Thread by @thomasforth

Well, well, well. gov.uk/government/new…

And also. gov.uk/government/new…

This makes sense of quite a few separate conversations I've had over the past year.

Let us go back in time to 2018. The depth of my commitment to buses is such that I,
1/ Went to the Parliament.
2/ Found and wore a tie.
Gave evidence to the excellent committee of @LilianGreenwood and @HuwMerriman (et al.)). Both good people in transport. committees.parliament.uk/committee/153/…

I had some grumbles as you would imagine that the "Health of the bus market: Bus services in England outside London" inquiry was mostly held in London,... but Lilian Greenwood took them on tour so I was happy to do likewise.

We did a big response to that inquiry from @odileeds. There are versions on Parliament's websites, but that's a bit broken at the moment, so this remains the easiest way to read it. Includes the "Bus Graph of Doom" that I've used for a decade. docs.google.com/document/d/1IZ…

The summary is still right (always nice when this happens).
1/ London's bus market works well. Locally controlled.
2/ England's small city and town bus market works pretty well. Deregulated but with close relationships.
3/ England's big city bus market doesn't work. Needs reform.

I'll let you imagine how much "heated response" I got for saying that "there are probably too many rural bus services in the UK".

So back to today's announcement. It gets the diagnosis pretty close to right.
1/ Deregulation of bus services has failed.
2/ DfT has been too London and too closed for too long to see the problems and think about them properly.
Those are the big fixes,... then there's the detail.

First up the one we can be almost completely positive about. Relocation of DfT staff to Birmingham and Leeds is a really good idea. Buses work differently in those cities to either London or Hastings (where some DfT people work) and that knowledge needs acquiring by DfT. Good.

The backdrop to this is that I always say that you can do relocation AND decentralisation. Well this announcement comes just a few weeks after the UK government cut funding for Transport for the North (the PM Boris Johnson is still lying to the House of Commons about this 😟).

Still, lots of value in having DfT staff in Leeds (the largest city in Europe without a tram or metro) and Birmingham. The trains between the two are almost certainly the worst in Europe on a size of city to quality of connection ratio. One bad slow train an hour. Get DfT on it.

So back to the main document. "The fragmented, fully commercialised market, which has operated outside London since 1986 will end" is a bold statement. And welcome. The diagnosis is right. Unregulated markets failed, and the Conservatives will (try to) put an end to them. Good.

But their idea of how,... "We want to see operators and local councils enter into a statutory 'enhanced partnership' or franchising agreements to receive the new funding and deliver the improvements.",... seems pretty unlikely to achieve their intention. For two reasons.

1/ The place where we REALLY need better buses is in big cities (and the towns that are part of them), like Greater Manchester. GM has been pushing to regulate buses for a decade now. Richard Leese always put it top of his devolution asks. And it's been such a huge battle.

Greater Manchester has been pushing and pushing and pushing, huge amounts of risk, not enough support from government, still a way to go. More than a decade of effort. So,... as a conservative I suppose, I'd have started by making this work. manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-m…

But that's the "thing" about the UK. We love equality (with a weird exception for London). Greater Manchester can't be allowed to do its own thing, be better, and lead. So now this strategy has to be national, do everything for everywhere in one big national strategy.

There are five big promises. I'll go through them one by one.

"simpler bus fares with daily price caps" > okay, so how are you going to do that? You're going to build a single national bus fare clearing system? You'll be setting fares nationally then? Really? I mean, let's see it, but that sounds unworkable.

"more services in the evenings and at the weekends" > cool. That just happens if you undo cuts to local authorities over the past decade. It's not a good idea to decide this stuff nationally. Local governments have a list of bus services they wished they hadn't cut. Give them £s.

"integrated services and ticketing across all transport modes" > again, how? Greater Manchester has been working on this for decades, and it hasn't managed, because your bus laws stop it, and your national control of railways stops it. You're really gonna fix that in six months?

"all buses to accept contactless payments" > that's easy since almost all of them do, since they all have to accept the national free bus passes and implementing that means it makes sense to accept contactless payments.

"Hundreds of miles of new bus lanes will make journeys quicker and more reliable" > okay great. See my previous comment about funding local authorities. If you let them franchise buses, and you ensure they have a fair funding settlement,... this will just happen.

So,... I'm very cautiously optimistic. The diagnosis of the problem is largely right. I'd have started with Greater Manchester and got that right first. If I was feeling very "save the Union", Glasgow too. Then roll it out to the other half dozen big cities and then think again.

Trying to do it all at once, from the centre, for every part of England, with just £3bn? It all seems too much to me.

(and most of the £3bn is probably not new money, as always. We should know in a few weeks, but that's the usual pattern in UK government funding announcements).

Some useful background to this is that England's big cities have been wanting to do integrated transport for decades. They've tried and tried and UK laws stop them. Here's Newcastle (and Tyne and Wear) losing just such a battle. This was the easy fix. transport-network.co.uk/Bus-devolution…

If the UK government went back to 2015, let Tyne and Wear regulate its buses, gave it control of Northern Rail commuter services into Newcastle,... it would have had everything this proposal aims for five years ago. But we always choose to hold our cities (except London) back.