What buses can learn from Britain vaccinating the world
Britain’s vaccination programme has been one of the few elements of the Coronavirus pandemic that actually fulfils the Prime Minister’s determination to describe everything his Government does as ‘world-beating’.
Not only have we vaccinated faster than almost anywhere else but one of the globe’s ‘big 5’ vaccines was invented in a British university and distributed by an Anglo-Swedish company.
British Life Science leadership
This is hardly surprising. Life sciences is one of Britain’s success stories.
British researchers are cited more than any other country’s with the exception of Americans. The research cluster of Oxford, Cambridge and London is world-leading.
Everything from the first cloned mammal (remember Dolly the sheep) to having the genetic sequencing capability to identify Covid variants (such as the Delta variant causing so much trouble in British schools) has been led in Britain.
Life sciences employ more than 200,000 people and Britain benefits from the NHS; providing the potential for both data and accelerated trials.
Now, while there are some important differences (vaccines aren’t very similar to buses), there are some important parallels between life sciences and buses.
Buses are also a British global success story.
London has the densest bus network of any major global city. The UK is home to two major bus manufacturers in ADL and Wrightbus. The latter is leading the way on the use of hydrogen as a fuel which may overtake batteries as the green technology of choice for bus operators. Britain is also home to several leading global groups, including National Express, First and Stagecoach (even if the latter have been on retreat from the world in recent years). Britain also has a distinctive global product: the double-decker.
One of the other things that characterises these two markets is that the private sector players and public sector depend on each other.
And they are similar because they have both been the subject of recent Government strategies.
So I decided to read the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, published in 2017, to see what we could learn in the bus sector.
Lessons from Life Science
One key difference is that the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy was written by the industry, not by Government. The subheading of the report is “A report to the Government from the life sciences sector” [my italics]. The strategy therefore starts out from the perspective of the industry telling Government what it needs to help it grow; not the Government telling the industry what it must do.
The strategy was published in 2017 then, in January 2020, the original author produced an update outlining progress to date in implementing the strategy’s goals.
I don’t remotely have the expertise to judge whether all the actions described in the strategy and update were contributors to Britain’s life sciences successes in 2020 and 2021, but it doesn’t seem implausible.
Reading the strategy, it reads very differently from the bus strategy. The bus strategy was not written by the bus sector; it was written to the bus sector.
One of the key characteristics of the life science strategy is that it focuses on long-term strategic goals (e.g. “Create four UK companies valued at >£20 billion market cap in the next ten years” or “Create 2-3 entirely new industries over the next 10 years”) and then dives into the detail of what needs to be done to support these goals (“In the next five years, the NHS should engage in fifty collaborative programmes in late-stage clinical trials, real-world data collection, or in the evaluation of diagnostics or devices”).
If this approach was applied to the bus strategy, we might have started with things like “Overall industry to achieve XX passenger journeys by 2031” or “Customer satisfaction to exceed YY by 2031” or “Bus modal share to be ZZ by 2031”. That way, everyone would be clear what we were trying to achieve before we started on how to achieve it.
But whereas the life science strategy starts with long term goals and works backwards, the bus strategy is much more focused on where we are now; and what the Government wants to be different.
One of the characteristics of the life science strategy is that almost every goal is measurable and as well as high-level strategic actions, there are also specific, detailed recommendations. For example, “Make support and incentives for manufacturing investment and exporting available to business through a single front door, provide a senior national account manager accountable for delivery”
The other thing that strikes me reading the life science strategy is that it is designed to enhance an entire eco-system. It talks about creating the right environment and the right skills. People and place are as important as product.
By contrast, the bus strategy is focused on product and process but less on the wider industry and enablers. Does the bus sector have the right supply chain? What would need to happen to bring lower cost, more innovative suppliers into the industry? Does the bus sector have the right skills in management? Is the skills shortage of bus drivers strategic enough that it needs strategic attention? It feels like it to me.
Will automation affect buses? Automation of cars may not happen, but if it does, it’ll have a big impact. What about automation of buses? Why are these points not discussed?
And what about the wider context? How on earth is road pricing not in a bus strategy?
Indeed, the very title of the National Bus Strategy (“Bus Back Better”) highlights that it is focused on now. The things discussed in it are those that relate to things that exist today, and how they could be improved.
As I said in my commentary at the time, it’s hard to argue with many of the conclusions of the bus strategy. But maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Government to do what it did with the life sciences industry and commission the industry to write its own strategy - this time focused on the long term and what the industry needs to thrive.
