Hansard

I thank Mark Ruskell for his motion and the opportunity to discuss the importance of our bus services. There is no doubt that Scotland’s diminishing bus network is in crisis, and our rural communities are paying a heavy price.

The crisis did not start becauase of the pandemic, and the failures of privatisation were not caused by Covid. In Scotland, passenger numbers have been plummeting since deregulation—they went down 43 per cent between 1987 and 2020—yet fares have risen by 159 per cent since the index started, in 1995. That dismantling of our bus network, route by route, has accelerated under this Government, with the number of passenger journeys falling by a quarter since 2007.

I know that there has been a decline across Britain, but, while the fall was 5.6 per cent in England, it was nearly three times higher, at 15.3 per cent, in Scotland between 2010 and 2018. There are many reasons for that decline, which include not only changing work patterns and growing congestion but the decisions that have been made by the Government, not least on cuts to council budgets.

The recent Green-SNP budget, which includes a real-terms cut of around £300 million for councils, will mean a real cut in more bus services in rural areas, the overwhelming majority of which rely on subsidies from the local council. That support is under threat more than ever before. That is no way to run an essential public service on which so many rely.

Buses still account for 366 million journeys a year in Scotland. They boost growth, they alleviate poverty and they connect communities. However, instead of providing an attractive alternative at a time when transport is the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, our deregulated bus system has been turning people away from public transport and towards cars. We see that in all our communities.

I will give just one example, although there are many across my region. The X95 bus run by Borders Buses connects rural communities between Edinburgh and Carlisle, in Midlothian, the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway. During the pandemic, its frequency was cut from hourly to every two hours, but, as we moved out of lockdown, it was not reinstated to hourly. The lack of frequency simply means that the bus is no longer an option for those who want to use it to commute to their work.

I know that there are challenges with the backlog in processing driving licences at the DVLA, and there is a lack of tests to ensure that, when bus companies decide to increase services, they have the drivers to do so. I have written to the UK Secretary of State for Transport on the issue. However, there has also been a failure of the Scottish Government to secure proper guarantees from bus firms in return for the more than £330 million of taxpayer support that was given to the sector during the pandemic. We need better conditionality to maintain services in return for that support.

We also need more fundamental change. Regulation in London and municipally owned operators such as Lothian Buses shows that the current broken system does not have to be this way. It is three years since I lodged amendments to the Transport (Scotland) Bill to lift the ban on council-run bus services, putting into practice Unite the union’s haud the bus campaign and the Co-operative Party’s people’s bus campaign, which call for a bus network that puts passengers, not profits, first. Yet, this Government has still not passed on to councils the powers that I secured, never mind given them the resources that they need to set up their own publicly and community-owned bus services. Astonishingly, the Green-SNP coalition continues to stack the cards against public ownership, with a £500 million bus partnership fund that can be spent only on deals with private bus companies, instead of using some of that funding to set up publicly run bus companies.

Scotland’s bus passengers deserve better, as do Scotland’s bus drivers. Deregulation has resulted in a race to the bottom in staff wages, yet it was our drivers and support staff who kept Scotland moving during the pandemic. They often put their own health on the line, including bus driver Willie Wallace, from Kilmarnock, who sadly died of Covid in October 2020. That should bring home to us the amazing work that our key workers do, for which we all owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

We owe our passengers a better bus network—one that meets their needs and understands that public transport is a public service that, like all public services, should be run for the benefit of the public and not for profit.