Buses (Deregulation)

I thank the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) for raising this crucial issue, which matters a lot to people throughout the PTE areas and beyond. I reiterate his comments about the Minister, because I have always found her to be extraordinarily helpful and a model of courtesy with all hon. Members. She has not let power in any sense turn her head and will, I am sure, remain precisely the same person when she resigns from the ministerial ranks. There is a quotation, I think from the former Duchess of Westminster, to the effect that anybody on a bus after the age of 30 is a failure. On Monday, coming home after our vote on identity cards, I made use of my Oyster card. It was the first time I had gone home at night on the bus. The bus—the 77A—arrived promptly at 11.15 pm. I got on it, used my Oyster card and found that it was full of a range of people, all of whom were perfectly happy and amicable. I travelled quickly, made a five-minute journey to my destination, got off and was within a few yards of my flat. I compare that with the experience that I commonly have at home, where I rarely use the bus service. Why? Because throughout Merseyside buses are, by and large, infrequent and expensive, especially for families. The age profile is quite different. The nice thing about getting on a bus in parts of Merseyside is that one never feels old, because almost 80 per cent. of the passengers are pensioners using free travel, which for years the council tax payer has funded. In some ways that is a bracing experience, and quite different from being on a tube in London, where one can sometimes look along a carriage and find oneself the oldest person in it. None the less, the climate is completely different. Another reason for not using the buses locally is that the routes are often indirect, and my experience with buses in other cities does not encourage me further. For reasons that hon. Members will be able conjecture, a year or so ago I got a bus to Hodge Hill in Birmingham. I was surprised to find myself the only person on a full bus to be wearing a suit, collar and tie. There was a definitely a class element to bus use in that area, which does not exist in London. One could argue that there is a big subsidy in London, public control and elements of car restraint, for example. I do not have a car parking place at my flat, which encourages me to use the bus. However, in areas such as Merseyside, we see a dire, depressing and declining picture. Eighty per cent. of the routes in Merseyside are straightforwardly commercial and 20 per cent. are subsidised. Two companies—Arriva and Stagecoach—operate 90 per cent. of the routes, with some small companies around the edges. Over the past 10 years, the number of passengers using supported routes has increased by about 4 million, but the number of people using commercial routes has declined drastically by 37 million. It has gone down by 20 per cent., but there has been no change in mileage. The buses are going round as per usual, but they are going round with greater cost and fewer passengers. Supported mileage has increased dramatically since 2000, by about 2 million miles. The subsidy has tripled and the cost per mile of running a bus has doubled. That is largely because of the commercial operators pulling out and deciding that they do not want to run routes that are not profitable enough. Often, when Merseyside PTA tries to work round that, it uses circuitous routes to satisfy passengers and the paying public. Contrary to expectations, during local transport plan 1, the bus fleet, commercial and other, on average got older. That is despite substantial publicity for public transport on Merseyside and substantial investment by the PTE in infrastructure. There was substantial innovation in, for example, the use of LPG vehicles and bus lanes proliferated galore. Clearly something is not working. I have no reason to believe that things are working a great deal better in Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle or Sheffield. That seems to be the general story since privatisation. We have gone for and are trying unsuccessfully to thrive with a market model for public transport. The key to improvement, if there is to be improvement, is thought to be competition. The enticement for all Governments is that improvement via competition will negate the need for subsidy, so that subsidies can be reserved for other services—for example, buses in and through deprived areas and the rural bus grant. Essentially, it is a market-driven model or, to be more precise, a profit-led model. It is not a demand-led model. In many cities and towns such as Southport, which I represent, there is a huge demand for late-night public transport to take people back from clubs, pubs and so on, but it is simply not provided. It does not suit the operators to provide it, or perhaps it is problematic, but it is a real social need and there is a real public demand. The model does not work because, in many places, as other hon. Members are likely to say, there is nothing like real competition; it is more like cartels. From time to time, the bus operators have been referred to the rather limp-wristed Office of Fair Trading when there seems to be a local monopoly in a particular area. It points out that another operator, perhaps 20 or 30 miles away, can be used if someone wants to travel 20 