Eight months in and one Secretary of State for Transport down here’s an analysis of where thing’s stand on the not so new Westminster administration’s approach to transport policy.
In every dream home a heart ache
Housing is the leitmotif for what the new administration wants to do. For the public transport sector the nature of an expansion in new housing is arguably more important than some of what may happen within the transport brief. The big question is whether a significant house building splurge will unleash a new public transport killing spree of car dependent sprawl or whether it will open the door to the kind of new suburbs that put people and the environment first. We know what good looks like – its already there in new suburbs in places like the Netherlands. The question is are we going to build it? Given that the new administration has said it wants housing built quickly – and mostly by the private sector mass housebuilders (with their poor record on sustainability and public transport access) – then there are good reasons to be pessimistic. On the other hand its early days and there are many battles over the detail and interpretation of the new planning regime still be fought. If the future isn’t to be one of shrinking islands of demand for bus travel then the public transport sector will need to play its part in these debates.
Bulldozer optics
We are back to the George Osborne era where no sentence was complete without the use of the word ‘growth’. Growth tends to be a code for looking big and busy on the economy and looking determined and cross about anything identified as standing in the way. ‘Growth deniers’ as they were called for a while. Projects and policies which get to wear the ‘growth’ badge tend to involve bulldozers – although they may or may not lead to good jobs for people (road building has the ‘growth’ optics even though road construction is very poor at actual job creation). Growth also hates planning – but loves it too. So planning is a bad thing when it stops us getting what we want (planning is ‘the single biggest obstacle to growth’ according to the Chancellor). But planning is a good thing when it gets us what we want (housing targets are back). There’s a touch of Eisenhower’s America in the vision for the voters of a new home in a new place with a new car on the drive and a new job in cutting edge private sector industries. A sensible world where people will vote sensibly. Meanwhile the dash for international infrastructure investment cash could also lead to PFI making a come back in transport. A more expensive, if off balance sheet way, of getting more things built.
There’s a saying that whoever you vote for the Treasury gets in. And this is particularly the case this time. Treasury orthodoxies and predilections are never far from the surface in the new administration’s policies and so capital continues to be seen as a good and virtuous whereas revenue spending is rather more suspect. Hence the demise of England’s £2 maximum fare with claims of compensatory capital investment to make up for the increase to the new and messy £3 maximum (see below). The trouble with capital investment though is its impacts are on specific geographies, it takes time to implement, not everyone wants it in the first place and it’s not clear who really deserves the credit for it. Also the level of capital spending that would be necessary for people to distinguish from the general background level of investment in local infrastructure would have to be an order of magnitude larger than it is now. Whereas revenue-based measures – like fares initiatives have instant and universal impact, it’s clear who was responsible and it makes a tangible difference to the cost of everyday life. To strike a more optimistic note on revenue it looks like local government revenue support is going to be put back on an upward trajectory again – which could feed through into available support for public transport services as well as in attracting and retaining the staff necessary to make more good things happen on the ground. The new administration has also been strong on its support for ‘real devolution’ and the demise of competition funding. There’s promising signs of this on transport in the devolution white paper for the well established Mayoral Combined Authorities in particular. Stand outs include consolidated funding settlements; a plan led approach (economic, transport and landuse); sliding scale for influence over local rail networks (though let’s wait to see what gets nailed down), the move to city regions taking responsible for taxi licencing (which if it happens would help in eliminating the race to the bottom which the current antediluvian regulatory system for PHVs and taxis promotes); a shift of powers over local strategic highways to the city regions with local roads staying with Districts (bringing other city regions in line with London); empowering local transport authorities to regulate on-street micro mobility schemes (e-scooters etc) in line with local needs.
In some ways all this is the next stage of the long journey back from the abolition of conurbation-wide Metropolitan Authorities (and linked wrecking of their integrated public transport networks through deregulation and later on by rail privatisation) that occurred nearly 40 years ago. This is a good thing. The big difference being the Met counties were run by leaders of directly elected councillors and the revamped versions are led by Mayors. Let’s hope that some of the brio and confidence that the Met authorities had will now follow on from the protracted and relatively cautious era of transition we have seen. A test will also be whether the city regions are prepared to transfer upwards powers that currently sit at District level to the city region level.
Meanwhile London clearly wants one person to talk to everywhere so bigger upper, and preferably single tier, Mayoral authorities are what the Westminster administration wants across England. They haven’t done much rolling the pitch though for what is extensive local government reform which is also predicated almost entirely on the idea that this form of governance is better for ‘growth’ because national government can get things sorted by cutting deals with the local big woman/man. There’s little interest shown in the other facets of what local government is and does – including, in an age of distrust in politics, how local concerns and identities will be reflected. All very Treasury. And outside the city regions the backlash has begun.
