Setting out his £3bn 'bus back better' strategy last spring, Boris Johnson's enthusiastic tribute to buses made it no surprise that he famously claimed to make models of them out of old wine crates to relax.
"They get teenagers to college," he wrote. "They drive pensioners to see their friends. They connect people to jobs they couldn’t otherwise take. They sustain town centres, they strengthen communities and they protect the environment. They are lifelines and they are liberators."
But a year on - and with passengers still not returning to buses after lockdown at anything near pre-pandemic levels - local bus networks across the North face a crisis.
As explored in a special edition of The Northern Agenda podcast this week, in Newcastle, Manchester and Sheffield, alarming reports outline how services could be slashed and fares raised in the coming weeks if the shortfall in bus companies' revenue is not made up with more emergency government funding.
In an online survey last week, we asked for views from across the North on local bus services. And the results don't paint an encouraging picture for those hoping people will leave their cars behind and take public transport for the good of the environment and the economy.
Listen to special report on the region's bus crisis in The Northern Agenda podcast
More than 2,000 readers of titles like the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and Yorkshire Live responded to our survey. Asked to give a score of between 1 and 10 for bus services in their area, with 10 being the best, 41% gave scores of just 1, 2 or 3 and only 12% rated their local service an 8, 9 or 10. In total nearly 70% gave their bus service a score of between 1 and 5 out of 10.
And are they using buses less now than before the pandemic? A total of 47% said they were using buses just as much as before but a sizeable chunk, 40%, said they were now taking the bus less often or much less often.
And as for the biggest issue putting people off the buses, 22% said it was them not coming regularly enough, the most popular answer. So it's no surprise that when asked what would make them more likely to use the bus, the most popular answer at 26% was more regular services.
One passenger, Snoof Kattekop, 40, an artist, maker and educator from Old Swan in Liverpool, is a wheelchair user who cannot drive and uses the bus for many day-today tasks including her son's school run.
She says on her way home "it's not uncommon for 2 or 3 consecutive buses, about half an hour apart, to arrive and leave with no passengers simply because they're late". "I have, on several occasions, sat there from 3.05pm (when the bell rings) to past six before either spending a tenner on a taxi I can't afford, or taking a different route that involves two buses."
Numbers of passengers on our buses have been falling for decades, in parts of the North by 15 to 20% in just the last decade or so.
In South Yorkshire the operator First has made losses of £26m in just the last eight years due to declining numbers, with the growth of car use making the roads more congested and harder for bus services to run well.
Since March 2020 the pandemic has accelerated the damaging trends affecting bus services and put the revenues of bus operators under even more pressure.
Patronage dropped to just 10% of pre-pandemic levels at the height of lockdown and though they have since slowly recovered they are still some way below what they used to be.
One major operator, Arriva, says some of its routes in the North are still carrying just 45% of their pre-pandemic passenger numbers.
To keep services going for vital workers, central government and local authorities have pumped in millions and millions in emergency support grants to make up for the lost revenue.
But in six weeks time the latest round of funding support runs out, meaning bus companies say they will have no choice but to cut routes and put up prices to stay afloat.
In Newcastle and North Tyneside it emerged this week exactly what this would look like, in a move described as the biggest single change to local bus services for 35 years.
By the end of March Arriva, Go North East and Stagecoach will be slashing their mileage – removing evening or weekend buses, shortening routes, and cutting some services entirely - on a total of 30 routes.
As John Dowie, Director of Partnerships at First Bus, tells the podcast: "The problem is our costs are rising, higher than inflation. There's a basic reality, the bulk of our costs are our staff, fuel, costs of vehicles, parts for maintenance.
"And we are under continuous pressure on that front. It's either fares, public sector support, or we have to reduce services. So there comes a point where sometimes fares do have to increase.
"But the problem is with Covid, it's just exacerbated the market challenges we're trying to face. So we will absolutely do our bit, we would be driving on empty if we tried to cover for withdrawal of government funding."
Nationally, the Government has promised to spend £3bn on bus improvements and encouraged local leaders to put forward bids setting out their detailed plans.
