National Bus Strategy: What’s not to Like?
Is the funding real, are the structures right and is it a central government power-grab? Just some of the questions for the National Bus Strategy
My social feeds have been so full of praise for the National Bus Strategy that to criticise feels a bit like kicking someone’s kitten.
So I’d just like to make it clear that I love kittens.
Yesterday was all about what’s good; so today it’s time for the bad and the ugly.
Right document, wrong author
In loads of ways, it’s a great document. Its description of good bus services is one that many people (including me) could stand beside. In some ways, it rather reminds me of a report I produced for Travel West Midlands, when I was a graduate trainee, describing how it all should be done. And I thought that was bloody good too.
But it’s also hyper-detailed for a central Government paper. A graduate trainee writing for a local management team probably ought to get into the weeds but should a Whitehall department? Whoever wrote it clearly knows their stuff and is capable of understanding what makes good local bus routes succeed. But, of course, the Department for Business could recruit someone to write a brilliant report describing how supermarkets should be run.
But they don’t, as it’s not their role.
Paragraphs like this are pretty damned detailed for a central Government strategy:
Networks often try to provide infrequent through services to everywhere or divert buses away from the main route to serve smaller places, reducing speed and convenience for people travelling between a route’s major points. As described, on high-frequency services more use could instead be made of good hub-and-spoke connections, with frequent feeder buses connecting into frequent major routes and through ticketing.
Or how about the support for “up to five” Glider routes in England. What if the ‘right’ number of Gliders is six? Or, actually, someone comes up with a better option? Nope, we get “up to five” Gliders. With, no doubt, a separate bid process for each one.
Five Gliders, please
I love this line:
Route branding can still work well as part of a wider network identity.
Phew! Permission granted!
And how about this:
We will promote PlusBus better, and work towards extending the range of destinations available under it and making PlusBus tickets available as e-tickets and mobile tickets, so users can start their journey with a bus trip without needing to have paper tickets posted out or collected in advance from a railway station.
I mean, should Whitehall really be concerning itself with precisely how individual ticket products are marketed and distributed?
You may say I’m being a bit silly, and why does any of this matter?
But the danger is that more and more decisions end up being sucked into Whitehall and further from the customers. As far as we can tell (and, let’s face it, the strategy doesn’t tell us much), the £3bn will be dispersed by experts in Whitehall in response to bids. The document is explicit they’ll only award money to outcomes that look like their description of what good looks likes. That means that there’s absolutely no point in any of the 81 local authorities, 5 big owning groups or 1,000 independent operators trying to come up with new ideas - as these are the good ideas.
This places a heavy burden on a central Whitehall team to always know everything and be right about everything, forever.
You might say I’m being melodramatic, but cross the floor at Great Minster House and you’ll find another team of people preparing to release the Williams review, one of which’s key purposes is to get decisions that shouldn’t be made there away from the DfT. Rail has spent the last two decades discovering that if money is controlled by central Government civil servants and awarded in response to bids, you end up with more and more decisions taken centrally and less and less empowerment of the front line.
But even as rail’s reversal of that process plays out, bus appears to be starting on precisely the opposite journey.
For clarity, I’m not saying that any of the best practice in the document is wrong. Just that DfT are the wrong people to say it.
Here’s the answer; what’s the question?
It’s also something of a shame that the strategy is so prescriptive.
Yes, Enhanced Partnerships are a perfectly sensible way of working, but they’re not the only way. Indeed, the Government’s own Enhanced Partnership guidance says:
In these initial discussions the authority (or authorities) and operators should consider whether a formal partnership is the most appropriate way to improve local services, or whether what the authority and the bus operators wish to jointly achieve can be done through a voluntary agreement. A voluntary agreement may be able to deliver change more quickly.
That option is, however, eliminated by this strategy.
In towns and cities like Brighton and Oxford, partnership working is established and the bus priority measures in the paper would be perfectly satisfactory to achieve an extraordinary step-change in usage - if implemented.
