Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Plenary, 01 Jun 2005

01 Jun 2005 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Transport (Scotland) Act 2001

Smith, Iain LD North East Fife Watch on SPTV

I am still slightly confused about where those 158 stations in the Highlands are. Perhaps I will have a look at my map later and find them. I am pleased that John Home Robertson is not Minister for Transport, and I am sure that people in the Borders are, too, given his attitude to the Borders rail line, which I think will be an extremely important link for the economic development of that region of Scotland.

Like the Minister for Transport, I am old enough to remember the pre-deregulation days on a local council. I am slightly younger than the minister, but we were both elected to our respective regional councils in 1982. I remember that there were concerns at that time about the decline of bus services. Indeed, there were deep concerns about the Conservatives' plans to bring in deregulation. A Tory white paper was published in 1984, entitled "Buses". As the committee's report mentions, it claimed that

"competition would lead to lower fares, new services and more passengers, by removing obstacles to enterprise, initiative and efficiency".

In reality, what many of us ended up with after deregulation was higher fares and a continuing decline in bus patronage. Occasionally, we had more buses on the same routes. Generally speaking, however, they travelled along fewer routes, and there was certainly not great innovation in new routes as a result of deregulation. We often found increases in local government subsidies because of the loss of the cross-subsidy between the profitable routes and the non-profitable routes. The resulting funding gap had to be picked up by the local authorities in order to keep services going, while the bus companies creamed off the profits from the profitable routes.

Where improvements were made to bus services, that was often done through local authority action. In Fife, under Henry McLeish, when he was leader of the administration there—some members might remember him in the same fond way that they will remember David Mundell—concessionary fares schemes and the co-ordination of bus contracts with school contracts to arrive at a whole-area contract were what saved rural bus services. That kept services going and led to an increase in patronage in Fife, while the national pattern was one of decrease. That was not because of deregulation; the bus service was made safe through the action of the local authority.

An interesting point to note is that subsidies for bus services in Fife fell after 1987, simply because the bus companies were picking up a huge amount of money from the concessionary fares schemes. The total amount of public money going in through concessionary fares and subsidies was roughly the same after 1987; deregulation had nothing to do with it.

The private sector has proved not to be good at responding to social need. A number of members have referred to the lack of services to hospitals, which is a major problem in many parts of my constituency. Travelling from the east neuk of Fife to major hospitals such as Ninewells in Dundee, the Victoria hospital in Kirkcaldy or the hospital in Dunfermline is difficult. Many rural services stop running at about 6 o'clock at night, so young people in rural villages trying to get access to facilities to stop them indulging in antisocial behaviour find that there are no buses to run them into Cupar to get to the swimming pool, for example. The same is true on many city housing estates.

Competition does not help deal with many of those problems and we need to ensure that we have a system that takes the best of the planning of local public services along with the advantages of competition for services. We do not have competition throughout most of Scotland. We have three bus companies with 84 per cent of the market. In most places in Scotland there is no competition; there is either a Stagecoach bus or a FirstBus bus. Here in Edinburgh, there is often just a Lothian Buses bus. That does not result in better services or innovation, which come through proper partnerships.

The use of quality partnerships and quality contracts as a backstop to allow us to say to the bus companies, "If you don't react we will bring in these things" is improving bus services in Scotland. Not having them, which the Conservatives would like, would result in there being no improvements at all.

Search Hansard contributions

Plenary, 01 Jun 2005

In the same item of business