Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
MS CLARE
KAVANAGH, MR
KEITH MOFFATT,
MR ROGER
SEALEY, MR
GERRY DOHERTY
AND MR
JOE LYNCH
21 JUNE 2006
Q160 Chairman: Mr Doherty, is there
anything you want to add on that?
Mr Doherty: Our view is that 10
years after the first Ten Year Transport Plan, the reality for
public transport users in Britain is that connections and interchanges
are either very scarce or non-existent. As far as buses are concerned,
it is our perspective that buses are used by those with no other
means of travel, there are either no train services locally or
they cannot afford to have a car, and where this happens even
measures that are designed to try to improve the efficiency of
the bus service are opposed by other road users. As far as your
question is concerned, no, we do not think the Government is doing
enough.
Q161 Chairman: Ms Kavanagh, are you
taking a deep breath or thinking about it? Sorry, Mr Sealey?
Mr Sealey: Our views are very
similar to those of Mr Doherty. It is the Cinderella of the transport
sector.
Q162 Mr Donaldson: If I could direct
this question to Transport for London and Translink. What is the
secret of the success in growing the use of buses in both your
areas?
Ms Kavanagh: I am not sure there
is any secret to it, as I think has already been discussed this
afternoon. Generally, country-wide bus passengers want the same
thing. They want a reliable service, they want short journey times,
safe journeys and a high quality of service. As I say, it is a
relatively simple process, you invest to give the passengers those
things and concentrate on those aspects of the service and you
will generate new passengers, people who will use the service.
Mr Moffatt: I think the key is
the design of an attractive integrated network by some form of
executive body. Mike Parker of Tyne & Wear referred to their
experience in the 1980s. I was there and it was very successful
because the executive body was able to design and organise the
delivery partly through its own operators and partly through other
contracted operators on a very attractive network. I think that
is the absolute key. In Northern Ireland we are in a position
to do that because we still have a regulated system. It has its
faults and we are working on improvements to it, but essentially
I think it is all about a professional body run on commercial
lines being able to design and organise the delivery of an attractive
network. How it is then delivered, whether it is a public operator
or a franchise system, is a slightly separate issue. I have worked
in private and public, regulated and deregulated, and it is not
a question of ideology but I do think ultimately experience shows
that you do need to provide a well-planned system.
Q163 Chairman: You are really saying
that degree of integration only comes with an overall authority,
is that what you are saying?
Mr Moffatt: Yes, I think you do
need a design. It is three things: the networks, the ticketing
system and the marketing of information. Those things have to
be brought together. That needs to be done with the full co-operation
of the participating operators. In my experience that is the case.
Q164 Mr Martlew: Can we go on a little
to the recruitment and retention of bus drivers. Is that a problem?
Mr Sealey: It is a problem. It
is more of a problem now outside London than in London. Transport
for London have bitten the bullet there and through its contracts
have allowed wages to increase in London. Although they make the
comment that there is no shortage of bus drivers in London, I
do not necessarily agree with that, there are still shortages
but nowhere near the shortages there were in 2000 when we were
getting a turnover of maybe 60% in some of the garages in London.
Outside of London we have still got high levels of labour turnover
and retention. There is also a cost to the industry. It costs
about £6,000 to recruit and train a bus driver and if they
are going out as fast at the other end that is a massive cost
to the industry that it is losing. We ought to be looking at how
we can stabilise that and maybe transfer those costs into wages
to stabilise the workforce.
Q165 Mr Martlew: Following on from
that, the days of driving a bus when it was very heavy have gone,
I presume they have all got power steering, but I see very few
women drivers and, in fact, very few women have given evidence
today, although I am glad to see this session is the exception.
Why is that?
Mr Moffatt: We are putting a lot
of effort into that. We have over 1,800 drivers and we have got
149 women now, that is 25% more than a year ago. We have introduced
new flexible rotas, part-time and term-time working, to enable
more women to come in, which I think is very important. Retention
is absolutely critical in the industry. I do not think there is
any secret, it is about good planning and providing good opportunities
and getting the wage structure right. In the past the bus industry
suffered from a low wage, heavy overtime dependency type of culture
and we are trying to get away from that now by improving basic
conditions and improving the image of the job and that is having
a positive effect.
Q166 Mr Martlew: Can I ask if the
unions are proactive in this? In their evidence the T&G made
reference to the average wage of a bus driver being 57% of a male's
wage in this country. Are the unions being proactive?