But amid reports that the budget has now been reduced to just £1.2bn - a claim denied by the Government - most of these proposals will get no further than the drawing board.
For many observers of the bus industry, there's an obvious solution to the wider problem. Bus franchising, putting the decisions about fares and routes in the hands of local authorities rather than the private bus operators, would mean the North could follow the example of London, which has not seen a decline in services anything like that outside the capital.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is the first leader to try and reverse the privatisation of bus services introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1985 Transport Act and plans to run the region's buses in-house.
And this week his best political mate Steve Rotheram announced that franchising was also the preferred model for his patch in the Liverpool City Region.
And South Yorkshire mayor Dan Jarvis said he too would bring forward proposals for the formal investigation of bus franchising which he described as "a critical step for efforts to transform the region’s transport".
Louise Haigh, a Sheffield MP and Labour's Shadow Transport Secretary, says that if in power she would make it easier for Northern areas without mayors to introduce franchising powers.
She said: "People talk to me all the time about what the buses were like in Sheffield, before I was born, when they were in public ownership, how, how good and how broad they were, but also how cheap and affordable they were as well."
Bus operators oppose franchising and would prefer 'an enhanced partnership' where private firms work together with local leaders, but John Dowie of First said such a move was "ultimately a local authority's democratic right".
But he said: "My health warning to local government would be that at the moment, we are struggling with the challenges of running bus services in congested environments with long term decline in bus patronage.
"It involves considerable risks, we have to manage the challenges of the new digital ticketing, the switch to zero emission vehicles. We have to manage that at the moment. Clearly, if local government actually thinks it wants to and is better able to manage, that's its choice, but it has to accept the risks that will then transfer across."
The Department for Transport said: "We have provided over £1.7bn to keep bus services running across the country throughout the pandemic, and are working closely with operators and local transport authorities to protect services after April.
“The Government has committed to investing £3bn into bus services by 2025, including £1.2bn to improve fares, services and infrastructure, and a further £525m for zero emission buses.”
But what's happening in your area? The Northern Agenda political newsletter looks at how different parts of the North compare.
Liverpool City Region:
Of the 2,000 responses to the survey, the 350 from Merseyside were most likely to say they'd use the bus to get into a town or city, at 57%. Some 72% were in favour of franchising.
A spokesman for Steve Rotheram's Liverpool City Region mayoral authority said bus passenger levels locally were around 80% of pre-Covid levels. Service cuts are expected if emergency funding is withdrawn, but the scale has not yet been made clear.
A Bus Service Improvement Plan worth £667m was submitted recently. If secured, the new funding would represent the biggest ever investment in the region’s bus services from 2022 onwards, accelerating delivery of a wide range of transformative projects like priority bus lanes, reduced fares and new services.
Other funding applications include bids to run 24 hydrogen fuel cell electric buses and nearly £280m to reform local services and introduce more bus priority and infrastructure improvements on key routes.
The overriding plan is that travelling on a ‘green bus route’ will mean passengers can enjoy faster, smoother, safer and more reliable journeys. This will be achieved via a series of measures including traffic signal upgrades, remodelled junctions, priority lanes and bus stop build outs that will be initially introduced in phases on the region’s busiest bus routes.
It was announce this week that a recommendation to confirm franchising as the preferred future model for running the city region’s bus network and services will go before the Combined Authority on Friday, March 4.
Mr Rotheram said: “Local leaders have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reverse the decision by the Thatcher government to fragment our public transport system.
"Hundreds of thousands of people in our city region rely on their services every day, with 82% of all public transport journeys in our region taken by the bus. Since the Thatcher government deregulated buses outside of London in the 1980s, services outside of the capital have suffered.
“After years of painstaking work, the Combined Authority’s assessment into the future of our bus market is recommending franchising as its preferred option to be considered further. The rest of the country is watching the work we are doing here very closely.
"We are one of the only areas leading the way in using new powers under the Bus Services Act to take greater control over public transport and ensure it is run in the interests of local people.”
