Meeting of the Parliament 04 April 2019
I can tell Mr Stevenson that there has been an 8 per cent fall in Scotland in the past few years, whereas the rate was 5 per cent in the rest of the United Kingdom. The important point is that the bill will do nothing whatever to reverse that decline. Mr Stevenson agrees with that point, because it is in the REC Committee report to which he agreed.
Another factor that has contributed to the fall in bus use has been the cuts to council budgets in recent years, which are leading to yet more reductions in support for bus services in Scotland. The bill will do nothing to reverse the decline in bus passenger numbers, and it will do nothing to drive up standards in the sector or strengthen passengers’ rights and workers’ terms and conditions.
The bill will not improve affordability or tackle transport poverty. It will not properly promote community transport. Crucially, it will not lift the ban that Margaret Thatcher introduced, which prevents local authorities from competing to run bus services. The limited measures on franchising and partnership are welcome, but we need radical changes to how buses are run in Scotland, to protect the lifeline services that are currently being axed and to stop the big bus companies simply cherry picking the most profitable routes.
That means allowing our local councils to set up and run local bus companies, to meet their communities’ needs, without the restrictions that the bill will place on them. It means ensuring that changes to bus routes will be allowed only after proper consultation with passengers and with the agreement of the traffic commissioner for Scotland.
It means putting a stop to the race to the bottom in how staff are treated. If a company wants to receive public money for delivering services, it should pay its workers a decent wage and deliver proper terms and conditions.
It means ending rip-off fares. It means not just setting up an advisory board on smart ticketing, but giving that board a legally binding remit to deliver a single ticketing scheme across Scotland and across transport modes.
It means properly investing in our buses, not imposing a £230 million real-terms cut in the council budgets that are needed to make that investment, as the Government’s recent budget does. If we believe, as Labour does, that public transport is a public service, and if we really want to improve our environment, we need to properly fund public transport.
What will not protect our environment are the proposals for a so-called workplace parking levy, particularly given that the proposals are an afterthought and are being introduced at stage 2.