Memorandum submitted by Lincolnshire County
Council
INTRODUCTION
1. I am Head of Transport Services at Lincolnshire
County Council and lead an integrated transport unit responsible
for developing and implementing public transport policy and projects,
and procuring passenger and fleet transport for the Council as
a whole. The unit was established ten years ago and was the second
of its kind to be introduced in the country.
2. I am also Immediate Past Chairman of
the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers, and am a
co-author of its policy on strengthened partnership working through
Quality Network Agreements which ATCO has put forward as an alternative
to the current regulatory framework.
3. Over the past eight years, Lincolnshire
County Council has established itself as one of the leading rural
local authorities through its pioneering "InterConnect"
bus project and other rural transport initiatives. InterConnect,
in particular, has achieved impressive patronage growth in partnership
with local operators and succeeded in its primary objective of
enabling people living in the deeper rural areas to readily access
employment and essential services.
4. On the face of it, Lincolnshire's experience
would suggest that voluntary partnerships between operators and
local authorities can on their own deliver the changes desired
by Government without the need for regulatory reform. However,
despite the success of InterConnect, the Council has, in some
cases, been unable to persuade some operators to work in partnership
with it and, in others, is seeing its strategy being undermined
by competition.
LINCOLNSHIRE CONTEXT
AND TRENDS
5. Lincolnshire has a population of 673,000
with a settlement pattern based predominantly on market towns
with each acting as a strong focus for the surrounding deeper
rural communities. One-third of the population lives in settlements
of less than 3,000 people. The population density is one-third
of the English average.
6. There is a high dependency on private
car travel in rural Lincolnshire which is reflected in a high
household car ownership of 80% compared with the national average
of 73% (2001 Census). The use of buses to reach work is lower
at 3.3% than both the region (7.0%) and nationally (7.4%). In
large parts of the county, high car ownership is seen as a necessity
and not an indication of affluence.
7. Lincolnshire is not natural bus operating
territory and commercial activity is focused largely on the larger
urban areas and interurban routes. This is reflected in the proportion
of mileage subsidised which amounts to 36% of the total operated
in the county.
8. Bus use amounted to 13.4 million passenger
journeys in 2005-06, a small drop of 1.5% compared to the previous
year. This is a significant improvement on 2004-05 when a loss
of 7% was recorded due largely to problems in Grantham which are
described later in the Memorandum. Overall, the exceptional growth,
which has been achieved on routes where major investment has been
made, has helped reduce the underlying rate of decline but has
been insufficient to stem the losses altogether.
9. The County Council's budget on subsidising
local bus services is £4.1 million in 2006-07, including
£1.955 million of Rural Bus Subsidy Grant. The Council's
own expenditure (ie excluding RBSG) has risen by 125% in the last
five years in order to keep pace with transport costs and commercial
deregistrations.
"INTERCONNECT"
RURAL TRANSPORT
STRATEGY
10. In 1998, the County Council adopted
a strategy aimed at addressing social exclusion in rural areas.
The essential planks of this strategy were to:
— work in partnership with bus operators
to strengthen and create a strong commercial "primary"
interurban network with a minimum hourly service using low floor
buses;
— channel demands from the wider rural
areas into key points on the primary network where passengers
can connect through convenient and managed interchange with the
interurban services;
— provide quality infrastructure at
stops and interchange points to provide a high level of accessibility
and security; and
— provide access to quality information
in the home and at stops.
11. Success in the first round of Rural
Bus Challenge enabled the strategy to be trialled on the Lincoln-Skegness
route with additional funding secured from the Countryside Agency
and the European Union. Introduced in February 1999 and branded
as "InterConnect", ridership increased by 60% in the
first year and had doubled by the end of the second year. Seven
years later, growth stands at 110% above the level prior to its
introduction. The original service was run commercially at broadly
two-hourly intervals and still performs commercially at its hourly
service level on InterConnect. It was an early example of what
can be achieved through "kickstart" funding.
12. There are now eight InterConnect routes
established with growth ranging from 10% to 110%. The Council
has worked with four operators of the interurban services, all
of which are run commercially during the core daytime period (broadly
7 am to 7 pm). Investment in these has been funded following success
in Rural Bus Challenge and Kickstart competitions. The increased
revenue to operators has ensured the longer term sustainability
of the services and reduced the potential requirements of the
Council to provide revenue support.
13. The service improvements have been supplemented
by a major programme of infrastructure improvements funded by
Rural Bus Challenge and Local Transport Plan expenditure, which
has seen over 200 raised kerbs and 500 stop displays built, and
architect-designed waiting facilities provided at four interchange
points fitted with cctv and information systems.
14. Fully flexible demand responsive feeder
services enable people from the deeper rural areas to access their
local market town, or by guaranteed connection with an interurban
service, reach larger urban centres, or centralised facilities
such as hospitals, further afield. Currently, there are 12 fully
flexible and five semi-fixed CallConnect feeder services carrying
a total of 118,000 passengers per annum. Bookings for CallConnect
and 14 dial-a-ride services in the County are managed centrally
making it the largest operation of its kind in the UK. Since January
2006, bookings can be made for CallConnect on the internet using
an interactive link. The operating costs of CallConnect services
and the bookings centre are funded by Rural Bus Subsidy Grant.
