Future of Bus Services for Worcestershire – June 2022 Update

Following my recent appointment as Cabinet Member with Responsibility for Highways and Transport for Worcestershire County Council I have been engaged in discussions regarding the future of bus services for our county area.

This work began in earnest, and continues apace as we seek to solve what has become a ‘catch-22 situation‘ – i.e. people say they will use the bus if the service is good, but not enough people are using the bus to provide operators with enough money to be re-invested into services. Operators are reporting heavy losses on services that have now become commercially non-viable to run.

By way of background, you should be aware that demand for bus services has fallen to around 70% of pre-COVID levels, and even lower at 50% for concessionary passholders. This is a trend that is impossible to minimise or dismiss – the cold fact is that fewer people are willing to travel by bus than before the pandemic. Even before the pandemic passenger numbers were on the decline.

In January 2020 – a couple of months before restrictions were introduced for the pandemic – a report was published by the Independent Transport Commission that said:

“Local Authority areas with the steepest declines in bus usage since 2009 tend to be found in Northern England and the Midlands …”

Independent Transport Commission, January 2020

It goes on to note that local authorities with strong declines since 2009 tend to have more frequent services, essentially that bus use is declining fastest in areas that have traditionally seen the levels of bus patronage.

Where have they gone?

I believe the decrease is due to a number of factors and if I were to summarise it I might describe it as a crisis of consumer confidence.

Couple with this is an increase in home-working, and more flexible working patterns.

The Independent Transport Commission (ITC) again looks more closely at the details and suggests:

Third party research shows that factors such as bus service supply are positively
correlated with bus demand, but increasing incomes, higher car ownership, and
higher fares are negatively correlated with bus usage.

Independent Transport Commission, January 2020

They add:

“Other negative factors for bus use identified included the increasing use of online retail (confirming the ITC finding that the fall in shopping trips has particularly depressed bus usage), increases in bus fares and the lower costs of car ownership and use (principally caused by the steep fall in fuel prices in 2014).

Independent Transport Commission, January 2020

I note the cost of fuel is nowhere near as low as it was in January 2020 and this may well encourage more people to consider travelling by bus – it’s currently (as of June 2022) too early to say if the price of fuel being high is having an impact on bus demand.

Despite demand for bus travel being in a heavily reduced state, the government has decided to end the Bus Recovery Grant that was put in place to help operators get through the pandemic. This fund provided over £226.5m of funding to operators across the country, and taken together with other financial support packages there hasn’t been a government since 1986 that has supported the buses more in financial terms.

Why 1986? That’s the year buses were first deregulated.

One of the common requests I get is to simply subsidise the buses with more money – and I am sympathetic to the view that some financial support is likely to be needed, but there is no magic money tree and every penny of money in the council’s coffers is your money and my money as taxpayers.

As I said to the OSPB committee shortly after I came into my role, there is simply no correlation to support the argument that the more money you spend on the buses the more passengers you get. It just isn’t true to say that more subsidy will equal more passengers. You, the reader, need to ask yourself if you want your taxes to be spent on transporting empty or near-empty buses around.

Here is a video copy of the exchange with one of the scrutiny panel members at the 25th May 2022 meeting where the topic of funding came up:

What next?

I am keen to outline the steps I am taking with colleagues at the County Council and with our partners and operators, and to ask for your support on some initiatives, as we look ahead to the future of bus travel in Worcestershire.

As you may know from press reporting, the Worcestershire Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) was an ambitious bid to the UK Government that would have enabled in excess of £86m investment into the network in Worcestershire, enabling more people to make a positive choice to take the bus for their travel needs.

As part of the BSIP process the Department for Transport made it clear they want to see Enhanced Partnerships (EP) as defined in the Bus Services Act 2017 as a key feature within how bus services are managed across England.

Outside of London and other metropolitan mayoral authorities, franchising remains an option. This was deployed most recently by the Manchester Metro Mayor Andy Burnham. The West Midlands uses a statutory Enhanced Partnership model.

As a conurbation, the urban West Midlands already benefits from significantly higher demand for bus travel with over 248m passengers in the 2019/20 period. That is why it is a mystery to us why our friend and neighbour’s BSIP was funded to the tune of £87.9m whilst Worcestershire’s plan was awarded £0. We congratulate them on their success, but Worcestershire’s network urgently requires investment to attract passengers. We have asked the DfT for feedback on our bid but we are still waiting.

You may have seen local reporting about Diamond Buses in Redditch in particular where they have outlined the services that are deemed to be at risk because they are not commercially viable. You may also be aware of the situation regarding First Bus and Johnsons bus services. It’s a bleak picture in Worcestershire.

The situation is bleak, and with funding to offset the impact of COVID-19 coming to an end the network is at risk of reverting to a reliance on the commercial viability of routes to ensure their survival, unless alternative funding can be located and unless we can revolutionise how bus travel works.

We are at the point now where nothing short of revolution of innovation in how we use buses will fix this problem.

The availability of bus services is important to the people of Worcestershire, and so we must work together across all layers of government – and as politicians with our public – to do whatever we can to try and safeguard services for our residents.

Worcestershire County Council is doing everything it can to help, including:

• REVIEW: Carrying out a full network review, to be submitted to the Department for Transport by 1 July. Alongside this I am launching a Bus Services Task Force for Worcestershire.
• ENHANCE: Fully committing ourselves to the establishment of an Enhanced Partnership with our operators as defined in the Bus Services Act (2017). Our operators are an essential partner and we cannot establish an Enhanced Partnership without them. They do their level best for the travelling public in Worcestershire every day. We thank them and we look forward to working with them in a new Enhanced Partnership.
• SECURE: Working with new operators into the County such as National Express who have taken over the former 144 service from Bromsgrove to Birmingham. We hope there will be increased opportunities for smaller operators and community transport providers to do more in our county.
• SECURE: Exploring the result of the Bromsgrove Demand Responsive Transport (DRT – what’s that?) trial and examining if this is a viable model for rolling out across Worcestershire. We would need to do this at pace to secure future resiliency to our network.

I need to stress that the buttons we as a County Council can push are limited as the broken component here is one of market fundamentals: demand is either low or not in a form to fit how bus services traditionally work.

However, to summarise:

REVIEW the network, set up a new ENHANCED Partnership, and SECURE the resiliency of the network by looking at demand-responsive solutions and smaller operators where we can.

To mitigate the impact of reduced demand, and whilst the County Council examines whether DRT is the solution for the future of our bus services, I am proposing the establishment of a Bus Travel Task Force for Worcestershire which will be comprised of the County Council, bus operators, passenger groups, councillors and MPs. These will be hosted on a monthly basis in each constituency within Worcestershire. Please look out for details of this in your area on social media, such as my own page on Facebook.

The Task Force is just a start, and there is much working going on behind the scenes in close conjunction with operators and local authority partners. I am fully aware of how people regard local bus services, and how much everyone wants the assurance of knowing there is a bus service even if they don’t use it themselves. I am also acutely aware from my own recent bus travel experiences that some people absolutely depend on bus services for their jobs, and for getting their children to school on commercial services outside of the Home to School Transport Service, which is not currently affected in the same way.

Thank you for taking the time to read this update. I will write another update as soon as I have more information to share.

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