My proposal for the UK bus network to be nationalised

[6Gman]

local identity not universal . i used to live in the cotswolds where the local bus company was stroud valleys green in colour ,now its just stagecoach nationwide & another company called cotswold green used to be ebley coaches

When a large part of the bus industry was nationalised (late 1960s) local liveries vanished and 95% were either leaf green or nipple red.

 

[busman2000]

When a large part of the bus industry was nationalised (late 1960s) local liveries vanished and 95% were either leaf green or nipple red.

thats news to me i thought local liveries was used well into the mid 90s when privatisaion kicked in

 

[busman2000]

I'm rather let responding to this point, but it might be worth remembering that when the (England and Wales) buses were last nationalised in the National Bus Company, liveries were essentially uniform - your bus was green, or it was red. The explosion of different liveries only came about with privatisation.

i used to live in the cotswolds where the NBC was cheltenham & glos ,chelt red, glos blue & stroud green now the whole lot is stragecoach white

 

[camflyer]

Buses have to be a mixed ecology, I think. The surviving municipal services are pretty good on the whole - but the capital cost of establishing new municipal fleets would be huge. Where the municipal companies have disappeared, franchsing is probably the best way forward.

As for long distance services, where the free market works, leave it alone. Where subsidy is required (as on the Traws Cymru network, for instance) contracting private companies seems to work okay.

The buses used for rail replacement services also should stop in the private sector. Makes so sense a nationalised (or municipal) operator bearing the cost of keeping a large capacity of buses on standby when they can be hired as needed.

 

[RT4038]

Buses have to be a mixed ecology, I think. The surviving municipal services are pretty good on the whole - but the capital cost of establishing new municipal fleets would be huge. Where the municipal companies have disappeared, franchsing is probably the best way forward.

I guess a new municipal fleet would be leased rather than purchased outright? The big setting up expense would be the depot - the building could be leased, but converting it into a bus depot (particularly as any new start up would be likely fully electric) would be a big expense requiring a Central Government grant to most Local Authorities.

Then there would be the funding of the operational deficit, which most Local Authorities would have difficulty covering in the current financial situation of sizeable overspends in their statutory responsibilities of Adult & Child social care, Special Educational Needs and Home to School Transport.

I don't think we will see any substantial new municipal operations until the funding of Local Authorities is sorted out!

 

[Ghostbus]

If it's a choice between franchising for the cities and nobody caring what happens anywhere else because the money is always better spent by local authorities elsewhere (and they certainly can't afford to buy/set up their own bus companies), which feels like the current bus policy, then full nationalisation starts to look really attractive.....

* One wage/conditions structure
* One fare/ticketing system
* One app/tracker/feed, with a helpline for the elderly/disabled
* One marketing/livery strategy
* Clear financial position (operating budget and long term investment)
* Clear customer charter
* Buses properly represented in all major planning/strategy decisions at the DfT or in local authority processes
* Standardised vehicles
* Efficient depot network
* Massive purchasing power (fuel, tyres, parts, ancillaries)
* Adoption of best practice (operations, policy, training)
* Certainty for the UK bus manufacturing sector

Even in an ideal world where combined authorities and councils/unitary authorities are directly running all buses, you still end up with all downsides of a patchwork provision, even a postcode lottery. Some of the local authority boundaries in use now are truly bizarre, but because it costs too much to figure out who would be due what slice of the pie, they still form the basis of the ticketing strategy.

People generally don't live/work/travel according to administrative lines on a map, barring of course, the coastline of Great Britain. So why not make that the extent of the nationalised bus operator's domain? The idea that buses are local so they should be run locally, is a red herring.

Stagecoach is a perfect model - head office focused on group level matters, with local managers given very broad leeway to make local level decisions. It produced a uniform service from the Highlands to Kent via Manchester and wherever Red & White is.

Londoners/Mancunians need to get out more if they think TfL is the nuts in terms of buses. Imagine what Stagecoach could do with TfL/GM level funding but a free reign to design services so they best met a specified minimum national contract. A nationalised operator would of course have a matrix organisational structure, with horizontal reporting into local authorities and passenger groups, as well as vertically to HQ.

And without the need to present a corporate image to the stock market, it's a fair bet a nationalised GB wide entity would incorporate local identities into its national branding/livery strategy. And without the need to trumpet the fact buses are integrated with other modes in certain places but not others, we could be rid of things like that horrible yellow mess in Manchester, and return to something a little less....stupid. Maybe even get rid of boring London red.

The old NBC went for plain red or green because they weren't actually a national operator. They needed to make sure people knew which bus was run by them, the professionals, and which was run by some bloke in a council department, a PTE or the GLC, who may or may not also be looking after trams or bin lorries. True national scope removes that need.

