Hansard

The green bus fund is a welcome initiative. Of course, as Elaine Murray outlined, Labour initially called for it some years ago. Low-carbon buses, which the fund will help to buy, contribute in a small but welcome way to cutting carbon emissions.

The minister was also right to mention the opportunity that the green bus fund provides for a great Scottish manufacturing company, Alexander Dennis Ltd, which, like him, I have visited. Not only is Alexander Dennis demonstrating how innovation can lead to success, it is demonstrating that Scotland can still build some of the best light engineering products anywhere in the world. Indeed, the Enviro400 hybrid, which is produced by Alexander Dennis, is the United Kingdom’s best-selling hybrid bus.

However, the core purpose of the work in this area is as part of our response to climate change and our endeavours to meet the carbon emission reduction targets that we have set ourselves, so it was disappointing news when we discovered in the summer that Scotland had missed its emissions target by the equivalent of more than 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. In some ways, that is no surprise, because although emissions in general have fallen in the past 20 years, those from transport have edged up, and there are about 1 million more vehicles on Scotland’s roads than there were 20 years ago. Decarbonising our bus fleet might be desirable, but that is not the real challenge. The real challenge is to decarbonise transport, which means getting people out of cars and on to those buses.

Given that there were 438 million bus journeys in Scotland last year and only 81 million rail journeys, it is clear that it is buses that have to play the primary role in that modal shift. The minister said that the share of bus journeys is growing, but that is not what is happening. The number of bus journeys has slumped by 150 million in the past few years, while the number of rail journeys continues to rise. Perhaps one reason for that is that the Government provides £667 million in subsidies to rail each year but only £295 million to subsidise far more bus journeys that reach many more parts of Scotland. I applaud investment in our rail network and I know that that balance is not new or unique to the current Administration, but it needs to be examined.

In truth, Government funding for buses has been cut. There has been a cut in BSOG and the recompense for concessionary journeys is being squeezed. The result is that, for the first time since devolution, bus passenger numbers per head of population are lower in Scotland than they are in Great Britain as a whole. I warn members that the decline will not be gradual. In my constituency of East Lothian and in West Lothian, First bus services, which had gradually become unreliable, irregular and expensive, were completely removed one day. Unless we act, that will happen more and more.

Green buses mean something else to me. For people of my age who grew up in the Lothians, there will always be red buses and green buses. The red buses were the corporation buses in the town and the green buses served the outlying areas. The green buses were run by the Scottish Bus Group. They were required by law to make 6 per cent profit every year, and that was reinvested in the services. They were regular, reliable, busy, profitable and lively. I know that, because I spent four summers as a bus conductor on those Eastern Scottish routes. In fact, they could get too lively. I remember one of my colleagues claiming that he had had a gun pulled on him on the last Dunbar service on a Saturday night. That was one fare that he did not collect.

Those routes in East Lothian were the best routes for the Scottish Bus Group. How can it be that we reached a point at which First, the successor company, simply removed them? Competition has not served us well in that part of Scotland. Competition crushed those First services at one end of my constituency, where the people are, and the company was left to try to serve those areas where there are far fewer people. The refocusing of BSOG has not helped my rural constituency. Our buses disappeared.

Nothing focuses our minds as much as an election. In East Lothian, when our bus services were removed, the local SNP councillors who were facing the electorate not only suddenly found additional money to subsidise bus routes but told the voters that they wanted to start their own council bus company, and the minister did not discourage them from that. However, they were not serious—and I have to say that the electorate saw through it all and did not believe them.

If we look at where buses are succeeding, surely the message is that it is time to change the industry’s structure, not just the fuel used by its buses, if we are to give passengers the assurance of reliability, stable fares and high-quality vehicles. We need look only at London, where Transport for London is so confident and successful that it has ordered 600 hybrid buses to give to the companies, delivering popular affordable services in a regulated market; at Renfrew, where we have Scotland’s only quality bus partnership, which is regularly lauded in the chamber by George Adam as a model that should be followed elsewhere; or at Edinburgh, where we have the nearest thing in Scotland to a publicly owned bus company running a near-monopoly of services across the city at an incredible £1.40 flat fare, however far one goes.