The other challenge with all powerful Mayors everywhere includes how well that works in rural areas where local authorities are lightly resourced and the office of the Mayoral Combined Authority even more so; the national State often finds the Mayoral model less appealing when they are run by big characters who don’t share national government’s views; and the Mayoral model doesn’t always attract straighter shooters – as can frequently be seen in the criminal courts of the US.
Meanwhile, the real next big step in devolution would be a shift in the taxation regime from national to local. A step too far for now.
Everything is going yellow
As buses in Greater Manchester come fully back under public control a new Buses Bill and franchise guidance has further upped the ante. In many ways, however, it is mostly a tidy up of the rough edges of the existing Osborne-inspired buses legislation (which was imposed at the time on a largely horrified DfT). In some ways this makes sense as Greater Manchester has proved that this legislation is workable. Setting out a whole new approach would risk blighting progress already being made elsewhere.
The big surprise is that authorities will be able to direct award to incumbents for round one of franchising as an incentive to crack on. I didn’t think this was legally possible but where there’s a will there’s a way! How this will work in practice will be interesting – as well as what it means for dynamics within the industry. At the same time the legislation opens up options which might appeal to smaller local transport authorities including partial franchising. Does this mean more incrementalisation, consultants reports and complexity or a sensible compromise for lightly resourced local authorities? We will see.
The big missing element is the option (as far as I can see) of being able to direct award to a municipal indefinitely. This would be the rough equivalent of what this administration is doing on rail. So why not on bus? The power to create new municipals is there but this would still leave them a) having to compete within a deregulated framework and the associated risks of a race to the bottom or b) compete for a franchise which they may lose either in round one or subsequent rounds whilst potentially sacrificing municipal values along the way.
The new franchising guidance sets out a very long and detailed set of requirements for what a franchising authority has to be able to show its franchise proposal will achieve. This could prove a disincentive for more lightly resourced authorities in rural areas. You could argue why not the other way round? Shouldn’t an authority have to demonstrate why it isn’t doing franchising by showing how will it achieve a long list of government set objectives by sticking with the status quo. The status quo in many rural areas being to laboriously and expensively tender a ‘network’ by individual route rather than as a single coherent network as would be the case under franchising. There’s still the underlying institutional sense that bus deregulation is the god given ‘natural’ way in which buses are provided and that a great deal of caution has to be exercised if that is to be changed. Again a big contrast with the approach to rail – and indeed to Wales where the presumption is that all services will be franchised.
The tragedy is that Labour could have introduced workable Westminster legislation like this anytime between 1997 and 2010. We would have been in a different and far better place on bus if they had.
Meanwhile a future regret may well be the decision to dump the £2 maximum fare to a far less attractive £3 maximum. £3 single makes more sense for longer rural journeys than it does for short urban journeys. Whilst it may make rural bus services more relevant if it becomes the new minimum urban fare by default then it risks becoming a fares increase for some of poorest areas of our cities (which are often at shorter distances to central facilities) unless people start doing workarounds – like moving back to period tickets. So is the £3 fare mutating into a rural bus patronage support mechanism?
It has now also becomes a test of which Mayors are going to find the cash to keep it at £2 – either way the UK fare landscape becomes more variable (A reminder for fact fans: England isn’t the UK). There isn’t an equivalent £2 fare in NI, Wales or Scotland (indeed Scotland has gone down a different route of widening age-based concessions which has the unintended consequence of leaving a squeezed middle paying relatively high fares). London also plays by different rules with a maximum single fare of £1.75.
£3 single is £6 for a bus trip (given most people are coming back from wherever they are going) which in urban areas means period tickets play a stronger hand again – particularly operator-specific tickets.
What’s happened to the £2 fare is part of a bigger trend observable in other parts of Europe (eg Germany). In the absence of compelling propositions on fares from operators / authorities in the recent post-COVID / energy shock world politicians parachuted cheap fares initiatives on top of existing fares structures. Now there’s some clawback going on which risks undermining the point of doing that kind of scheme in the first place. Meanwhile the complex fares structure they were layered on top of remain largely intact because there’s a preference to come up with new stand-alone fares initiatives than stand back and take a more holistic view of what we are currently doing on fares and what objectives we are trying to achieve.
