Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2023
Monica Lennon mentioned that next week is #lovemybus week. I have to say that the event will seem to be rather ironic for many of my constituents, who will be feeling unrequited love after their local buses have been removed. Many of my constituents love taking the bus, but private bus companies do not appear to love them back.
Thousands of my constituents in Renfrewshire are angry, frustrated and in despair after McGill’s cut a huge 13 per cent of services at the start of this month. The company claims that the primary reason for that is the Government’s withdrawal of Covid recovery support funding. Those are the latest cuts in the bus market, which has been decimated over the past 16 years. For example, in 2007, under the then Labour Government, there were 5,400 buses in operation, but the figure had plummeted to 3,700 in 2022. As Alex Rowley rightly said, young people and older people alike are now asking what the point is of having a free bus pass if there is no bus to get on.
In Renfrewshire, we are seeing the dilution of some services and the withdrawal of other services altogether. In Kilbarchan, buses have been cut from one every 20 minutes to one an hour. In Erskine, young people are without the 22 service to get them to college in Paisley. In Gallowhill and Whitehaugh, disabled residents have lost the service from inside their scheme. In Neilston and Barrhead, cuts are affecting national health service workers who are trying to make it to shifts at the Royal Alexandra hospital. In Foxbar, a constituent of mine who is a dialysis patient is having to take a daily taxi journey because of early morning bus cuts.
Working mothers in Johnstone also face early morning bus cuts, and now find it impossible to get to work on time after dropping the kids at school. Service cuts are affecting Spateston, Linwood, Ferguslie, Hawkhead, Kirklandneuk, Bishopton and more. The list goes on and on.
Frankly, people have had enough. The bus cuts are unacceptable to them, so they should be unacceptable to the Scottish Government, too. People do not want warm words; they want action. They want us to reverse the cuts and urgently deliver a plan to improve our bus services.
Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, which has few resources, has stepped in to support some services. That is welcome, but temporary and very limited stopgap measures simply will not cut it. Therefore, it is frankly astonishing that the Scottish Government has done nothing—precisely nothing—to stop bus services in Renfrewshire being cut.
It is also extremely disappointing that the new Minister for Transport denies the problem in his amendment and has so far ignored my invitation to visit Renfrewshire to hear directly from passengers who have been affected. People in my area are rightly asking, “What is this Government here for?” For all the talk from the minister today, not a single bus service that was cut at the start of this month in Renfrewshire has been, or is set to be, reinstated.
The Scottish Government is not a bystander in this, so it should stop acting like one and govern, because the situation is not inevitable. We can and should do things differently, and there are solutions that should be implemented. First, it is long past time that instead of happily handing over to private bus companies hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in subsidies every year, it should impose stricter conditions on support.