Further written evidence
from NECTAR (BUS 16a)
1. These comments come from NECTAR
- the North East Combined Transport Activists' Roundtable. As
noted below, they are a modified version of what we sent to the
House of Commons Transport Committee in early January this year,
with the addition of remarks prompted by firm evidence of local
authority bus cuts in the North-East region of England as at 25
February 2011.
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. In responding to this Inquiry
so as to meet the original 4 January 2011 closing-date, NECTAR
realised that much
of the specific information about consequences to bus services
of Government-imposed local authority cuts
would not be available until well after that date. We are thankful,
as well as glad, to see that, as a result of requests by (presumably)
many others across the country as well as by NECTAR, the House
of Commons Inquiry closing-date
has been put back to 28 February. Our remarks are in two main
parts - the general and the particular.
(a) GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
5. We have noted, from the Government's
Department of Transport Business Plan 2011-2015, published in
November 2010 and to be annually updated, 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 aims "to
make transport cleaner and
greener".
6. 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). This prohibition applies just
as strongly whether the reduction in funding is specified directly
by central government or achieved, at one remove, by manoeuvring
local authorities into compliance in the face of lower overall
levels of income.
7. Yet the terms of this Inquiry
start from an assumption that such reduction is already taking
place. So we cannot underline
too strongly, once more, this inherent contradiction between the
DfT Business Plan as quoted and the Terms of Reference given to
those providing and/or sifting evidence that is considered relevant
to "Bus Services after the Spending Review".
8. We therefore urge the House
of Commons Transport Committee to take what steps it can in its
own right to point out that just about every item of evidence
it receives for this Inquiry is firm indication, also, that thanks
to the Spending Review the Coalition's Business Plan is bound
to fail in its aim to promote lower-carbon transport and to tackle
road congestion with any success.
9. Before moving to specific summary
details of proposed bus cuts known to us, we make an increasingly
significant general point about Bank Holiday period bus service
reductions, especially as applied to the Christmas and New Year
holidays. These, in 2010-11, highlighted more than usually vividly
the inequitable provision of public transport in general in the
UK. 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, and
few trains, mainly those from further afield, eg Transpennine
trains between Manchester and Middlesbrough, rather than local
Northern Rail services.
10. We have tried to persuade
transport operators to run at least limited services on these
three days, but with no success
- it is not that local authorities and/or bus operators are against
the idea in principle, but that 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 still regarded,
in practice, as a fall-back to private travel provision. There
is also a hidden bias
against the bus as a form of transport, in that we know and support
strongly the continuing moves by rail operators
towards a "Seven-Day Railway", by vastly improving the
frequency and quality of Sunday train services. The most conspicuous
example of this is the forthcoming East Coast main-line timetable
reforms that begin on 22 May (a Sunday, appropriately enough),
with Sunday afternoon and evening frequencies, at least, to match
those on weekdays.
11. If rail operators can do this,
privatised as they are, why is the same not seen on the buses?
Absence of more than skeletal bus services on Sundays of all kinds
is bad enough, never mind on Bank Holidays, for which most bus
operators think a Sunday service will do. But the many threatened
withdrawals of existing local authority-supported Sunday services
will, if carried out, mean that vast tracts of the country - even
of some urban areas - will
in effect have no bus services at all for two days in succession
at Easter weekend, two Bank Holiday weekends in May, and on the
last weekend in August - and these are exactly the days on which
many people will
have more chance to get out and about than normal. To add insult
to injury, this year's total is increased further, by the Royal
Wedding Bank Holiday on Friday 29 April - just after most service-cuts
are newly in place.
12. Does the Government have any
plans, we wonder, to level the imbalance between private and public
transport by limiting car use by the same amount? This is not
as fanciful as it might seem - Athens is said to have banned half
the car-fleet on alternate days to combat its urban congestion
and pollution problems, theoretically grounding every motorist
for 182 days each year. If we add up all the Sundays and Bank
Holidays in a normal year, we get sixty days on which, for an
increasing number of people, bus travel will be impossible. Is
that a rational element in any campaign to encourage increased
use of public transport? Or may we, perhaps, look forward to an
early announcement that, to treat all kinds of road transport
users equally and fairly, motorists, too, must henceforth lock
cars away in their garages for 60 days every year?
(b) PARTICULAR
INSTANCES OF
THREATENED BUS-CUTS
13. Recently-prepared Local Transport
Plan 3 bids in the Tees-side area put great weight on the development
of better public transport as the only way to reduce road traffic
congestion, and to deal at least in part with
excessive CO2 emissions. (This
opinion, incidentally, is even shared by our regional Highways
Agency, of all people!) The increasing cost of petrol now adds
even more urgency to this aim. Yet councils in at least two of
the five constituent boroughs of the Tees Valley - Hartlepool
and Stocktonhave had to vote to cut bus-service provision,
at times drastically, at just the times of day and days of the
week when growth in bus use is most desirable - evenings and Sundays.