So something that was making bus use simple and feel like a public service again has gone. It’s not good optics. And no – shrill hyperbolic promises of ‘biggest ever’ changes to planning legislation or ‘biggest ever’ investment in bus lanes etc – will never have the same cut through with the man on the Clapham (North Yorkshire) omnibus as the £2 bus fare.
What kind of public control?
The battle of ideas over the best way to provide public transport is effectively over. Even the last Conservative government had given up on advocating for bus deregulation or anything remotely like the original rail privatisation vision. The new Labour government is far more enthusiastic about reversing both than the last Labour administration. Hence the quickening pace at which rail, trams and buses in Great Britain are coming back into the public sector – with direct public operation to the fore for steel wheel modes. Looking back bus deregulation was an early harbinger of the neo liberal period and rail privatisation one of its last full-throated hurrahs. Both were part of a much larger project where the objective was to break the power of organised labour in favour of the interests of organised wealth under the guise of the ‘marketisation’ of everything. The original objective of the wider neo-liberal project has now largely been achieved (though unusually the unions remain strong in the sector for industry specific reasons). We are now in a new era where having efficient and effective public transport is seen as a key underpinning for economic growth in an era of ‘securanomics’. The appetite and rationale for propping up pretend markets for rail and bus has now largely evaporated. After all the former is now mostly run by some form of publicly owned organisation (even if its overseas owned) and buses became a cosy, competition-averse, oligarchy long ago. Patience with the privatised railways periodic nervous breakdowns has also run out.
So in this new era the new big questions revolve around what will public sector control and operation look like in practice and whether the opportunities that are opening up will be fully realised. The current framing on rail reform is that this is a case of handing the railway back to industry professionals without all the tangled inefficiencies of privatisation getting in the way whilst simultaneously minimising day-to-day government interference. A more cohesive railway with less monetised interfaces and periodic nervous breakdowns is a good thing and long overdue. But if that is all we end up with then this risks nationalisation being a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ rather than an opportunity to think big – really big – about what a publicly accountable railway could be and do. A similarly cautious approach was taken to rail nationalisation in 1948 where British Railways (instead of Great British Railways as was also proposed) in its early years set about maintaining a geographically regionalised railway that looked backwards not forward. The governance, remit and senior appointments at British Rail ‘take two’ need to ensure that the railway doesn’t become introverted and its wider role in serving the social, economic and environmental needs of nations and their regions and places are reflected.
What could thinking big look like? It should start with what a public sector railway is going to look like and feel like to the travelling public. At present what you get in terms of branding, train spec and comfort and so on is at the behest of different operators with very little that says to the public that this service is publicly owned or not. Instead shouldn’t a nationalised railway have a national intercity product which is consistent in terms of fares, train spec and service offer? We did it before with InterCity and many countries continue to do it – for good reason. This in turn could align with a national rail development plan which should incorporate what’s left of HS2 and all the unanswered questions it’s hacking back left behind. It was always mad to promote HS2 as a separate entity – when in reality it formed the basis for a rewriting of the national network. Now is the opportunity to integrate the future of new domestic high speed rail routes with the rest of the network and how it presents itself. An interminable process of fares reform has been going on for some time now – but its objectives are confused and the outcomes can be filed under tinkering. Greenpeace recently threw down a gauntlet calling for a UK variant of Austria’s successful 49 euro a month Climate Card. I’m not saying that this is necessarily the right approach. There’s the interplay with sub-national local bus and tram services to consider and the Greenpeace proposal doesn’t include InterCity – so perhaps something equivalent to Germany’s BahnCard might be. a better starting point (an annual subscription to get significant discounts on all rail travel). However, Greenpeace have at least filled the vacuum with a bold proposition. What’s the big idea on fares on GBR that could grab the travelling public’s imagination? And when does the debate start? Also due some big thinking is the track access charge regime (welcome as the recently announced temporary alleviation for new freight services is and more bullish approach to open access passenger services paying their way)) which is a relic of the faking of markets era. The format for track access charges was deliberately designed to dump disproportionate costs on regional trains (which have the least impact on infrastructure) in order to give rail freight a chance (fair enough) and create artificially ‘profitable’ long distance services.
Finally, although it was undone by operational failings the foundations and early years of the Abellio Scotrail franchise is worth looking at as an example of an attempt to embed rail within a far wider set of social and public objectives. There was a director of economic development to forge better links with local authority economic development teams to make sure the railways mesh with both overarching local economic strategies but also with specific regeneration schemes and bids. It had a director of health and sustainability, fitbands for staff and an intention to achieve a gold award in the Scottish Healthy Working Lives. There was an employee gain share and a seat at the board for a trade union representative. Indeed the franchise specifically aligned itself with detailing how in practice the railway would contribute to the Scottish Government’s key aims. More widely the Borders Railway – the biggest domestic line reopening in a century was an exemplar of the ‘more than a railway’ approach. Rather than being an engineering project to walk away from afterwards there was joint working between Visit Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Transport Scotland and the local authorities in the area. This included a coordinated plan with an international tourism promotion campaign, an investment fund to support local business, a new business park at Tweedbank and a major housing development at Shawfair in Midlothian.