Now, it may be that the local managers and local authority in those cities want to spend the next six months negotiating the detail of a statutory partnership.
But I’m reminded of an experience at Chiltern Railways. South West Trains had just been through an incredibly expensive and painful (unless you’re a lawyer) alliancing process with Network Rail. My then boss, Rob Brighouse, felt that we too should have an ‘alliance’ with Network Rail.
So he and our local Route Director wrote up two sides of A4 and signed it.
The punchline is that the value of any ‘alliance’ or ‘partnership’ comes in the soft things (e.g. Network Rail always attended our internal management conferences, and vice versa). Far more value than a statutory process will be if Local Authorities and bus operators get to the point of attending each others’ internal meetings.
Where’s the bloody money, Lebowski?
It’s absolutely fantastic that there’s £3 billion for the bus industry. But is there?
The strategy gives not the smallest hint of how it is to be spent. I’ve added up all the actual spending commitments that might possibly form part of the £3bn, and they total £421.5m. The remainder is dismissed with an airy:
The bulk of the £3bn transformation funding will be paid after the transformational changes begin in April 2022
But there’s no clue as to whom and for what the £3bn will be paid. Presumably, local authorities will have to bid? Against what criteria? No clue. Indeed, I suspect that the reason the press release was issued at midnight but the strategy at midday was so that the Government could hoover up headlines about £3bn of funding without anyone noticing that the document makes no commitments whatsoever.
Now, probably, the £3bn will happen. But the document states (ludicrously) that the strategy provides ‘certainty’ but it requires the reader to take on trust that £3bn will emerge.
I told you it was discretionary!
The document several times refers to the £3bn as discretionary. This is becoming something of a habit.
Traditionally a ‘strategy’ would allocate funds to outcomes, but not this one.
And given this Government’s track record with discretionary funds, there seems a pretty big risk that it’ll become yet another voter bung fund.
Remember the Towns Fund which channelled cash to marginal constituencies just before the 2019 election?
Newark, the 270th most deprived constituency, would probably not normally have expected cash from a levelling-up fund but, of course, Newark is represented by the Communities Secretary and ended up with £25 million.
Andrew Marr asked him how it was decided that he’d get cash given that, on face value, his constituency didn’t qualify. Here’s the transcript:
JENRICK: If the question you’re coming to is was I involved in selecting my own community, absolutely not. Ministers do not get involved in their own constituencies. That decision was made by another minister in my department.
MARR: Who?
JENRICK: It was made by Jake Berry.
MARR: Who also got money for his constituency.
JENRICK: Well, that was a decision made by another minister
MARR: Who?
JENRICK: Well, it was made by myself.
MARR: So you decided that Jake Berry’s constitency got money and Jake Berry decided that your constituency got money.
JENRICK: With respect Andrew, this is perfectly normal
If you don’t believe me, watch it yourself. So it may be that, even now, DfT intend the ‘discretionary’ fund to be entirely above board and to be channelled to operators and authorities that best meet the (unpublished) criteria. But don’t be totally surprised if ministerial intervention results in criteria that are, shall we say, flexible.
In fact, I have a little test. Make a note in your calendar for a few years’ hence, and let’s go back and see how much of the £3bn ended up in Knowsley.
Given that the strategy is full of talk of ‘levelling up’, there should be nowhere more deserving. On the Government’s own Indices of Deprivation, Knowsley is the third most deprived place in Britain.
Moreover, if (as the strategy says) the Government believes that lack of decent buses is a key cause of deprivation, then Knowsley should also be front of the queue for funding. The two biggest population centres in Knowsley are Kirkby and Huyton, yet here’s what Google Maps offers me as the best public transport between the two (for comparison, it tells me the car journey is 12 minutes):
So Knowsley is the third most deprived place in Britain and desperately needs better buses. Anything else worth mentioning? Oh yes, Knowsley is the second safest Labour seat in Britain.
