How passengers are being failed by private bus companies - Bill Adams

Jonathan is a disabled passenger up in Bradford. Getting around takes more effort for him, so he needs his local bus to turn up when its supposed to, and he needs it to be accessible.

Kayley is a teaching assistant. It’s taken her 18 months to find out the quickest bus route to get to school. It can take her almost an hour to get to work, but the school is only four miles away. That’s a 12 minute car journey.

What do all these passengers have in common? Private bus companies are failing them, and they have had enough.

All three of them are coming together with bus users across West Yorkshire to demand a better bus service.

Let’s be absolutely clear. Our buses are in crisis. We know that the coronavirus pandemic has hit public transport hard. Government has been paying bus operators directly to run near empty services to ensure our key workers could get to the front lines of this public health emergency.

But we have to be honest with ourselves. This isn’t going to go on forever. And bus companies aren’t likely to foot the bill once government support ends.

In an emergency, we need our public services. This pandemic has shown what a vital public service buses really are. It has shown what a nonsense it is to have them run for private profit, instead of being run for passengers, as a public good.

And, as the smog cleared across the M1 and M62 this spring, it has shown the clean, green future we can have if we invest in public transport.

But these market failures have been well known to anyone who relies on the 680 into Bradford, long before coronavirus came along.

Right now, bus services are a Wild West free market. Private bus companies can do what they like, and local councils have little say over routes, fares or timetables.

The effect of this set up is stark. We’ve lost 17.5 million miles of bus route across our region since 2014. Passenger journeys have more than halved since privatisation, by 438 million. And public funding has been cut by £2.2m in the last 20 years.

If you’re reading this, and you use the bus, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You don’t need numbers to tell you how bad your local service has got. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Just like you, the Better Buses for Yorkshire campaign believes that our bus services can and should be better. We believe they should be run by and for local communities. We think they should be affordable, accessible, reliable and green.

So many of us in the campaign have worked zero hours contract jobs. We’ve lost wages when the bus is late or doesn’t turn up. Some of us have been sanctioned because we couldn’t get to our universal credit meeting on time. And we’ve all spent through the nose for a car or taxi, instead of waiting for a bus that never comes, so we didn’t let relatives or friends down.

We believe that public control of buses can change these things. Right now, bus operators in West Yorkshire don’t offer one flat rate bus ticket. Many won’t accept tickets from other companies. But under the public control powers of the 2017 Buses Act, councils can force operators to do these things.

We can use these powers to create new routes, have affordable fares and make buses so popular we can cut the number of car journeys and contribute to a better climate.

And we can support new jobs in a green manufacturing sector for Yorkshire. In Scarborough, Leeds and Rotherham, highly skilled, unionised workers build clean, green buses. They export these buses around the world, helping to cut carbon emissions, providing skilled workers with good green jobs for the future.

But right here in our county where we make these green buses, we aren’t buying these green buses. Private operators on the whole are buying buses elsewhere. And these bus manufacturers are losing orders and having to cut jobs.

We think public control can mean we set new rules for buying local, and buying green, to support new manufacturing jobs, and a 21st century public transport system.

Sure, bus companies have got to turn a profit. But we’ve got to get to work on time. We’ve got to see our families. We’ve got to be able to get into town and have a social life. Buses can give us all these things when they are reliable, cheap and accessible.

We don’t have these things under a privatised system. But we can have them under public control.

Bill Adams is the TUC regional secretary for Yorkshire and the Humber.

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