Contribution
My hon. Friend goes to the heart of the issue we are debating today. This is an opportunity for our country to enable our manufacturers to compete within the market.
What British industry needs is not to see its renowned prowess for making diesel buses become a sentimental memory in communities such as Falkirk, but policy certainty and support to scale up and properly compete in the zero emissions market as we move towards the implementation of the ZEB mandate. International competitors have been able to scale up to meet the global market through state subsidy and clear procurement ambition. It is up to us to gather the political will to do the same, which I am sure we will hear articulated today.
Through both the mandate and voluntary targets for new registrations, operators are moving to prepare for new additions to their fleet to be fully zero emission by 2030, at the earliest. As that date approaches and diesel buses concurrently become a diminishing part of manufacturers’ order books, we must acknowledge that there is a short window before every new bus in the UK market will be zero emission. The year 2027, proposed by some during the passage of the Bus Services Act 2025 as the date for the ZEB mandate to come into operation, would, without thought, drastically narrow that window, and I was glad to see those amendments defeated.
However, the message we are hearing from our manufacturers is clear. If we now fail to get this right, we will not be talking about a British-led transition and we will not be talking just about a 35%, and rising, Chinese market share. We will be talking about transitioning to reliance on other places in the world to build the vehicles we need on our roads. We will be facing the reality of the long-term consequences of the price and security of supply being increasingly elsewhere and not here. We will have lost control.
That is why this debate is urgent. The Government, in my view, have the political temperament to deliver a new generation of British-built buses, and they have the proven ability to be bold on industrial policy, but too many missed chances by previous Governments and increasingly imminent deadlines for our industry mean that we need to be bolder. Sadly, taxpayer-funded schemes have contributed, rather than aiding a solution, to the problem of diminishing market share for UK manufacturers.
The initial ZEBRA—zero emission bus regional areas—scheme, touted proudly by Prime Minister Johnson’s Government, committed to 4,000 British-built buses by the end of the last Parliament. The scheme delivered just 2,270 buses, of which about 46% were built abroad. There was a material and harmful chasm between political rhetoric and delivery for UK manufacturers.
Scottish manufacturing fared worse recently in phase 2 of the Scottish Government’s zero emission bus challenge fund, the outcome of which was sending two thirds of ScotZEB2 orders to Yutong in China, while less than 20% went to Scottish manufacturers. That created an existential threat to 400 jobs and the Scottish bus manufacturing sector last year, with the First Minister being informed by the company in August 2024 that the outcome of the scheme appeared to show little regard for Scottish manufacturing, with unprecedented action being required in September to prevent the two factories from closing for good.
In addition, 130 jobs were lost in 2024, in part because of the aggravated issue of conditions being placed on Scottish Government funding, compelling adherence to advanced Fair Work First standards for employee remuneration, welfare and safety, while no such requirement was made of foreign manufacturers. I am all in favour of fair work standards being applied. The problem here is that they were not weighted in the procurement exercises, despite their being required only of British manufacturers. That created an unlevel playing field, tilted in the wrong direction.
We have heard testimonials to the origin of London’s public transport system in the labour of Scottish, English and Northern Irish workers, who now contend with, and are contradicted by, the rapidly increasing portions of Transport for London infrastructure coming from elsewhere in the world.
It does not have to be this way. For example, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) alluded to, the Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region combined authorities, when franchising their bus networks, bought nationally. They chose to weight properly when buying buses, with procurement teams looking at what could be achieved when social value is appropriately weighted.
These successes and failures are largely down to how the schemes are set up. It seems entirely right to me that, because many are funded wholly with our constituents’ tax money, we should maximise the muscle of the state to make sure that as much of it as possible ends up benefiting our constituents, within the limits of our World Trade Organisation obligations.