I am entirely serious - put a note in your calendar and check back on where the money went.
(If you want a further example of how ‘discretionary’ funds work, check out this post from last week)
Is it still £3bn?
Hmmm - Boris, buses and post-dated funding commitments. What does that remind me of?
It’s worth also pondering whether it is really £3bn. That figure is exactly the same figure as was quoted a year ago, before the pandemic, so it’s clearly what the Government has in mind. However, they’re currently spending £25m a week on emergency pandemic support and it’s not totally clear whether the £3bn is in addition to the payments that will replace the Coronavirus Bus Service Support Grant in July, or whether future payments will count towards it. My guess is that the Government will maintain that flexibility.
It’s all about the people
The Government has set a blistering timeline to the process of setting up 81 Enhanced Partnerships. We need Local Bus Improvement Plans by October and universal Enhanced Partnerships by April 2022.
But, of course, local authorities and bus operators are not creatures in their own right, they are simply collections of people. And thanks to 10 years of austerity, many local authorities have entirely hollowed out their bus functions. The strategy acknowledges this and promises to build a best practice centre for buses somewhere (let’s hope it has good bus links!) but that doesn’t change the fact that a local authority with no expertise cannot have embedded skills in time to produce this paperwork.
Best case it will either have a competent person newly employed but without local knowledge or a reasonably expert consultant. Made worse is the fact that many owning groups have also hollowed out their local management teams. There are some counties where, bluntly, the entire bus network currently runs on a kind of autopilot (today is a repeat of yesterday; and so forever) without any local expertise supervising the whole show. It would potentially have been better to put operators and local authorities on notice that Local Bus Improvement Plans were expected but to give them time to upskill before writing them.
This is also where the complete refusal to say where the £3bn is going will cause an issue. In a county with a zombie bus operator and a hollowed-out council, both the PLC and the local authority must now go and recruit local management to be able to do the work required by this document. But where’s the money going to come from? The operator has just been told they’re making no profits for the next year and have no idea what’s happening after that: the local authority is still on austerity rations. How do the finance directors sign off on the recruitment? £3bn tomorrow isn’t the same as £3bn today.
We know, of course, that this is a Government that believes that ‘deadlines focus minds’, which is why they adamantly refused to extend the Brexit negotiation deadline. And, of course, it worked, as they got their deal done, with days to spare. But, of course, the deal was also a total fuck up. So make of that what you will.
What’s not in it
Luckily, before the strategy came out, I’d already spent a bit of time noting down what (in the humble opinion of Freewheeling) should be in it.
So let’s wrap up by doing a quick mark-up:
* The strategy devolves all decisions to operators and local authorities, and then tells them in fine detail exactly what to decide
It’s remarkable, given how much I thoroughly enjoyed reading the document, how little of what I asked for is actually there.
It does a brilliant job of describing what good bus services look like but is potentially light on some of the critical enablers.
I won’t repeat my previous post as you can read yourself the rationale for what I thought should be in there. But, as an example, it’s absolutely fundamental that we deal with the fact that we’re still building new housing estates that are almost unservable by bus. It’s essential that we stop charging the same for car drivers on congested bus corridors as we do on quiet rural roads. And it’s essential that DfT actually do what they say they’ve done in the strategy, and put in place long-term certainty of funding structures so that operators can invest against them.
Without these enablers in place, the £3bn will not achieve its full potential.
So, as I said yesterday, there’s a lot to like. But also more to do.
What do you think? Am I fair? Or am I kicking kittens? tell me your thoughts on linkedin
CORRECTION: A reader has got in touch to point out that Google is lying to me, and there is, in fact, a direct bus between Kirkby and Huyton, operated by Stagecoach. Though heaven knows how one would discover this! Anyway, more than happy to correct the record, though I think the wider point about Knowsley applies - it should be front of the queue based on its indices of deprivation.