15. CallConnect and dial-a-ride vehicles
are fitted with GPS tracking equipment and voice and data communication
systems. Instructions are sent by text to the driver 30 minutes
in advance of the pick-up time.
16. The impact of InterConnect on accessibility
to services is demonstrated by research commissioned in 2000 and
2005. This revealed that, amongst those with no car available,
67% now use a bus to go to the bank (compared with 41% in 2000),
93% now use bus for shopping (58% in 2000) and 75% use InterConnect
to get to hospital (36% in 2000). In the areas served by CallConnect,
40% of bus trips were newly generated emphasising the opportunities
to travel that InterConnect has brought to more remote areas that
did not exist previously.
17. Although the primary objective of InterConnect
was to increase social inclusion, it has also had an impact on
car use as revealed by the market research on the first project.
This showed that there was a small increase of 3% between 2000
and 2005 in the percentage of residents who used bus as their
main mode. Of those making additional journeys, 78% had switched
from car to bus.
LESSONS LEARNT
18. Implementation of the InterConnect project
has provided the following lessons:
— A major sea change in use and attitudes
to bus services can be made by addressing within a comprehensive
strategy all barriers deterring bus travel.
— Co-operation with the operators of
the interurban services has been vital to ensure that the network
functions in an integrated way.
— Demand responsive services can be
highly effective in reducing unmet travel needs and thereby addressing
rural social exclusion.
— Importance of strong branding, marketing
and availability of quality information.
— Stable timetables giving passengers
confidence that they can rely on buses.
— Investment in quality buses and infrastructure.
— Importance of Rural Bus Subsidy Grant
in sustaining CallConnect services in the longer term.
19. Despite the undoubted success of InterConnect
and the excellent partnership working with operators to achieve
it, the impact of the current regulatory framework can be illustrated
with three examples:
(a) There are two operators on one InterConnect
route on which both run an hourly service commercially but will
not accept the other's return tickets thus denying passengers
the equivalent of a half-hourly service.
(b) Two operators run another InterConnect
route jointly to provide a half-hourly service with integrated
ticketing. Recently, a third operator (one of the national groups)
has started a service in competition with the incumbent operators
which have in turn registered additional services over parts of
the route to run just in front of the new operator. This has led
to parts of the route having five buses per hour but with four
of these running within minutes of each other. Such competition
is not sustainable and jeopardises the future viability of the
route.
(c) On another interurban route, the Council
is keen to enter a partnership to introduce InterConnect but the
operator is unwilling to do so.
20. The Council has no power to influence
matters in these situations despite the considerable investment
of public funds to increase the quality of service and infrastructure.
As pointed out in a recent report by the National Audit Office
and Audit Commission, although local authorities are accountable
to Government for delivering local growth in bus usage, operators
are not accountable to them for the performance of commercial
services.
GRANTHAM
21. Another example of the problems facing
local transport authorities occurred in Grantham in 2004. Until
that time, a comprehensive network of town services had been run
commercially by two operators. One of these withdrew its town
operations following an industrial dispute and the other was taken
over by a third operator. The performance of the new operator
was exceptionally poor which resulted in bus patronage halving.
After a year, it sold its operation to another company and, despite
a considerable improvement in performance, the damage had been
done and ridership has not recovered significantly.
22. The County Council had no power to intervene
in what was a commercial operation but the consequences for it
were that some services now require subsidy to maintain them and,
importantly, the Council missed its LTP patronage target by a
significant margin. This affected its LTP score and financial
reward for 2006-07.
QUALITY PARTNERSHIP
SCHEMES AND
QUALITY CONTRACTS
23. Statutory Quality Partnership Schemes
have little application in a rural area such as Lincolnshire.
The levels of investment by local operators are modest, which
is not surprising given the operating territory, and it is unlikely
that a QBP in itself would be sufficient to influence investment
over and above that already planned by a company, though it may
influence where such investment is directed.
24. In rural areas, local authority investment
is directed primarily towards improving stop and information infrastructure.
Levels of service are such that there is, in reality, little choice
for bus users, and to deny any bus service from using these facilities
would reduce that choice further. The absence of any influence
over service levels and fares also detracts from the attractiveness
of QPSs.
25. There is little appetite for Quality
Contracts outside the larger urban areas. More would be gained
from strengthening partnership working to overcome the problems
illustrated above using the quality network approach being advocated
by the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers and provided
as written evidence to the Committee.
REVENUE FUNDING
26. As important as regulatory reform is
the need for revenue funding. Outside of London and the PTE areas,
26% of bus mileage is now subsidised and the rate is increasing.
In more rural areas, such as in Lincolnshire where 36% of the
network is now subsidised and its bus revenue expenditure has
risen by 125% in five years, the burden is greater. As more commercial
services are deregistered, this pressure will increase and make
it increasingly difficult for the County Council to maintain services
outside of the core network and core times.
14 June 2006
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