Leon Daniels on the National Bus Strategy
After an extraordinary week for the bus industry, I got together with Leon Daniels (host of the Lunch with Leon podcast and former Managing Director of Surface Transport for TfL) to review what had happened.
Is the bus strategy as radical as it sounds? Where are the hidden catches? And what’s going to happen next?
You can hear the full discussion on The Freewheeling Podcast.
Funding
Freewheeling readers will know that I had been concerned that the funding promised in the bus strategy is not guaranteed, with the word ‘discretionary’ used many times. Leon has an explanation:
The Department for Transport is in the middle of a one year budget because the spending review was postponed. The bus strategy can only give us funding until the end of this Parliament, which is 2024. So I hope the money is guaranteed.
Like me, Leon has some concerns:
Governments have a pretty crummy track record of devolving 100% of responsibility but with 80% of the funding. There is a risk that the funding gets sliced over time.
Though he notes that the DfT has achieved something remarkable, which is turning short-term emergency support into a long-term funding settlement:
We’re now conflating the Coronavirus support (the CBSSG) into the long term support for buses, so as the CBSSG begins to decay, it will be replaced with an equivalent level of support for more frequent, better and cheaper services. That’s heartening as any decent Treasury would want us weaned off the CBSSG, so the Government has done well to get what was originally a short-term support for Coronavirus into a long-term support for the industry.
And he’s particularly impressed that socially necessary services are not just guaranteed and required as a statutory duty, but augmented by economically necessary services as well:
Socially necessary services are rejuvenated and with a duty on local authorities to fund socially necessary services, but also economically necessary services. This isn’t just about running services in rural areas at later times, but this is about when a local authority for any number of strategic or policy reasons wants to run a service, a local authority has a duty to fund these services.
Local Authority capability
One of the concerns about the bus strategy is that not all local authorities have the resource and capability to deliver the Bus Improvement Plans envisaged by the strategy. Leon points out that:
The £25m that is set aside to give local authorities resource and capability until you divide it by all the local authorities across the country.
He also points out that the outcomes from the bus strategy will depend a lot on the capabilities of the bus operator and local authority:
There’s a matrix: for good local authority and good operator, this is music to their ears. But there’s also good operator and bad local authority, bad operator and good local authority and bad operator and bad local authority. There’s a lot of talking to be done between people who haven’t been communicating with each very well for many years.
Local political leadership
Leon has a concern that local political circumstances in those councils with very narrow Labour or Conservative majorities could see the ambitions of the bus strategy being relegated to immediate political concerns:
For many local authorities where there is no strong political leadership, something like an unpopular bus lane is enough to push the balance of power out.
He is under no illusion that a lot of this will be controversial
Road space is finite, there is no doubt there will be congestion. Now, I don’t mind that, as if you make the journeys sufficiently difficult to make, they’ll do something different. But in the short term, we’ll have the pictures of the bus lane and the long line of traffic. I always like pictures like that, as the reason the bus lane is empty is because the bus has already got to the place it’s going to.
However, he also notes that this is heavily based on the experience of London:
It was the virtuous circle of simplicity, bus priority measures and simpler fares; supported by £700m of taxpayers’ money. But if you believe that buses are the life-blood for employment, recreation, commerce and education, then it’s money well spent.
He has no doubt that Boris is personally behind this plan:
I can see the Prime Minister and his team wanting to replicate that across the country.
Public and private
He hopes that the bus strategy will result in the public and private sectors falling into a new equilibrium in which each does what they do best:
It’s always better that the private sector does what it does best, which is owning assets and mobilising labour, and the public sector does what it does best, which is strategic planning.
Overall, Leon has many of the same enthusiasms and concerns that I do (which you can read about here). It’s fantastic to see bus priority taken seriously, and the prospect of decent funding for the industry. But the funding has to be guaranteed and there’s a lot of hard work in areas where operators and local authorities don’t have a tradition of close partnership working to turn the ambitions of the strategy into reality.
Take a listen to the full thing for more detail - and subscribe to The Freewheeling Podcast for future episodes.
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