Greater Manchester:
Perhaps unsurprisingly as the only area outside London to try bus franchising, people in Greater Manchester are more positive about the idea than many in the North. Of the 300 local respondents to The Northern Agenda survey 70% said the measures would improve services.
Describing services as they are now, 61% of Greater Manchester respondents gave them a score of between 1 and 5 out of 10. And First Bus chief John Dowie said passenger numbers were "definitely lagging a bit in Greater Manchester from where we'd like to be".
In the short term, the Greater Manchester Transport Committee warned this month that it expects around one-third of local services to be affected if emergency bus funding is not extended, with a wide-scale reduction in frequencies and around 30 routes withdrawn completely.
It warned: "If this were to happen communities would be cut off. It would have a very significant impact on our economic recovery as a city region, and on our plans to be greener and fairer."
Bus operators and Transport for Greater Manchester have received more than £100m from the Government in emergency support since the pandemic began. But around £30m is needed to stabilise the bus market and around £40m for Metrolink for the next financial year, it is estimated.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham wants a total overhaul of Greater Manchester's bus services to bring them into line with London's, and has submitted plans worth £630m as part of the region's Bus Service Improvement Plan,
Its bid envisages hop-on-hop off flat-rate tickets - so people can get on another bus within the hour without paying again - and overall fares reduced by around 25%.
Transport chiefs envisage a ‘radically simplified fare structure, with a London-style flat fare for single trips that will be a ‘hopper’ replacing a huge variety of single fares, and attractively priced one day and one-week travelcards’.
West Yorkshire:
The 440 local responses to our survey showed widespread dissatisfaction with bus services in West Yorkshire. A total of 72% rated their local service between 1 and 5 out of 10, while 64% backed franchising.
West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin took her first steps towards bringing the region’s buses under public control in June last year, but the process is unlikely to be finished until 2025 because of government-enforced timescales. The mayor herself has said she is “extremely frustrated” by the length of time public franchising is likely to take.
This week her mayoral authority stepped in to save services in the Wakefield and North Kirklees area that were due to be cut by operator Arriva. The taxpayer will now support these services in the short-term while officials see if there is longer-term demand.
She said: "I want a London style bus service in West Yorkshire that’s clean, green and affordable, and I’ll do everything in my power to make that happen.”
Asked about cuts it planned to make across the North, Arriva said: "We want to work with local authorities to evolve networks to meet new patterns of demand, but we must also ensure a sustainable operating model for the future.
"These are difficult times and while we can’t rule out future cuts to services, we can say that any such decisions are only taken following thorough analysis and are never taken lightly. We continue to work closely with all stakeholders to ensure the best outcomes, but we can’t speculate about the impact of unknown funding decisions at this time."
As an example of how to promote bus use, John Dowie of First Bus singled out Leeds, where the city council and West Yorkshire Combined Authority have spent the best part of £200m as part of the Connecting Leeds scheme.
The project has led to improved bus priority systems and ticketing information to make journeys smoother from the suburbs into the city centre - and easier for vehicles to get around once in the centre.
An on-demand 'smart bus' is also being piloted in Leeds. The leader of Wakefield’s opposition Tory group, Nic Stansby, told a recent meeting: “I’ve noticed that Leeds gets what Leeds wants.
“If they want Smart Buses ,where people can ring up and pay £2 for a bus that stops 200 yards from their houses, then they get it.
“We’re very much the poor man in this relationship and you (Labour) have our full support to go and fight for us, because we’re not coming out of this as well as Leeds.”
North East:
Transport bosses in this region - where bus patronage is at 75% of pre-pandemic levels - are bracing themselves for severe bus cuts when government funding runs out.
Transport North East (TNE) says the lack of guarantees about short and medium-term funding mean around 10% of bus services are set to be cut, which "would impact directly on people accessing employment, education and other essential services".
Nexus, which operates the Tyne and Wear metro, has drawn up a £4.5m rescue package to mitigate the worst effects of commercial bus company cuts in Newcastle and North Tyneside.