or 30 miles to avail themselves of a bus for which they have no real need. The OFT's rather limp-wristed response has not allowed the benign effects of competition to kick in. That is all against a background of the Government not, strictly speaking, leaving the market alone. They allow subsidies by passenger transport executives; they allow traffic regulations to impose bus lanes; they allow companies to receive profits. They essentially preside over the situation. As the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley pointed out, it is apparent that bus ridership has fallen and the only saving grace for the Government is in London where the situation has been sustained and has improved. People have despaired of public transport and have found that travelling by car has not become more expensive. The cost of car ownership relative to bus ridership has fallen. Increasing environmental concern has changed the degree of Government tolerance. Furthermore, in some cities, the use of cars has made congestion intolerable even for car users. I know that the Government are having a rethink; I know from veiled comments by the Secretary of State for Transport recently that he is having a rethink. What appears to have prompted that rethink as much as anything else is the prospect of rolling out congestion charging throughout the country. People know that congestion charging works in London but it works because there is a tube system, a good, affordable bus system and good public transport infrastructure. That does not exist in other conurbations, so the people who would suffer most from congestion charging would be those with less money. They could not easily afford the congestion charge but they would have to use their cars to go to work if there were no public transport system, and they would pay a substantial premium for doing so. The Government are linking the transport innovation fund—a big pot of gold that local authorities can try to dip into and that carries with it the requirement of making the right noises on congestion charging—with some latitude on the development of quality bus contracts and quality bus partnerships. They seem infatuated with the idea that congestion charging is a solution to congestion. They accept that something must be done about buses. I believe that they will do something about that in the not-too-distant future. I hope that this debate helps them to proceed more quickly with the process of rethinking. I do not believe that congestion charging and quality bus partnerships, or increasing regulation are necessarily the Siamese twins that the Government believe them to be. I think I am right that, before we had congestion charging in London, the figures for London bus use were enviable compared with the rest of the country and rising. All along, with and without congestion charging, it has had greater public control and substantial public subsidy. I think that London might thrive without the current level of subsidy. Things could improve substantially so that it did not need the current level of subsidy. That could be due to increased ridership, with people such as me starting to use buses, increased efficiency with new buses, and increased familiarity. Many people do not use buses because they do not know where they go. They have the unnerving feeling that they will be whisked far away into the distance and have a longer walk than they would have had to start with. In the House of Commons and among the wider public, everyone says that they believe in public transport. It is a nostrum from which no one demurs. No one, except perhaps the former Duchess of Westminster, says that public transport is a bad thing. I am not sure that we all believe passionately in the public actually using public transport, but there is clearly no point in having it if it does not entice the public out of their cars and encourage what is today called modal shift. There are clear gains for the environment and in terms of congestion. Strangely, there is also a forgotten gain—some of us are old enough to remember it—of social cohesion. When one gets on a bus and finds that it is not full of people waiting to attack with knives, one starts to talk to other people. That is not a bad thing for society. We have talked about social exclusion, but social cohesion is a strange and incidental by-product of people using public transport, except on the London underground, where protocol demands that people talk to absolutely no one for fear of being thought to be insane. It is self-evident that the Government's public transport policy on buses so far has produced a flat zero in modal shift outside London. They already have some regulation and use economic levers, so they must consider how they can use regulation and economic levers better. This is not a plea for nationalisation because buses never were nationalised. It is false to suggest that there was an age when the municipal authority provided the entire pubic transport infrastructure. I was brought up in Liverpool where Ribble, Crossville and Liverpool city council bus companies provided popular services and people did not discriminate between private and public providers. We are talking realism. The situation requires that something be done. It is demonstrable that the current economic and legal levers are insufficient. If that does not change, public transport in general will deteriorate.