Memorandum by Stoke-on-Trent City Council
(Bus 11)
THE BUS INDUSTRY
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Stoke-on-Trent City Council is a Unitary
Authority (1997) with co-ordination responsibilities for public
transport and welcomes the decision to undertake an inquiry into
the bus industry.
1.2 Stoke-on-Trent is ranked 26th most deprived
Local Authority District in England (1998 Index of Local Deprivation)
and 3rd most deprived in the West Midlands. The severe economic
problems currently facing the City have been recognised at the
national level through an initiative by the then Secretary of
State for Trade and Industry, "The Byers Initiative",
which seeks to comprehensively address the difficulties facing
North Staffordshire.
1.3 The City is characterised by a collection
of "urban villages" where housing and industry are interspersed.
As the economy has declined local jobs are disappearing and the
ability of people, particularly in the more deprived communities,
to access new employment is limited by parochial attitudes and
low aspirations, but particularly the linear nature of the City
and its Victorian street pattern which both restricts and increases
the cost of movement. This situation is making certain areas of
the City less attractive for local businesses to prosper impacting
adversely on job prospects and recruitment.
1.4 Large areas of severe dereliction (including
prominent, empty and underused buildings, vacant brownfield sites)
and a generally harsh and oppressive environment not only reduce
the quality of life for the communities living within this urban
core, but exacerbate the poor image of the City and act as a major
disincentive to investment. Living conditions are further constrained
by poor housing (17.9 per cent of dwellings are classified as
unfit), low wages, low income and poor health (36.8 per cent of
the City's adult population is claiming some sort of benefit and
in some wards eg Brookhouse, this increases to 60 per cent). Public
transport is, therefore, of considerable importance to the City
in terms of regeneration and overcoming social exclusion.
2. BUSES—THE
PRESENT SITUATION
2.1 There are a number of contributory factors
relating to the provision of bus services in urban areas generally,
and specifically in Stoke-on-Trent:
— Some bus operators are reducing services,
particularly the less profitable or marginal ones in order to
assist with the process of staff retention and recruitment;
— Some operators are starting to refocus
resources on main road services with frequent headways, thereby
missing estates and communities which are off the line of major
routes.
2.2 The design of the present network of
public transport services within the City is dictated by the following
principal factors:
— The need to service a number of small
town centres each with their own local estates;
— Major health and Education sites
remote from the town centres;
— The shape of the City which is linear,
with a series of interchanges of varying standard and quality;
— The former industrial heritage of
the City which created area culs-de-sac because of mine and pottery
workings, and water courses;
— The recent trend of bus operators
to reduce services, combined with a contracting of the passenger
transport industry generally, leading to excluded communities
in inner estate areas and areas remote from the main routes.
This results in the following transportation
deficiencies:
— Bus services which do not connect
readily with other services to and from the major health and education
sites;
— The concentration of new employment
sites in out-of-town locations where more construction space is
available;
— Difficulty in making certain cross-city,
cross-town and cross-conurbation journeys because of the difficulty
of understanding the network;
— Poor links between communities and
local facilities such as schools and leisure centres;
— Low frequencies caused by the difficulty
of serving areas which are divorced from main routes of the City.
These issues have, therefore created particular
difficulties for some communities, and specifically in the areas
of:
— Access to new employment opportunities;
— Access to health facilities which
are multi-centred and spread across the City;
— Access to education facilities and
training centres;
— Access for people unable to reach
or use conventional public transport services.
2.3 These transport challenges contribute
to:
— Socially excluded and disadvantaged
groups without access to education, health, leisure services,
commercial and employment opportunities;
— Inequalities in terms of access to
health and social care services;
— Higher absenteeism from schools;
— Low participation in lifelong learning;
— A culture of low self-esteem and
low aspirations;
— A less mobile workforce at increasing
risk of exclusion from the labour market.
All of these effects are reflected in the City's
deprivation statistics.
The present community transport scheme is fully
committed and cannot accommodate additional capacity.
2.4 These deficiencies have led the City
Council to prioritise a series of actions within the Local Transport
Plan aimed at increasing the market share of public transport,
increasing modal shift and securing the network.
3. QUALITY PARTNERSHIPS
3.1 The City Council has been very successful
in securing a series of Quality Corridors in the City with the
principal operator—First—, and patronage has grown
on bus services on these corridors by as much as 30 per cent.
