Extra Barnett Consequentials Should Fund Our Buses

The extra funding from Rachel Reeves' announcement of £15bn for the English city regions should be spent wisely in Scotland by funding SPT to deliver bus franchising.

Agglomeration is the idea that city economies should grow with increasing size i.e. the largest city would be the most productive, followed by the second largest and so on. Unsurprisingly, to those familiar with public transport here, the UK is unique among large, developed countries in that its cities (excluding London) see no productivity benefit with increasing size.

Centre for Cities highlighted in their 2023 report that Scotland lags behind its European peers by £10bn with Glasgow accounting for £7.3bn of that deficit.

Much of this poor economic performance can be attributed to poor connectivity and peak-time road congestion which is worse in the UK than any other European country. These large UK cities are highly car-dependent due to an under-provision of public transport options.

Insufficient regulation of bus networks is a significant reason for poor public transport provision and ever-decreasing bus usage. Since bus de-regulation in 1986, annual ridership has fallen from 1.6bn to 0.9bn journeys outside of London, contrasting the increase from 1.2bn to 2.2bn in the same period in London, where buses remained regulated and under the control of Transport for London.

Lothian Buses, although deregulated, survived the process of privatisation that followed in the 1990s. As the UK’s largest remaining publicly-owned operator, it continues to buck the trend in Scotland seeing steady passenger numbers where everyone else is seeing decline.

They also return a dividend to their council shareholders, something that the buses in London don’t even manage.

A traffic jam at junction 17, not an uncommon sight these days. Credit: Richard Webb (Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this month, Rachel Reeves announced a package of funding, worth £15bn, for public transport infrastructure in England’s big city regions, outside London. This is a shrewd financial decision as every £1 invested in bus brings an economic return of £4.55, although not all of this funding will be used for bus services.

This figure includes: £1.5bn for South Yorkshire, £1.6bn for Liverpool city region and £2.5bn for Greater Manchester among others.

Based on a Freedom of Information (FOI) request in 2023 the increase in spending in transport by Westminster should result in Barnett consequentials of 91.7p per capita to Scotland. In other words, £15bn spent on transport in England should result in around £1.3bn extra to the Scottish government.

This funding is not ring-fenced and so the Scottish government is not required to spend this additional income on transport. However, as Scotland can already be considered “a backwards facing outlier on public control of franchised bus services in the UK” it would be unwise to consider spending this money elsewhere.

If we take the £1.3bn the Scottish Government should receive as a result of Reeves’ announcement and divide that per capita we could expect to see about £530 million for the Strathclyde region (being roughly 41% of the total population). The exact split of the spending may not reflect this figure but it’s a useful benchmark.

Centre for Cities estimate a full franchised network in the Strathclyde region to cost £100m for the initial five years; this additional funding provides a golden opportunity for SPT to push ahead with the most ambitious plan available for bus re-regulation in the Strathclyde region if the Scottish government will back them.

The Scottish government could commit £200m funding to a fully-fledged, overhauled, franchised bus network in Strathclyde and still have considerable change leftover.

Funding is not the only thing the government must do. Recent research published by Get Glasgow Moving highlights how far behind the English city regions we are with our progress on bus franchising. This funding could be an added boost for SPT to speed up the timelines but it must go hand-in-hand with simplified franchising legislation.

In the present system, it is likely to be 2030 before we see franchised buses on the streets of Glasgow; there’s another general election before then and nearly a full cycle of a Scottish parliament which doesn’t get elected until next May.

In fact, since franchised buses won’t hit the streets of Strathclyde until September 2030, there will be two men’s FIFA World Cups before anybody could sit aboard a Clyde bus! Kylian Mbappé will be in the twilight of his career and Craig Gordon will probably have retired.

The Scottish government should be excited about SPT’s current plans to use the powers in Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 and they should be platforming their efforts and making sure they deliver the most ambitious form of franchising.

Jim Fairlie MSP, the government minister for Agriculture and Connectivity, whose portfolio includes buses, described SPT's franchising investigations as a “trailblazer for future possibilities” during a parliamentary debate.

Strathclyde is Scotland in miniature, it has urban, rural and island communities, it has subway, suburban rail and ferries. This could provide the blueprint for re-regulation of buses in the whole of Scotland and could be a huge benefit to the Scottish economy, if done properly.

The government should be committed to simplifying the legislation to make it quick and easy for SPT to re-regulate the buses and be championing their efforts rather than putting their fingers in their ears.

The simplification requires the removal of an “independent” three-person panel from the franchising process. This panel is unelected and convened by the Traffic Commissioner for Scotland, also unelected, and has no democratic accountability.

They do have the final say over the franchising proposals and can reject the proposals as occurred in Tyne and Wear in 2015. After which, the panel was removed from the now-tested English legislation.

In response to a question in parliament on this issue from Claire Baker MSP, the Labour spokesperson on Transport, Jim Fairlie reaffirmed his support for the panel process as a means of providing checks and balances. Once more for the people in the back: there is already an independent audit built into the legislation before this panel. There are, in effect, two audit processes which will soak up public money and delay the delivery of the much-needed bus regulation.

Based on the Tyne and Wear example the delays this panel process add could be around a year and this panel must be reconvened every time there is an alteration to a franchise causing further delays. There is always the risk that they reject the proposals after lots of time and public money has been sunk into the endeavour.

The unanticipated injection of cash from the UK Treasury should not be wasted on pointless panels; it a boon for the Scottish government to use to end this failed neoliberal experiment once-and-for-all for Strathclyde. If this is done right, the rest of the country will follow.

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