Written evidence from NECTAR (BUS 16)
1. These comments come from NECTAR - the North
East Combined Transport Activists' Roundtable.
2. NECTAR is an open, voluntary, umbrella body,
established to provide a forum in which the many organisations
with an interest in sustainable transport in all its forms can
develop a co-ordinated view on contemporary transport issues.
3. NECTAR is one of a national network of Transport
Activists; Roundtables sustained through Campaign for Better Transport.
As such, NECTAR provides opportunity for the exchange of news,
studies and information.
4. It was in the course of our most recent such
opportunity - an executive committee meeting on 11 December 2010
that we realised that, much as we might wish to respond constructively
to the HoC Inquiry, much of the specific information about the
consequences to bus services of all kinds was not yet available
to us, or to anybody else.
Two main reasons for this stand out:
— (i) Local
authority supported bus services - the most likely ones, in our
view, to come under financial threat - run from April to March
(ie the financial year), so will not change for another three
months yet.
— (ii) The
amounts that the Government has allotted to each local authority
have only been made known in the last two or three weeks. With
the onset of the Christmas and New Year holiday period, one which
this time, exceptionally, includes no fewer than seven non-working
days instead of the usual three or four, no local authority can
possibly be expected to have formed any definite plan of action
over reducing expenditure on its multifarious public service obligations,
including those connected with bus services.
5. We know, however, that Stockton-on-Tees Borough
Council will be holding a public meeting, one of its regular "Public
Transport Forum" sessions, on Saturday, 22 January 2011.
This is, in our view, the earliest day when a member of the bus-using
public may gain even an inkling of what an already hard-pressed
body of public transport officials has been able - or been forced
- to put forward as cuts, or other adjustments, to the borough's
bus network.
6. As this is undoubtedly the position that,
mutatis mutandis, will apply throughout the North-East region
for some time yet, we wish to ask that you delay the closing-date
for receiving evidence for at least a further eight weeks.
7. Meanwhile, we have noted, from the Government's
Department of Transport Business Plan 2011-15, published in November
2010 and to be annually up-dated, that the Coalition Priorities
(under heading B, page 2) include, at No.3, the intention to "encourage
sustainable local travel.....by making public transport.....more
attractive and effective, promoting lower carbon transport and
tackling local road congestion". This Priority is an expanded
version of part of the previous page's paragraphs headed "Vision",
which also aim "to make transport cleaner and greener".
8. If, as we hope, this government is sincere
in these aims and priorities, then the one thing that it must
not do is reduce the amount of money that is spent on providing
bus services (and, indeed, any and every other form of transport
that produces, proportionally, lower carbon emission figures than
do cars and lorries). Yet the terms of this Inquiry start from
an assumption that such reduction is already taking place. We
cannot underline too strongly the inherent contradiction between
the DfT Business Plan as quoted and the Terms of Reference given
to those providing and/or sifting evidence that may be considered
relevant to "Bus Services after the Spending Review".
9. We urge, therefore, that not only does the
House of Commons Transport Committee agree to our request for
a delay to the closing date, as mentioned in §6, but also
take what steps it can in its own right to point out that much
of what it is likely to receive in evidence is also firm indication
that, thanks to this Spending Review, the Coalition's Business
Plan is bound to fail in its aim to promote lower-carbon transport
and tackle road congestion.
10. The recent Christmas and New Year holiday
period has highlighted, once again, the inequitable provision
of public transport in general in this country. Unlike most other
European countries, we have to do without all buses and trains
on Christmas Day itself, as well as (in most areas) a similar
dearth throughout Boxing Day. On New Year's Day itself, customs
vary - no buses in North-Eastern England (our territory) and few
trains, mainly those from further afield eg Transpennine services
between Manchester and Middlesbrough, rather than the local Northern
Rail services.
11. There have been a number a sporadic attempts
by user groups and other transport supporters to persuade bus operators and
the local authorities in their operating areas to introduce at
least a limited bus service on some or all of these three days.
Usually this has met with little success. It is not that local
authorities and/or bus operators are against the idea in principle:
but they have not been prepared to take the financial risk that
they see in putting such services on. This, to us, is a
clear sign that public transport is regarded as a fall-back to
private travel provision - and, with spending cuts looming, this
(dis)regard is hardly going to be superseded by an improvement
in bus service-levels on these, or indeed other, bank holiday
days each year. Once again, this militates against the Government's declared
aim of encouraging greener and less polluting forms of transport
[cf. §§ 7 and 8 in our original submission].
12. This year's unusual additions of Bank Holidays-in-lieu
(27, 28 December and 3 January), has probably produced more than
the average confusion for bus users over exactly which buses are
running, to which timetables, on any of these disrupted
days. One example, from the Teesside area, will illustrate
this:
Monday 3 January, designated a Bank Holiday
in 2011, saw widely-contrasting levels of bus service in
the borough of Stockton (and elsewhere, as served by
the bus operators concerned). Stagecoach ran a full Saturday
service (ie little different from a normal Monday in
most respects) for those in the northern and eastern areas
of the borough (plus Billingham and the south end of
Hartlepool, in effect); Arriva, on the other hand, ran a
Sunday service for those living to the south and the west,
particularly on the Eaglescliffe and Yarm corridor, where this
resulted in one bus per hour rather than the normal weekday
10-minute service.
13. Spending cuts are hardly likely to encourage
anyone to try even to smooth out this discrepancy in future years, never
mind to improve the level of bus provision overall. We submit
this as an additional, seasonally-inspired piece of evidence
for the likely adverse effects on bus services of the Government's
funding cuts, in direct contradiction, as stated earlier
[§9], of its aims to encourage use of public transport
as a means of reducing road congestion. But we would still appreciate
a two-month extension of the time available to complete our search
for specific evidence of actual cuts for the House of Commons
Select Committee to consider.
December 2010
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