Mr Sealey: We have been and we
have been successful in regard to that, but that has not been
at no cost to the public. We have had to take on very hard-nosed
business people who are driven by cost centres. Recently we had
a dispute in Eastbourne, which is the first time I can remember
bus drivers there have stopped working, and we are seeing increasing
militancy across the industry and it is the only way our members
see they will be able to get the level of remuneration that the
job requires.
Mr Doherty: I think we would concur
with what Mr Sealey has said. The whole of the transport industry
is not attractive—I talking at the coal face end—and
by and large does not attract female participation, it has not
done for a long time. It is getting better and, to be fair, the
companies are trying to do that. We have to deal with some of
the social consequences of people working on their own, which
a bus driver does, which someone working in a rural train station
does, they are on their own and there are difficulties, assaults
on staff are increasing, and we have been dealing with the British
Transport Police and the rail industry to try and deal with that,
but what are really needed to make the gender balance a lot better
than it is are family friendly policies because, whether we like
it or not, in this country the domestic burden falls on females
by and large. Until companies adopt family friendly policies to
take account of that then we will fail in the transport industry
to rebalance that gender balance, in my view.
Q167 Mr Martlew: There has been reference
made to the fact that it costs £6,000 to train a bus driver.
One presumes that is to get him or her through the test. What
about customer care? We have heard the bus driver is the point
of contact for the company. Should there be formal training in
this area and, if not, why not?
Mr Sealey: To be fair, there is
in certain companies, and quite specifically Transport for London,
where it is a requirement that drivers go through customer care
training. We have had discussions with the Department for Transport
and personally I sat on a committee for a number of months looking
at this whole area of customer care but it seemed to run into
the sand because one of the problems at that time was because
there was such a shortage of bus drivers, as soon as the company
got the driver trained they wanted them out on the road and the
whole thing about customer care, route familiarisation and things
like that, were, in a sense, the last thing on the agenda. There
are possibilities with the certificate of professional competence
coming in for building that in where drivers will have to have
required training every five years, but with a £6,000 initial
cost unless the company is convinced they are going to keep that
person they are not going to invest more money in customer care
in the short-term.
Ms Kavanagh: Training is hugely
important in this issue. It is not just about driving skills,
it is about customer care. As Roger Sealey has said, in London
it is now compulsory that all drivers go through what is essentially
an additional 40 hours of customer care, disability awareness
training and so on. We had a situation prior to the introduction
of the training, for example, where we had powered wheelchair
ramps on all our buses but the drivers were not necessarily trained
to use them. It is a vital component of customer care and also
a vital component of retention because you have to make the drivers
feel worthwhile, that they have a career progression, have an
interest in developing their skills. We see additional training
as vital.
Q168 Clive Efford: How serious is
the problem of congestion in terms of delivering a reliable and
efficient bus service?
Mr Moffatt: I believe congestion
is a key issue and it has grown in all parts of the country. Unlike
Great Britain outside London, in Northern Ireland we have not
had so much because traffic growth has been a little behind but
it is now the fastest UK region for car ownership growth and it
has to be tackled. It has to be tackled in a planned way so there
are quality bus corridors, not just bits of bus lane at the easy
places but tackling the difficult points. In terms of making public
transport more attractive the answer is on two fronts: one, making
the network of service more attractive in terms of frequency and
reliability, but equally providing tracks for buses. If you build
a tram system generally it has a track which is very well designed
and kept clear, and we do need the same approach with buses. In
Belfast, on our core corridors our road service colleagues have
identified that 32% of the people in vehicles on each major corridor
are being carried in 2% of the vehicles. If a third of the people
are already on the bus, why should they not have a third of the
road space? If we are really serious about trying to have half
of travellers on the bus we need to be looking at it in that way,
in a very simple way. I believe that is the example which we can
follow from London now where they are having great success in
this way.
Mr Sealey: There is another issue
which is about the flexibility of buses. When you stick to a strict
timetable, and we know that congestion occurs, the classic thing
is why do three buses turn up at one time, and all the academic
research comes up with the same answer, it is congestion. There
is another way this could be looked at, which is unrealistic scheduling.
These days companies generate schedules by computers whereas in
the old days there used to be a lot of local knowledge. In the
garage there used to be what was called a garage rep who would
deal with schedules and they had local knowledge so they would
know the bottlenecks and that sort of thing and could realistically
schedule the buses. That has gone now. It is interesting that
on an educational course we have recently started to redo scheduling
and we have had a massive response from our stewards from all
over the country so that they can understand this.
Mr Doherty: In answer to the question,
clearly congestion plays a major part in bus usage in my view.
