It’s our rural bus services that are being worst-hit

MICK DREWRY, Don View, Dunford Bridge

Once more, Miriam Cates MP voices her concerns about our buses in last week’s Chronicle.

She has a history of campaigning for better bus services since becoming MP; indeed, it was a theme of her maiden speech of February 15, 2020. In the intervening time, however, the bus services have deteriorated further and rural services, as Miriam Cates accepts, have suffered more than the more profitable urban routes.

The reasons for this further decline in services, she argues, are falling passenger numbers, high fuel prices and the failed bid for government funding; she gives no particular reason for this bid failing.

She does accept that ‘services were struggling even before Covid’ and that the impact upon rural services has been the greatest.

Consistent with her political leaders, she blames anybody but the very people who can effect positive change: her government. She also fails to mention that the true reason behind the chaos we have today is a previous Tory government’s failed privatisation experiment; deregulation of the buses in 1986 (except in London).

Like all of the Tories’ privatisation policies, deregulation of the public transport system benefited no-one but those who own the private companies that have taken control of our buses.

Passenger numbers in Yorkshire and the Humber have been in steady decline since deregulation; from 678 million passenger journeys in 1986/87 to 276 million in 2019/20. The pandemic has seen a marked decline to just 96 million passenger journeys for 2020/21.

Commercially, this is unsustainable, which makes the argument for bringing public transport back into public ownership more pertinent. Equally, the spiralling cost of fuel would be better controlled under state-ownership of the fuel companies but this is never going to happen.

Although Miriam Cates professes not to be wedded to ideology, she maintains an ideological stance by continually being in denial of the detrimental effects of the Tories privatization experiments.

We are now suffering the consequences of all of these ideological experiments with our public services: gas, electricity, water, telecommunications, railways, Royal Mail, even the NHS where a growing percentage of its budget is being spent on ‘outsourcing’, i.e independent sector providers (private health companies).

This money is still classified as NHS spending, which hides the growing private interests within the NHS. Of course, since 1986 we have had a period of 13 years under a Labour government, which did nothing to reverse any of the Tory privatization experiments and actually introduced private finance into the NHS in 1997.

The Blair governments could have put our buses back under public sector control or at least extend the Transport for London model nationwide (6.5 million passengers use London buses every day).

The last Labour government is remembered more for what it didn’t do than for what it did and we have no idea what Sir Keir Starmer’s public transport policy is. Meanwhile, we have now had two Labour South Yorkshire mayors, both elected on a flagship promise to bring public transport back under public ownership.

Like Boris Johnson’s ‘Bus Back Better’ strategy of 2021, our

Mayors’ election manifestos are seemingly just bluster.