A huge amount of work has been done in installing special kerbs
at bus stops, erecting new shelters and information panels, negotiating
a better contract with a shelter provider and introducing bus
priorities including vehicle detection systems. A significant
part of the network is now served by modern, low-floor accessible
buses. However, there is no long-term commitment on the part of
the bus operators to:
— Continue with the routes as they
stand in terms of route or frequency;
— Cross-subsidise the increases in
patronage on specific services to help secure other services for
a longer period;
— Use increases in profit for delivery
of, for example, more or better priority measures.
In the worst case the operator pulled out of
a Quality Partnership route in the City with 56 days warning,
and in every subsequent case the major bus company has only been
able to acquire buses which are low-floor but are second-hand.
3.2 In summary, Quality Partnerships have
generally worked on the main corridor routes, but this has not
delivered consequent beneficial results over the whole network.
4. NETWORK STABILITY
4.1 The City Council's aspiration is that
the resourcing of Quality routes would lead to the delivery of
a long-term stable network. In general terms the Quality routes
have remained fairly stable, but it is the marginal services on
the remainder of the network which have been subject to a rapid
rate of change.
4.2 In fact, a recent set of service withdrawals
on 3 March 2002 has seen a total of nearly 50,000 journeys per
year withdrawn from a series of routes including main links to
Festival Park, which is a major shopping destination, and Chell
which is a deprived inner City area. In addition, although outside
the City boundary, some communities which are closely linked to
the City have been abandoned by the main bus operator, leaving
this Council and neighbouring Staffordshire County Council to
find alternatives. If only five people per journey used the affected
withdrawn journeys, an equivalent of almost the entire population
of Stoke-on-Trent (255,000) will have been inconvenienced by the
withdrawals. Another effect is a severe reduction in facility
for poorer communities on the edge of the City—a trend which
is continuing and causing concern in the fight against social
exclusion.
4.3 There are, on average in the City, about
four sets of service changes per year, each of which contains
an element of service withdrawal. Another personal example within
Stoke-on-Trent journey to work area is the series of routes which
link Stoke Town Centre with a nearby market town (Cheadle). In
just four years, bus services connecting these two points have
experienced 30 changes. On each of these occasions, users have
had to adapt their lifestyle to fit the new schedules, and suffer
some level of inconvenience in the process.
4.4 The resultant unfortunate message to
users and non-users of public transport is that the industry is
continually contracting and constantly changing its services,
and thus is seen as an unattractive alternative to other modes
which are far more stable by comparison.
4.5 It is this factor of service unreliability
and short-term commitment which is, in my professional view, the
most damaging to the Government's 10 year targets and the ability
of local Councils to help deliver them.
5. BUS PRIORITIES
5.1 The case for more bus priorities is
clear. Well-designed bus priority measures improve inter-stop
times and can deliver improved reliability.
5.2 However, there is little point in investing
heavily in priorities when the fare collection systems of so many
bus companies are still old-fashioned. Even modern ticket machines
require many key depressions by the driver to issue a simple ticket,
and the giving of change uses up any gain from bus priorities
as the bus is stuck at the stop while the customer transactions
are completed.
5.3 Furthermore, many big bus groups move
vehicles around the country but rarely fit local destination display
equipment. The effect of this is longer dwell times at stops as
drivers answer customer queries about the bus route.
5.4 Smartcard investment and quality regulation
would answer these deficiencies and make bus priorities more effective.
6. THE CASE
FOR MORE
FUNDING?
6.1 In order to meet its aspirations in
the ten-year plan, the Government has targeted resources into:
— Capital works (through Local Transport
Plans);
— Challenge Competitions (such as Urban
Bus Challenge)—a mixture of capital and revenue;
— Rural Bus Services—a mixture
of revenue (Bus Grant) and capital and revenue (Challenge Competitions).
6.2 These processes have tended to allow
the introduction of capital works and experimental or new services
but have not addressed the fundamental problem of keeping in place
a base network which will contribute to the economic and social
well-being of the affected communities. In London, where such
a network is secured, patronage is growing and there is stability,
integration and service improvement.
6.3 The other main area of funding is from
a Council's SSA, a proportion of which is used for revenue subsidy.