There is no point getting on a bus if you are going to sit in
a traffic jam. It takes political will and imagination and innovative
thinking to determine (a) how the bus is going to achieve priority,
make the journey quicker, make it more attractive, and (b) how
it is going to be politically sold to other road users because
when you make available a bus lane there is less space for other
people to use. The quality bus corridors, for example, have been
extremely successful in Dublin which started 10 years ago and
Dublin has been transformed in terms of congestion. It is still
bad but it would have been a hell of a lot worse if some measures
had not been taken. There are other things that have not been
done that could be done, for example traffic lights giving priority
to buses when they approach, when you have got two lanes coming
into a city centre that are clogged in the morning and the other
two lanes going out empty, why do we not use one of the lanes
going in to make it three lanes in the morning and three lanes
coming back out in the evening? There are issues that could be
dealt with but it seems to me that nobody is grabbing these and
saying let us at least try them. I am not aware that there is
anywhere in Britain where there are those kinds of things and
that kind of innovative thinking has been put in place to try
to alleviate congestion, which on all statistics is only going
to get worse.
Mr Lynch: One of the things we
do is run bus user surgeries and the top issue every time is reliability.
The most important aspect of that is doubtless to do with congestion,
as has been mentioned already. It is clearly a hot political issue.
As has been mentioned already, it is possible to put in bus lanes
which do not achieve anything, and I can think of examples of
that, where you can take up road space, reallocate it to buses
but achieve nothing for buses and you do not disadvantage cars
either but you can then tick the LTP box to say you have put in
bus lanes. There are some hard political decisions to be made
to reallocate road space as appropriate to ensure that buses do
get priority and this will improve reliability, there is no two
ways about it. In the submission I put in I suggested there is
a figure of perhaps 10% of the bus fleet in urban areas required
simply to deal with the effects of congestion, and that is a tax
on bus users because the bus companies have to put in extra buses
to ensure there are sufficient buses to run the correct timetable,
and the people who pay for that are the users. As was also mentioned
earlier, there is the question of who provides the track and given
it is the highway authority, the local county council, the unitary
authority, that has a responsibility for doing that, perhaps there
needs to be some quid pro quo whereby if they do not provide
the priority for buses there will be a financial penalty for the
authority.
Q169 Clive Efford: Can I ask TfL
to explain how you work with local authorities and whether you
have any problems in dealing with them over improving facilities
for bus services?
Ms Kavanagh: Something like 10%
of the strategic route network in London is directly under TfL's
control, however 90% of our buses run on local authority roads,
so the issue is about working with the local authorities. The
key issue is that Transport for London are responsible for allocating
the funding for bus priority schemes, but we still need the political
will of the local authorities in order to introduce them. We are
still, like everywhere else, reliant on the local authorities
to work with us to put bus priorities in. We do control the traffic
signals, for example, so the kind of scheme that was talked about,
giving buses priority at signals, we can control and are expanding.
Q170 Clive Efford: How do you define
what a community bus service is? What level or number of community
services do you run?
Ms Kavanagh: We do not run anything
that we would call a community bus service. We run a level of
service across London which is consistent with the level of demand
that people require. There is not any distinction in the London
bus network.
Q171 Chairman: Does the Mayor have
a central control point which controls all of the traffic lights
throughout London?
Ms Kavanagh: Effectively, yes.
Q172 Chairman: So he could in fact, if
he were to consider the scheme Mr Doherty was talking about, take
initiatives that he himself could bring forward?
Ms Kavanagh: Theoretically we
could, yes, but you still need to work with the local authorities
because they could oppose it.
Q173 Clive Efford: How do you ensure
that you are running services that people actually want and need?
What we have been hearing from previous witnesses is they would
like the flexibility and the powers that TfL have in order to
meet local need and, in fact, you are better at tackling issues
like social exclusion than they are able to under their regimes.
How do you ensure that you are running the services that people
want and need?
Ms Kavanagh: We collect the data,
simply. We have a very extensive programme of passenger demand
monitoring. Essentially we survey all the passengers who get on
the bus, find out where they get on and where they get off. We
put that together with information, for example, from Census data
so we know what the population is like, we know the age profiles
and so on. We have a huge background of information and do a lot
of market research asking people what they want. We liaise directly
with all local authorities to understand what they want. We work
with developers, with schools and hospitals, anyone who can impose
a demand on the bus network. We have a huge network of both hard
and soft data, if you like, about what people do. We then have
a team of skilled transport planners whose job it is to analyse
that data and come up with the integrated network that Keith Moffatt
referred to.