The other three boroughs, Redcar, Middlesbrough, and
Darlington, have not published
any specific information in time to include it here, suggesting
that they are faced with agonising choices that they know will
bring hardship to many, and not just bus users - many jobs
nowadays call for irregular
and/or unusual working hours, weekends and evenings included.
So we must, in fairness to all the council officials concerned,
repeat our view that this entire bus-cutting exercise has been
driven by a doctrinaire government reduction in funds to local
authorities, manipulated in such a way that the general public
might be led to think that it is the local councillors on whom
the blame should fall, when the reality is usually otherwise [cf.
§6 above].
14. Hartlepool borough services
are the worst affected of any in the North-East - despite the
considerable amount
of poverty and deprivation that exists, particularly but not only
in the urban area. Large swathes of the town, including High Tunstall,
Hartlepool Headland, Rift House, Owton Manor, Seaton Carew, Elwick
village and Dalton Piercy village, will have virtually nothing
on Sundays and after 18.30 on any evening. The villages may well
retain no buses at all, even during the day on weekdays. This
is bound to cause quite unacceptable
social isolation, in clear breach of several clauses of the Transport
Act of 2000, for instance.
15. There is another worrying
aspect to the Hartlepool cuts. Most of the dedicated Hospital
bus links are also in the
list for withdrawal. This in itself is bad enough, but should
be read alongside some proposals for a new
hospital eight miles west of Hartlepool town centre, whose functions
are not all clear but which will call for
regular, frequent and reliable public transport throughout every
day and night for those many people living
in the town without their own cars. It is true that the first
round of government cuts included the cancellation
of this project, but a lot of local energy is being put into finding
alternative funding for it, government
cuts notwithstanding. Even so, a situation could exist in which,
if the hospital is built, buses could
be laid on in its first years and then removed at little notice
later on, for reasons similar to those that
have caused the rash of bus service cuts now. This, admittedly
hypothetical at present, is not a situation
that any user of public transport
can view with optimism.
16. Stockton borough services
The council in this borough
has striven endlessly to keep the range of tendered bus services
that it has. Last
September, it even managed to re-introduce a direct evenings and
Sundays bus link between Middlesbrough and Billingham that had
been taken off a few months earlier for fiscal reasons. Yet this
is one of seven routes for
which notice of withdrawal has had to be issued - just as its
existence was beginning to make itself felt among the people in
the areas for which it was designed.
17. Northumberland
county services It
is to this county's great credit that practically all the tendered
bus services operated now will survive after this April. NECTAR
suspects, but has no evidence for the theory, that the method
of working out grant employed by this government works in favour
of counties of this size and type, to the detriment
(however unintentional) of
the more urban areas such as Hartlepool and Stockton. But equally
we have no
grounds for thinking that Northumberland's present level of service-support
can be maintained into the
2012-13 funding season.
18. Tyne
and Wear area To
the best of our understanding, bus services are largely protected
from cuts, at least in the 2011-12 financial
year. This does not preclude changes in service-levels later on,
but at least it continues a long-standing commitment by this conurbation
to the maintenance of good-quality public transport as widely
as possible.
Concluding remarks:
19. We know that the Inquiry aims
to find out the effects of the cuts on bus services, and we have
tried to keep to its terms of reference as far as we humanly can.
The problem with doing this, even after the welcome
extension of the "reply"
period, is that the effects of even the mildest of cuts will not
be seen until the start of
April at the earliest. As a closing remark, therefore, we should
like to express our disquiet at the fact that
the Traffic Commissioners, to whom all applications for changes
in bus service operations must be made,
56 days in advance of their intended start-date, do not have any
powers to hear objections from the general public. If they had,
of course, they would now be inundated with such complaints, and
no doubt the
bus cuts would have had to be postponed to match. We ask the House
of Commons Transport Committee members, therefore, to take into
account this obstacle to bus users who wish to do anything practical
themselves towards limiting, or even preventing entirely, reductions
in their bus services.
20. Over and above the details and
the legalities, we are reminded of a remark by George Bernard
Shaw"Advice to those thinking of getting married -
don't". Once these bus cuts are in place, anyone thinking
of giving up a private car in favour of total dependence on public
transport in this country can hardly be
blamed, despite the entirely different context, if, sadly, he
or she takes GBS's advice.
February 2011
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