However, Stoke-on-Trent City Council, in common with many other
local authorities has to annually make reductions in its expenditure
in order to meet the stringent targets set by the SSA process.
In fact we can only afford to spend about 0.002 per cent of the
Council budget on bus service subsidy. The continuing effect of
service withdrawals means that we cannot keep up with the removal
of services from our communities, and we now face a situation
where many parts of the City have no evening or Sunday bus service,
or have a very poor level of service because we cannot resource
the necessary improvements. Often, the only alternative available
to local Councils is to not award service tenders, meaning that
we are also contributing to the decline in services.
6.4 However, the definition of "commercial"
by the bus industry remains shrouded in commercially confidential
mystery. Our local First subsidiary is one of the top 10 earners
in the bus industry, yet still makes regular withdrawals of service,
in some cases of journeys which are well used. Areas in the City
which have been abandoned by this large bus group have passed
under tender to other bus companies who then report successful
increases in patronage and a developing market for bus travel.
6.5 Stoke-on-Trent City Council has, however,
succeeded in imaginatively using capital funding through the Local
Transport Plan to purchase its own low-floor accessible buses
for use on wholly-subsidised bus routes in the City. This has
enabled the Council to provide high quality vehicles to areas
which otherwise would have no bus service at all, and at a reduced
tender cost. However, we are constrained in expanding this process
by the need to contain revenue costs and to avoid direct competition
with commercial bus routes.
6.6 My view is that additional revenue funding
to Local Authorities is needed to target service provision so
that a stable, integrated network is maintained which will meet
the long-term needs of our citizens.
7.1 External effects on the industry—Costs
7.1.1 Cost pressures on the bus industry
have been particularly severe in recent years as the combined
effects of fuel prices, the contracting insurance markets, and
the results of years of reducing staff conditions have all begun
to bite. These factors have generally resulted in a declining
market with fewer suppliers, and have meant that operators have
raised their tender prices to local authorities. In many cases,
the increases for tendered journeys has been many more times the
rate of inflation—our worst example being a contract for
two journeys which increased last year by 600 per cent.
7.1.2 These effects are difficult to predict
but stress again the necessity for additional revenue funding
to meet the price rises being experienced.
7.2 External effects on the industry—Market-led
decisions
7.2.1 The other unknown factor in service
delivery is the effect of decisions of the big bus groups. If,
for example, a decision is taken centrally to reduce, say, the
number of vehicle engineering spares, the effect on service delivery
can be marked and negative, as vehicles cannot be found to maintain
service. Decisions about rates of return, centralisation of management
functions, and deployment of vehicles can all have a negative
result on reliability and quality of service delivery. Such decisions
are unpredictable to local authorities, but the effect is felt
locally.
8. SERVICE QUALITY
8.1 Although the City Council has written
service quality requirements into its Conditions of Contract,
and demanded that operators who win certain types of service contract
put their drivers through a recognised customer care programme,
it is not straightforward for local authorities such as ours to
influence commercial matters such as:
— Driver behaviour and standards;
8.2 To do so would require a considerable
effort in terms of monitoring and follow up which is beyond the
ability of most local authorities to deliver, and is not within
our powers or duties to deliver. However, poor attention to these
matters by commercial operators results in a poor presentation
of service and can contribute to a feeling of lack of care by
providers.
8.3 It is my view that some form of quality
regulation is required for operators to maintain standards. A
process similar to the PTEs' rail-based SQUIRE and TIRE regimes
would allow an impartial monitoring of standards without the very
severe financial penalties imposed by, for example, the Traffic
Commissioners.
9. SUMMARY
In my view, the following matters need to be
considered:
— Increased revenue funding to local
authorities is required to combat the effects of declining bus
service provision and maintain an integrated network;
— Quality partnerships only work for
main corridor routes and quality regulation is needed for all
services;
— Bus priority measures are important
but there needs to be a consequent investment in on-vehicle systems
and quality measures to reduce at-stop dwell times;
— Buses are an essential tool in reducing
social exclusion but networks are insufficiently stable to produce
long-term benefits.
10. FINAL THOUGHT
10.1 As a way of truly testing the Partnerships
v Contracts argument—a trial area is needed to establish:
"Would there be improvements or not?"
Paul Lucas
Passenger Transport Manager
April 2002
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