What bus franchising could mean for future services in Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster – Dan Jarvis

The year the strike ended, the Tory government put in motion another seismic change with the privatisation and deregulation of bus services through the Transport Act 1985 – kickstarting another sort of decline.

South Yorkshire could follow Manchester’s bus franchising plan: Dan Jarvis

The free-for-all it created left the shape of those services almost entirely up to private bus companies, and sharply limited the ability local government control over the buses.

In the decades that followed, the average price of a bus ticket in England has increased by more than four times, much faster than costs for car travel.

That’s happened even as the taxpayer continues to provide 42 per cent of the funding for bus transport. Passenger numbers outside of London – which kept regulation and has thrived – have dropped by 38 per cent.

The picture has been particularly tough in South Yorkshire.

Covid hit passenger numbers hard, and they are still down almost 30 per cent. But the rot began much earlier, with annual passenger miles in South Yorkshire falling by over 20 per cent just in the decade to 2020.

Why does that matter? Because buses are not just another business.

We need them to boost our economy, to give people access to opportunity, and businesses access to workers. We need them to help ensure no-one is excluded from mobility, including the most vulnerable.

We need them to save us from an unsustainable dependency on cars which threatens to choke our cities and eventually turn our region into one vast suburbia.

We need them for better, healthier, more liveable, more inclusive communities.

We need them to cut pollution from fossil fuel vehicles which causes 17,000 premature deaths a year in the UK.

We need them to help accelerate our transition to Net Zero.

We need them, in other words, because they are critical to building a stronger, greener and fairer South Yorkshire.

Thirty-six years on, and we have another Conservative administration.

This time the PM claims to love buses so much so he paints models of them in his spare time.

But just like his levelling up agenda, it’s all smoke and mirrors.

The £3bn he promised to transform buses was already very modest.

Since then, all but £1.2bn has been skimmed off, mainly to fund the emergency bus support under Covid.

It’s a joke.

That’s why last week local leaders and I took the decision to undertake the formal assessment which is needed for franchising our bus services.

To be clear, franchising is not a silver bullet. The decline of the past decades has more than one cause, from cheaper car costs to a rise in cycling.

And ultimately the biggest underlying challenge is funding.

Conservative austerity has slashed our transport budget by 40 per cent in real terms over the last decade.

While one structure or another might help us spend money better, if there is no cash, franchising will not protect bus services from cuts.

Nor is the official assessment a mere formality.

While I question how difficult the Government has made this process, it is absolutely right we should rigorously test and clarify franchising’s costs and benefits.

It is only on that basis we will be able to decide whether to finally proceed.

But there is a credible argument that the structure of the system has been a real driver of decline.

More than that, there is a strong case that greater public control is a necessary 
framework for greater investment and support to be truly effective.

If there is the slightest 
chance of franchising being better for our buses, we have 
to rigorously test the case for 
it – because I made a promise when I was elected not just to preserve our bus services but to lay the ground for their transformation.

Now, I’m calling on the Government to match that ambition – in deed as well as word – and back our plans to transform our bus services.

It’s the least the travelling public in Barnsley and South Yorkshire deserve.

Dan Jarvis is the South Yorkshire Mayor and Labour MP for Barnsley Central.

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