The Labour Government Moves Ahead To Reform and Protect Local Bus Services

The government’s Bus Services Bill received its first reading in the House of Lords this week (17th December). The intention is to implement the government’s commitment to deliver better bus services across the country.

The two key tools available to combined and local authorities that have local transport responsibilities – enhanced partnership schemes and bus franchising both receive attention in the bill together with the removal of a legal restriction on local authorities establishing new local authority owned bus companies.

The measures proposed for franchising are particularly bold – enabling authorities to move into a franchise based model far quicker than has previously been possible – rules relating to awarding contracts without competition will be revised to enable authorities to take control of services provided by existing operators for up to five years – thereafter opening the services up to competition between operators.

The enhanced partnership model of working between authorities and operators – widely used across England also receives attention with reforms planned to include the designation across the  network of services deemed to be socially necessary.. New requirements will place responsibility on the authority to ensure that a solution focussed approach is taken to developing alternative arrangements aimed at maintaining, in some form, the affected services.

The bill will be welcomed for plans to tackle a wide range of issues that can deter people from travelling by bus or avoiding paying for travel with authorities to be empowered to make local byelaws to tackle anti-social behaviour and enforcement powers against non-paying passengers.

Notable, however, is the failure within the bill to address the more fundamental issues that frequently deter travel by bus – the problems of urban congestion affecting timetable reliability and increasing the costs to operators in providing robust service operations and the possibility of measures to encourage behaviour changes on the part of car users do not feature.

Combined and Local Authorities will also be anxious about the cost implications - a number of the proposals bring into question the ability of authorities to allocate funding to new responsibilities at a time of intense expenditure constraints.