Bus Services

To continue seamlessly, I made the point that many young people contacted me about their bus service. I shall give another quote. It links with what I was saying about the right way to do such things. One young person from a village in my patch stated:"““I rely almost entirely on public transport as the cost of owning and driving a car is collosul””—" a misspelling, but one cannot have everything."““But First Buses Bristol seem to do nothing but raise prices and rip people off, it currently costs me…over £5 return to the centre of Bristol””." The interesting phrase in the message is"““considering they have the monopoly on the local bus services, shouldn't there be some regulation on their prices?””" Later on, there was a reference to extortion. That is the point that I was trying to develop when the bells rang. There are several different models for running a public service. One is complete competition, which operated for a period after deregulation in the mid-1980s. I remember that in Oxford, where I was a student at the time, the bus companies were fighting each other. A bus would pull up literally a minute before the time the bus from the rival company was expected, take all the passengers and bomb off down the road. One could barely move for buses. That all ended. The fittest survived, and eventually the situation degenerated into a monopoly. A competitive model does not work for bus services, especially in market towns and villages. The situation may be different for urban services, but when we are talking about rural routes, infrequent routes and, often, not huge passenger numbers, the idea that two companies will run side by side—that there is the volume for that—and that there is always an entrant waiting to chip away at and threaten the incumbent is just nonsense. FirstGroup has huge resources—it could see anybody off. To all intents and purposes, it is a monopoly provider. Yes, the council occasionally lets out a franchise for evening and weekend services, and FirstGroup gets some of them as well. There are other small operators in the area, but FirstGroup overwhelmingly dominates. So we have a private monopoly. When I ask the managing director why he does not lower the fares, his response is that at peak hours the buses are full, so if he lowered fares, he would lose money. The rest of the time, the additional passengers that he would get from lowering the fares would not make up the money that he would lose from lowering them, so it is not worth his while. The answer is always, ““We are not a charity, we are a business. We run to maximise our profits.”” He tells me that the rate of return for the bus business is not as great as it is for some of the other bits of FirstGroup's business, so he is not interested in lowering fares. The managing director's tone has mellowed a little since I first spoke to him, but, in essence, his attitude is, ““You want a public service, you pay for it.”” Britain is unusual, in that 90 per cent. of the revenue for bus services comes from bus passengers. Some 10 per cent. is from subsidies of various sorts from central and local government, but the vast bulk of the cost is met by passengers. Belgium, where the figure is 30 per cent., has taken the view that public transport is a public service—I agree with that—and that therefore more Exchequer input is probably the only way to deliver it. Of course, things can be done. Quality bus partnerships, bus lanes and real time information are all good things and can help, and I do not wish to decry the efforts that have gone in to making improvements. But, when it comes down to it, when my constituents contact me about the cost and reliability of buses and the routes run by the companies, I tell them that the bus company will not make changes because it will not make any money, and the council will not subsidise services because it does not have any money. Tough, get lost, go away—there is nothing that can be done because we are at the hands of a monopolist. Bizarrely, the Select Committee on Transport looked into the Government's draft Local Transport Bill, and said that when there is more than one operator and they want to co-operate—for example, one might want to cover one area and the other might want to cover another area, with through ticketing—competition law may crack down on that and deem that they would be acting collusively, which would undermine competition. Competition is the wrong model, and we must make it clear that local transport providers should be able to co-operate and work together in the public interest. I could go on at length and give a large number of quotes from young people—for example, ““The fares have gradually gone up and up, but the service has not improved””; ““I would use the buses as it saves me attempting to park the car, but I can't afford to””; The bus goes once an hour and costs £4 return.”” People talk about the proportion of their income spent on fares—for example, ““I am spending a quarter of my wages on buses.”” I am talking about young people, perhaps with Saturday jobs, and recent graduates with relatively low incomes. The subject deserves much more time than we can give it this afternoon. I want to convey young people's frustration, and the fact that because of the way in which the system is structured it is a private monopoly about which we can do very little. The Government are considering some sort of re-regulation, but my worry is that it will not go far enough. A bit more regulation will not make FirstGroup provide a quality public service. It is a private business, and if we want a quality public service, we, the public, will probably have to pay for it.