The promise of the Better Buses Bill: will reality and expectation line up?

In this article, Silviya Barrett, Director of Policy and Research at Campaign for Better Transport, shares her views on the introduction of the Better Buses Bill, which allows local authorities in England to take control of bus services. She highlights the potential for improved transportation, the challenges of funding and expertise in local government, and calls for support to ensure success.

Recently, the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, officially unveiled a series of measures that will give all local authorities in England the power to control and run their own bus services.

Since the 1980s, buses outside of London have been deregulated and privatised, leading to differing levels of provision and services across the country. Since 2017, mayoral combined authorities have had the power to bring buses under local control with franchising agreements, and Greater Manchester was the first to do so last year. The results speak for themselves: in the first six months of franchising, ridership on Bee Network buses rose by 5%, punctuality improved, and passenger revenue was £3m more than budgeted for.

The Better Buses Bill means that all local authorities will soon have the power to determine bus routes, service frequencies, fares, and infrastructure. It means being able to run buses in line with the needs of communities, and that local governments will be able to put profits made by the most popular bus routes towards supporting the less popular, transforming bus provision in more rural areas.

But while this is a very welcome Bill, with a lot of positive potential for the future of buses, many local authorities won’t be able to take advantage of these new powers. Since privatisation, most of their transport teams have lost the skills and expertise needed to manage buses.

Another barrier is funding, with fragmented funding pots allocated on a competitive basis. Councils must continually bid against each other, and those with bigger, better-equipped transport teams have tended to win over smaller, less expert authorities, primarily affecting small unitary or more rural councils where bus service improvement is needed the most.

For years now, bus funding has been a story of winners and losers. Through the previous government’s National Bus Strategy, local authorities were asked to compete and bid for a share of an initial £1.1bn to use for Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIPs).

Our research found a £230 per head difference between local authority areas for government bus funding, a striking imbalance with 12 councils receiving over £50 per head but 15 others less than £6 per head. Having new powers to franchise services will, therefore, be meaningless for councils without the long-term funding certainty to enable them to deliver.

No community should be without a reliable bus service, and the Better Buses Bill should be seen as an opportunity to provide that. Buses can transform an area, helping people to access jobs and education, keeping us connected and fighting social isolation. That’s why, along with these new powers, we are calling on the Government to place a duty on local authorities to identify and also to provide the bus services which are necessary for social and economic reasons in their area. Importantly, the Government also needs to replace short-term competitive pots with long-term funding settlements for all local authorities, to help them deliver these services and transform their bus networks.

When she first took office, Louise Haigh said she was going to ‘move fast and fix things’, a principle we welcome. Yet when it comes to this Bill, it should not be rushed but seen as an opportunity to fix the currently fragmented system.

Find out more about the work at Campaign for Better Transport here.