Q174 Clive Efford: Is the hard data
the thing that drives the decisions or is it the appeals from
local communities?
Ms Kavanagh: No, it is the hard
data. We start with our data and with the local knowledge, if
you like, the appeals, and put everybody's ideas through our track
demand model to find out whether they meet our investment criteria,
the pretty standard cost benefit analysis that is done that says
how many passengers this will generate, how much passenger benefit
it will generate, what is the cost of doing it, and we have criteria
for agreeing what is a worthwhile part of the network.
Q175 Clive Efford: When we strip
it all away you are as bad as the operators out of London?
Ms Kavanagh: No, because the criterion
is passenger benefit and not profit. That is what makes the difference.
It is about whether people have a facility, can save time, can
access the bus network, not whether we make money.
Mr Moffatt: We have a similar
approach, although on a much smaller scale obviously. Unlike outside
London, in Great Britain our job is to provide as comprehensive
a network as possible, so we do not distinguish between commercial,
community or social. We have a broad remit. Basically we are a
state-owned operator so our remit is very broad, which is to provide
as comprehensive a network as possible to meet the needs. Within
that we have to provide more commercial services in order to attract
more people on to the buses. We have targets to achieve in terms
of modal share and patronage growth. We have to meet those targets
by putting in network schemes which are very "commercial",
but equally we have obligations not to leave people high and dry
as well. The value of this approach is that it is truly integrated.
We have a research unit which is expert in social needs analysis,
GIS systems, and we have all sorts of community issues in Northern
Ireland to handle as well. Ultimately, it is an art as well as
a science. It is very hard to pin down precise targets. I suppose
the real value is in an integrated approach to meeting all the
different network needs. I get quite concerned when I hear these
distinctions made between commercial and social. We know the cost
and the revenue on our routes but we look at them on a much wider
basis than whether any one particular route makes a profit or
a loss. In fact, our network has a lot of cross-subsidy. Cross-subsidy
used to be a bit of a dirty word. I think the important thing
about cross-subsidy is to know where it is, to have transparency.
I do not think there is anything wrong in having a network that
is concentrating on commercial routes to make them grow, which
is what we have done with our Belfast Metro system, if you can
create more profit which you can use to cross-subsidise perhaps
the community-type services.
Q176 Graham Stringer: If I can ask
Ms Kavanagh, it is very difficult to disaggregate the factors
that have led to the impressive patronage growth in London. I
have tried to look at some of the figures. Can you tell us what
the growth rates are in Outer London on those routes that are
not affected by the Congestion Charge, because quite a lot of
credit is given to the Congestion Charge but it seems to me that
there is just as good a growth going on elsewhere?
Ms Kavanagh: The Congestion Charge
has had a huge high profile and has been extraordinarily effective
but it does cover a very small area of the City, particularly
in relation to where our bus passengers are. As I have said, 90%
of them are outside the central area. To get the growth figures
we are talking about it is growth in the outer areas and it comes
down to what we were talking about, the bus service is more reliable,
it is more frequent, the vehicles are of a much higher standard
and are more accessible. The network is planned in detail to meet
passenger needs and that is the reason why, despite growing congestion
in Outer London, bus service usage has continued to grow.
Q177 Graham Stringer: There has been
a dramatic rise in cycling since the bombs last July. Do you believe
that has contributed to part of the growth in bus patronage?
Ms Kavanagh: Can you say that
again, I am sorry?
Q178 Graham Stringer: I was not very
clear. The impact of the bombs is clearly people make judgments
about how they are going to travel and one of those judgments
appears to be more people are cycling. Have people switched from
the Tube to buses since 7 July?
Ms Kavanagh: There was a very
small effect in the immediate aftermath during July and August
but by the end of August we were almost back to the same levels
on the Tube and on the bus.
Q179 Graham Stringer: Can I ask Mr
Lynch, can you tell us a little bit about your organisation, how
it is funded, how it is controlled, who is on the management committee,
that kind of thing?
Mr Lynch: Sure. It is an organisation
that used to be called the National Federation of Bus Users. Caroline
Cahm has been leading it for the last 20 years. She has done it
on a voluntary basis. The funding primarily, certainly in my case,
comes from the large group bus operators because there is no other
funding. I would be quite happy if government wished to put some
funding in, in the same way as for Passenger Focus for the railways.
That is something we have mentioned before and the response has
been that there has been some project funding but it has been
very limited.
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