More thinking also needs to be done about the best formats for municipal operation given the mixed bag that is municipal operation at present. By and large owning local authorities have tended to be very hands off with their municipals – so they have all developed their own broadly commercial cultures. Is there a secret sauce behind why some of them are among the best bus companies in Britain? And to what extent can governance of the municipals better reflect the fact that they are companies that are locally owned with a public service remit?
Away from the legislation the actual business of bringing bus services back under public control is happening on the ground. As bus franchising becomes more established the big questions for authorities are the pros and cons of a ‘plain vanilla’ approach to round one of franchising (in order to get something safely in place which can be built on later) or to look to be more innovative from the get go. Alongside this will be the tough choices about going for the cheapest bids for franchises or those where the bidder is motivated and offering quality at good value (even if its not the cheapest). After all we have seen many examples on rail franchising of the adage ‘if it looks too good to be true it is too good to be true.’
This is an industry which slants towards those looking backwards over their career and justifying what they did, and what they are used to, rather than those looking to the future and the scale of the opportunity that putting the public back into public transport opens up. On top of that the recent period of neo-liberalism hollowed out public sector capacity and confidence. For years it’s been a case of ‘there is no alternative’ to privatisation and deregulation. But now there is an alternative and we are starting to live it. Making the most or it is going to require guile, strategic thinking, confidence and ambition. And most of all looking forward not backward.
Meanwhile it’s also early days on the delivery of regulated buses – but with some promising signs in Greater Manchester that progressive innovation (such as night buses and social fares offers) is starting to be layered onto what was a careful approach to getting the basics right as part of a very successful initial transition.
Finally, one area of the administration’s policies that hasn’t had that much attention is the package of improved workers’ rights. Strengthening the position of labour could be one of the more significant things the new administration does – as this makes labour less disposable and also encourages capital investment within organisations and companies. It’s also something which could be particularly pertinent to public transport which in someways has become an outlier – with all the other utilities still firmly in private hands.
Greening by stealth?
There’s an argument that runs that the new Westminster administration is being savvy about how it greens the country. What it won’t do is go on moral crusades that risk triggering the kind of backlash that is currently ravaging green policies across the Western world. What it will do is go green where it supports good jobs and a growing economy. That is the terrain on which it will fight on carbon reduction and wider sustainability issues – and which ultimately will get more green things done. Whether you accept that argument or not it’s clear that for this Westminster administration the green imperative is secondary to the growth imperative and what it would see as the ‘grown up’ politics of the reality of mass car ownership (hence the fuel duty freeze in the budget – alongside some more progressive changes to the wider vehicle taxation regime). Whilst it’s true that green crusades can come unstuck, without a central organising principle the danger is that the transport brief becomes more vulnerable to drift. It risks becoming the usual bog standard transport policy where every form of transport gets a share of the cash and attention but nothing much really changes or has impact. And as the bible says: without a vision the people shall perish. Same applies to parliamentary majorities. Meanwhile if the real cost of motoring continues to decline then we risk throwing ever great sums of money at public transport in order to keep it afloat rather than to win back significant market share.
Get off the streets
Despite the bus industry seeking to give the impression that they are utterly helpless to do anything worthwhile as there are no bus lanes anywhere, there’s actually a lot of investment going into bus priority and active travel schemes. The transition on the paranoid right from fantasies about fifteen minute cities towards creating the conditions for attempted pogroms in the Summer was depressing. However at least it did create some breathing space for those public authorities that had stayed the course to continue to transition streets to places for people rather than private vehicles. There are no signs so far off any backtracking on this by the new Westminster administration. Long may it continue.
Conclusion
Not for the first time then transport is far from the number one priority of a new government. Where transport is seen to contribute to the main priority of growth – then all well and good. The greener the better. But there is to be no big green crusade on modal shift per se. And there’s the worrying suggestion that the optics of a macho road building programme will end up holding the trump card on transport spending. At the same time public transport is quite the outlier on public ownership and control. What kind of public control and ownership it will be is still shaping up.
So we know the key themes of this administration. Much of the detail is still contested internally within government – as well as being more widely up for grabs.