But a TNE spokeswoman said: "The North East faces extensive cuts to bus services without continued government support, and there’s nothing to say these cuts will be equitably applied across the network. As a result, some communities face having their public transport links severely cut back or removed altogether."
A bid of £804 million has been made to overhaul local bus services under the Bus Service Improvement Plan. This would make a string of upgrades that would include cheaper fares, low-emission buses, and single-ticket travel over bus, Metro, rail, and ferry throughout Tyne and Wear, Northumberland, and County Durham.
But with the total pot for the whole country likely to total just £1.2bn, expectations of success are low.
Go North East managing director Martijn Gilbert said: "The Government support provided to maintain bus services whilst passenger numbers, and therefore revenue, dramatically reduced during the pandemic has been on a strict break-even financial basis. There have been no profits from bus services for nearly two years.
"In fact, as the funding has reduced and we now approach a cliff edge, many services have started to become seriously loss making, reflecting major changes in demand from the way many people now travel, as well as rising costs including from growing road congestion.
“As part of trying to recover bus use there have been a number of bus operator-led initiatives, including new special fares and tickets such as the Go North East £2 evening bus fare for any journey after 7pm, but there is still a gap of around 25% in demand and revenue as things stand today."
Alistair Ford of The Tyne & Wear Public Transport Users' Group said local bus services, "whilst provided in some cases by nice modern vehicles with leather seats and free wi-fi, are far from good enough".
He added: "We have already seen reductions in many services, including cuts to timetables, merged routes (making them very slow and circuitous), and in some cases routes disappearing all together.
"These latest proposals are symptomatic of a 'death spiral', where services are cut to cover losses meaning a poorer offer for passengers, which in turn sees more people resorting to car ownership, further weakening bus passenger numbers."
And he added: "We firmly believe that a franchised system (as in London and as is being proposed in Manchester) would definitely help. We need to be careful to point out that this isn't public ownership but public oversight.
"The private bus companies would still own the depots, own the buses, employ the drivers, and provide the services. But local people would have a say over the routes provided, the fares charged, and the priorities for the system.
"Integrated ticketing would come as standard, bus services would be far less confusing for users, and profits from popular routes could be used to support less profitable but socially-valuable services. Bus ridership in London is the highest in the country for a reason: they have an integrated, publicly-controlled bus system that puts passengers before profit."
Further south, on Teesside, there’s an on-demand bus scheme called Tees Flex which people can book using a smartphone app, a website or over the telephone.
According to Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, the bus service has gone from strength to strength in its second year with the vehicles having now clocked up almost enough miles to go to the moon and back – twice.
But of the 132 responses from the area, 74% rated services between 1 and 5 out of 10. And at a recent meeting in Middlesbrough a councillor said taxis were now cheaper than buses on his patch.
Mick Saunders said: “You have a couple of people wanting a taxi, it’s cheaper than getting a bus. They’d rather wait in the house and get the car to the door and wherever their destination is. People are not prepared to walk to a bus stop anymore.”
Cheshire: -
It's not just the big city regions where bus services face an uncertain future. In Cheshire, of the 153 responses to the survey 77% scored local services between 1 and 5 out of 10. And two-thirds were in favour of franchising.
In Cheshire West and Chester, where nearly £1m has been paid out in emergency support for buses, a Bus Service Improvement Plan worth £37m has been submitted.
And council chiefs recently hit back at claims by a Minister that they have not taken full advantage of Government funds to boost bus services in the borough.
In neighbouring Cheshire East, a council spokesman said current bus usage levels were at 55 to 65% of pre-Covid levels.
And he added: “Unfortunately, we are already seeing some contracts returned by companies who are indicating some services will be unsustainable if recovery funding stops in April. In Cheshire East, this is likely to result in pressures across nearly all our local bus network.
“The combined value of Covid-related financial bus support for operators is put at £1.2m, while the total value of the bus service improvement plan for Cheshire East is £56m over four years. The council has not been in a position to bid for any green transport funding because of the requirement for the council and bus operator to match fund any grant. The council is not in a position to do this.”
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