Not content with angering pensioners, businesses, students, farmers or the self-employed in their effort to rebalance the country’s economy, the Government has also decided to attack the bus-travelling public by adding 50% to the cost of your daily bus. It might seem like a small issue, but more than 3.4 billion bus journeys were made in the UK last year, so it affects a lot of people.
Even worse, they are going to war against their own Mayors who are taking the issue into their own hands to try to maintain the bus cap at £2 per fare in Liverpool, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire and to protect their most vulnerable residents.
And all this political drama for the sake of a few hundred million pounds of treasury expenditure each year.
Sources: https://x.com/LCRMayor/status/1854138619906154717
https://x.com/AndyBurnhamGM/status/1858407680890560730
https://x.com/MayorOfWY/status/1858444822069076392
Even worse, our transport secretary has hinted that she may well do away with the bus fare cap entirely, leaving our weary and haggard commuters to the mercy of a failing private market!
Source: https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1858072776734626104
Unlike our tweed-wearing, incredibly well-to-do farmers, this has not led to large-scale protests at our centre of Government. Nigel Farage has not taken the opportunity for a photo shoot in front of a bus to take this elitist government to the woodchipper. Instead, most people are, at worst, mildly miffed.
But buses are really important!
In fact, I would argue that they are much more important than tax reliefs for large farms. Buses remain the most used form of public transport in England. They will likely remain so no matter how much we invest in our other forms of public transport or bat tunnels.
As the Government’s own National Bus Strategy put it, “A successful bus service is good for the economy, for the environment, for the cost of living and for the quality of life in cities, towns and villages across the country.”
Unfortunately, we have not had “a successful bus service” for a long time.
Over the long term, the number of bus journeys has been in decline. In England, they dropped from 4.6 billion in 2009 to 1.5 billion during the pandemic to just over 3.4 billion today – a strong recovery but not back to where they were. The recently announced £1bn to pay for more services is definitely welcome but just having more buses running won’t solve everything.
Ultimately, if our buses are failing, then, why do I care about the cap so much?
Well, I am really glad you asked. Since the bus fare cap was introduced, ridership has increased by 20%. Some of this is a natural bounceback from the pandemic, but it is also partly that the simplicity of getting on and knowing your fare is affordable no matter where you go. It makes bus travel that much easier.
Building rail networks is great, but quite expensive and prone to delays and cost overuns. Buses are (let’s be honest) less great but very, very cheap. If we want to hit comparative levels of public transport use as, say, in Hamburg, we would have to double ridership in our major cities like Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool. Also, buses will be essential for intra-city travel, getting people to and from work, shops, and leisure activities.
As the Centre for Cities handy diagram shows, price and price transparency is one of five levers we can actually pull to increase ridership. We know that making buses affordable and making it clear how much you have to pay no matter where you are gets butts on bus seats.
Source: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/gear-shift/
Across the UK, buses are an incredibly affordable way to get people to travel. The cost of operating the bus network is about £6bn a year, with around £5bn raised in revenue by operators each year. Combined, this is about 60% of what stamp duty raises each year.
Bus travel also provides a net benefit to the economy. The Government itself thinks that buses have a positive ROI of roughly £4 for every £1 invested in it.
Other countries are recognising that local public transport is a good investment. Four French cities have introduced free or at least partially free public transport. Small countries like Malta and Germany introduced a local subscription scheme where all local public transport is just €49 per month.
Taking away the cap, then, is wrong because it fundamentally misunderstands what people want from buses. They want clear and affordable fares. Upping the cap makes buses less affordable, and removing it altogether risks throwing us into the abyss of not knowing how much you will have to pay to get on a bus at all.
I don’t think this is a risk worth taking on our already fragile network.
Particularly as Combined Authorities look to take public transport under control, we should be looking to cut, not increase the price of public transport, and simplifying fares with policies like a fare cap or a single-use subscription should be top of the agenda for good policy.
The current Government may need to find funds from somewhere in order to fill its fiscal black hole, but messing around with bus pricing is a regressive way of doing it. Find out more about our work on transport
