Who cares about buses?
I ask the question because last week the Government published the jobs specs for some new jobs in its latest quango Active Travel England.
Active Travel England was announced last year, and is currently recruiting a Chief Operating Officer.
Like much around the DfT’s emerging strategy at the moment, a lot is uncertain. The person spec acknowledges that “the form of ATE and its relationship to the Department is still being formalised” (I bet it is!) but a few things are known.
We know that Active Travel England will be a statutory consultee on all new planning applications and we know that they will have an inspectorate role, checking up on local authorities to make sure they’re implementing the (sweeping!) statutory guidance on improving bike lanes. We also know they’ll be responsible for disbursing the £2 billion for active travel projects that the Government announced last year. Moreover, the person spec tells us that the COO will be responsible for ‘recruiting’ a team of 35 people. Maybe I’m naive but that suggests that this isn’t simply rebadging some existing DfT staff but is actually new resource to do an expanded job.
It all sounds great.
But something strikes me.
We will shortly have Active Travel England, with a remit to ensure the right things happen for active travel on a national basis. All the rumours suggest that when Williams finally reports, Network Rail will emerge from its 15-year chrysalis as an engineering organisation to become a customer-focused butterfly, with a national mandate as a ‘guiding mind’ (and a huge budget) for all things rail.
So that means the only travel mode without a dedicated national quango will be buses.
This is particularly noticeable given the remit of Active Travel England sounds remarkably similar to the situation for buses following the National Bus Strategy. Active Travel England exists to disburse a new multi-billion funding settlement (check), to ensure sweeping new statutory guidance on infrastructure is actually implemented on the ground (check) and to act as a statutory consultee on planning (well, would certainly be good to have a guarantee of a bus voice round the table).
The National Bus Strategy was pitched at delivering local solutions, and I applaud that. But Active Travel England appears to have been set up as a kind of assurance function, to ensure that local authorities actually do what they’ve been asked to do. And that doesn’t sound a bad idea for buses.
Anyway, whether or not it’s a good idea is almost immaterial.
I could imagine a world with no modal quangos at all - or a world with one multi-modal transport quango designed to act as the bridge between local authorities and the DfT (who could then, quite properly, focus on policy not implementation). But it does seem a bit odd that the only transport mode without a national voice will be the one that is most used.
