
In London, if you miss your bus late at night, another will quickly appear. In Cheltenham, you could be facing a half-hour wait or more, assuming there would even be another bus that night.
Buses remain the most used form of public transport across England, yet bus routes have been systematically eroded and the frequency of services reduced, with little regard to the passengers who rely upon them. Over 40 years ago, buses outside London were privatised and deregulated by the then Conservative government, making services less dependable and more expensive.
Increasingly therefore, in counties like Gloucestershire, many people, particularly those in the more rural areas, have no option but to travel by car. Travel costs are often one of the biggest household outgoings in the UK for those needing to get to work.
The new Labour government plans to tackle this situation. Labour will begin to build and improve our local bus network so that it can provide affordable, reliable local transport to help us all get to work, college or schools, or to healthcare appointments. And unlike expensive road infrastructure projects, this can all be achieved all without large and expensive decades-long construction work. Greater use of buses will also help to make the transport infrastructure more ‘green’, cutting levels of pollution and congestion.
But to get people to use buses they must be affordable and dependable and cannot simply stop operating outside the most profitable hours. In September 2022, the last government introduced a £2 fare cap for services across England. This led to an increase in the number of bus journeys taken by 10%.
That government also planned to end the £2 fare cap on a single bus journey in December of this year. However, in the Budget last month, the new Labour government decided to continue the fare cap, although set at £3 a journey. It is not a perfect solution, but it avoided the almost inevitable return to even higher and unregulated bus fares at a time when household budgets are tight.
On the wider front, the government’s new Bus Bill will allow local authorities across England to bring the buses back into public ownership and run and control them as local services. Over time this should make it more likely that the bus becomes the transport of choice for everyone, not the “second-class service” of last resort for those without access to a car.
Modernising our transport infrastructure and delivering better bus services is at the heart of Labour’s plan to kickstart economic growth in every part of the country and get the economy moving.
Clive Harriss,
Vice-Chair Membership, Cheltenham Labour Party