After nearly 40 years of Thatcherite deregulation and privatisation, the buses in Manchester are back under public control. On Sunday, 50 Bee Network electric buses will take their first journey across Bolton, Wigan and parts of Salford and Bury, with the full rollout across Greater Manchester scheduled to be complete by January 2025.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, should be proud. He faced down his critics, and stood firm against the immense pressure of the private bus operators who challenged his decision but failed to overturn it in the courts. The role of local campaigners Better Buses for Greater Manchester in this result must also be recognised; they clearly made the case for why public control would improve services and put pressure on Burnham to go through with his campaign promise. Thanks to them, the chaos of bus deregulation in the city will finally come to an end.
Greater Manchester was the home of the first ever horse-drawn “omnibus” service. Set up by a tollkeeper in 1824, the service ferried passengers to and from Pendleton and Manchester. The city has seen public ownership and control before. From 1930, there was a patchwork of services across the city, with every council owning a different coloured bus fleet. In 1969 these were streamlined, with the creation of a new transport authority, Selnec, which covered the whole of Greater Manchester with its trademark orange buses.
Then along came Margaret Thatcher. Her 1985 Transport Act led to a mass sale of council-owned bus companies and the start of a free-for-all in how services ran in the city. The quality of vehicles dramatically declined. In the “bus wars” that followed, private companies fought for custom, even racing each other down the street to pick up passengers. One observer described it as “gangster warfare”. Most travellers unsurprisingly simply got the first bus that came along, rather than picking and choosing their favourite bus company, which left competition authorities scratching their heads.
As companies consolidated, Manchester’s privatised buses developed a terrible reputation for being expensive, unreliable and slow. The theory was that deregulation would lead to “new and better services”, but the opposite had happened. Buses became more expensive and more unreliable. Since privatisation, bus fares in the UK as a whole have nearly doubled in real terms since 1987, while 3,000 bus routes were cut in the decade to 2019.
We are all propping up the private operators in this broken system. Public money makes up 40% of bus company revenue, but the public has no control over fares, nor the vast majority of routes and timetables. And 10% of that public money is paid as dividends to bus company shareholders, instead of being reinvested in better services.
The contrast between the capital and the rest of the country is stark. While journeys in London, where bus services are regulated by Transport for London, doubled over the two decades before the pandemic, bus trips outside London halved. The UK lags behind other countries on productivity, and terrible urban transport in major cities outside London is a significant factor.
None of this is inevitable. The public want a better bus system, with one study showing that 57% of motorists would use their car less if bus fares were lower and services more reliable. Other countries show it is possible. Local public transport is 88% publicly owned in Germany, and in Switzerland, every village gets an hourly service thanks to proper funding, public ownership and planning.
And now Manchester is also showing the way. Using new powers from the Bus Services Act 2017, Burnham has introduced London-style regulation with private bus companies now bidding for contracts in a planned network.
Ultimately, we need full public ownership, but public control is still a gamechanger. It means Transport for Greater Manchester has the power to properly plan its Bee Network, with affordable area-wide fares, simple ticketing and a coordinated timetable.
It means that it will be able to redirect surplus profit from busy routes to subsidise less busy but essential buses. Overall cost savings due to lower profit margins can be used to expand the network, or provide better evening and weekend services. Public transport will be cheaper, more frequent, reliable and easy to understand.
A 2021 report on buses by a former UN special rapporteur on human rights found that the UK had “provided a masterclass in how not to run an essential public service”. But the tide is now turning. Thanks to Burnham and the campaigners who made the case, Greater Manchester could provide a blueprint for turning around our broken bus system.
With further campaigns being organised in cities and regions across England to take buses back under public control, and with Wales already planning to regulate its entire bus network, the reversal of Thatcherite deregulation and privatisation is in motion.
Cat Hobbs is the founder of We Own It, an organisation that campaigns for public ownership of public services
