Contribution
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) for securing this debate. Our public transport services have been run down for years because of the previous Conservative Government, and many rural communities across my Thornbury and Yate constituency have seen their vital bus services disappear. To rub salt into the wound, we have seen money spent on gimmicks that are aimed at delivering headlines rather than saving the services we rely on.
My constituents were looking forward to the new Government offering them hope, but one of their first actions was to hike the bus fare cap, which is so vital in rural areas, where journeys are long and fractured, and the Government have committed to the cap only for the next year. I welcome the announcement of more funding for services that are subsidised by combined and local authorities, but for it to be effective, it must be targeted at restoring our rural services, rather than being funnelled into already well served urban areas. In the west of England, funding has been prioritised for urban areas such as Bristol, where increasing the frequency of services boosts the number of passenger journeys more. As long as the focus is purely on passenger journey numbers, rather than ensuring that everyone has a basic minimum service that enables access to work, education and health services, our rural areas will miss out.
One of the half-baked solutions to the reduction in mainstream, regularly scheduled services has been to roll out an on-demand bus service called WESTlink. Although on-demand services can work, WESTlink is being used locally to do far more than any on-demand service can reasonably be expected to do, and the delivery of the service has been poor. Bad experiences have led to people losing confidence in it, because no one wants to be stranded and to have to pay a fortune for a taxi. People have told me that they have booked the service to get from A to B, only to find that they are the only passenger on board.
The situation is even more ridiculous when we consider that some WESTlink services are filling the gap left by the axing of bus routes that children and teenagers used to get to school or college. Parents repeatedly have to call up to book what should be a consistent daily service to get young people to and from their place of learning. It is simply a waste of time and resources to manage the service in this way. To quote one parent,
“I know there is a WESTlink available to book every day, but with the WESTlink only able to have a small number of passengers—and it is never on time or takes us somewhere completely different before taking us to school—it’s leaving parents with the fear of being fined.”
I have tried in vain to raise this issue with the West of England combined authority, both in my time in this place and in my previous role as the leader of South Gloucestershire council, but each time we are met with the same answer: “There’s no funding.” That shows the core weakness of the system. Routes that are commercially sustainable are run by bus companies, which absorb the profits, and the less-used but equally important rural routes are left in the hands of local authorities. Local government has had its funding cut to the bone during more than a decade of Conservative rule in Westminster, and it simply cannot magic up extra money to keep the buses running.
When I raised the issue of using funding to provide minimum service levels for rural areas in the House a few weeks ago, the then Transport Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield Heeley (Louise Haigh), agreed with me; I hope that the Minister will echo that agreement today. I also hope that the Minister will agree that regardless of whether new franchising powers are taken up—my hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton has highlighted the difficulties—local councillors should be involved in decision making. As a councillor for many years, I know how valuable their local knowledge can be in avoiding disastrous route and timetable changes that make sense to those sitting in the bus operator’s office. The Yate and District Transport Forum in my area is a good example of local representatives working with operators, but all too often councillors find out about changes at the same time as residents, when it is too late to intervene.
I agree with the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) about the need to understand that whatever boundary one chooses for transport services, some people will want to cross it—and in the case of the 84/85, it is a significant number of people. I have had similar messages about people’s inability to get to jobs, the impact on people travelling to Katharine Lady Berkeley’s school, and so forth. It is important that the Minister provides clarity on the issue of cross-boundary services.
I will finish by briefly touching on railways. We are lucky enough to have some local lines and rail services in my area, but there is no joined-up approach to ensure that people living in villages like Hawkesbury Upton who take a bus to the railway station in Yate will get there in time to catch the next scheduled train. This lack of an ecosystem holds us back. Our services operate disjointedly, which is why people simply do not feel that they can rely on public transport to get around. In addition, we need to increase the number of rail services. I have been pushing for the reopening of stations at Charfield and Coalpit Heath as a new solution for people travelling to the growing number of jobs at Severnside, and have been pushing for the Government to guarantee funding to keep half-hourly trains running through Yate.
All in all, we need a clear and connected plan to improve our public transport network in order to fix the rot that has set in after years of Conservative cuts and neglect, and to ensure that everyone has a regular service that they can depend upon.