rural transport.