One Chief Executive Officer responsible for the village bus service in Crimply Bottom and Misty Corner, the turn up and go services in Big Smoke, the Moors buses in...all the Moors, the inter-urban and commuter services in MetroTown, the post tram network in County Town and Tiny City and of course, Bussy McBusFace in Resort Corner. A bus is a bus. It's not a tram or a train. So why let people who care more about trams/trains run them?

It will probably never happen, chiefly because Mayors like playing with their toys too much. It's certainly not cost. You can probably buy every bus operator in GB outside of London/Manchester for pennies in the grand scheme of things. And it's not like that would come under day to day government spending, it would be in the investment column, paid off over decades, with the efficiency savings kicking in hard within just a few years. One uniform supplier, for example.

 

[BazingaTribe]

I think in reality you wouldn't nationalise but rather you would municipalise, creating more arms-length municipal operating companies along the lines of Blackpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Nottingham etc. Buses are generally a very local thing, so I can't see much sense in a National Bus Company and a one-size-fits-all approach.

Reading Buses does it very well and despite a few hiccups (particularly on how to keep on servicing the villages south of Junction 11 on the M4) they are better than how Stagecoach runs in Basingstoke. However, there's zero need for a bus service between the two towns because the train is so efficient, so I'm not honestly sure a parallel bus service would do it better than the trains do at the moment.

 

[GusB]

My first thoughts are that we should look at how buses are run in a given area first and then decide what needs to be done. I wasn't a big fan of privatisation in the first place but if something works well, let's not try to fix what isn't broken.

Buses have to be a mixed ecology, I think. The surviving municipal services are pretty good on the whole - but the capital cost of establishing new municipal fleets would be huge. Where the municipal companies have disappeared, franchsing is probably the best way forward.

I agree with the "mixed ecology" principle. I live in a rural area where there are many tendered services, many of which are actually operated by the council. There could be improvements, though; my local route is operated by the incumbent Stagecoach and has been since privatisation, but there are places nearby that I cannot access by bus because there is no multi-operator day ticket. I wouldn't object to paying an additional pound for such a ticket.

As for long distance services, where the free market works, leave it alone. Where subsidy is required (as on the Traws Cymru network, for instance) contracting private companies seems to work okay.

Again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

I guess a new municipal fleet would be leased rather than purchased outright? The big setting up expense would be the depot - the building could be leased, but converting it into a bus depot (particularly as any new start up would be likely fully electric) would be a big expense requiring a Central Government grant to most Local Authorities.

I'm glossing over the issue of fleets being leased as opposed to being owned outright, but I disagree about the depot expenses. Councils have depots for their bin lorries, gritters and other vehicles - there's nothing to stop them being used for buses, too.

I'd rather see my bus services being localised rather than nationalised. That doesn't mean that I'd like to see my local council take over every service; rather, I'd prefer that there was some "guiding mind" in place. That guiding mind should consist of the people who actually use the services, those who would like to use the services but don't for various reasons, and the people who provide the services.

 

[philg999]

Problem is everyone looks on nationalised companies with Rose Tinted Spectacles, I can remember them and they were neither cheap nor regular.
Whilst there is no Eutopia some kind of cap is the best way to try and increase usage.

in the months before privatisation we had a vast relatively frequent rural bus network virtually everywhere with good evening and Sunday services in and between most towns. Nowadays almost none of this exists. Yes city centre bus routes are much more frequent than they were in 1986, and obviously the vehicles are more modern, but everything else is worse outside densely populated areas. The bus companies extract as much £ from their city centre / trunk route customers as possible to pay thrit shareholders. Any routes which are marginal are run solely at the cost to the taxpayer. It is much more cost effective to the taxpayer and better for society in general to force companies that want to run buses to cross sunsidise the marginal routes. And if they don’t want to run a bus company in exchange for this lower profit margin then the government can do it instead.

 

[YorkRailFan]

If we continue with a Labour Government into another term, I wouldn't be surprised to see the likes of Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan moving operations back into the public sector as existing contracts expire.

It was one of Khan's pledges if he were to be re-elected as London Mayor last May.

Khan said he was “delighted to confirm today that if re-elected I will work with a Labour government to review bringing London’s bus routes back into public ownership”. He added: “This will help guarantee consistency and value for money for all London’s bus passengers in the long term.

“The Tories have made their position crystal clear, refusing to give London long-term funding certainty the capital needs and offering nothing but financial uncertainty and instability.”

Sadiq Khan to review bringing London buses into public ownership

Sadiq Khan has pledged to create a new London bus company which would look at bringing routes into public ownership.

www.cityam.com

 

[Richard Scott]

in the months before privatisation we had a vast relatively frequent rural bus network virtually everywhere with good evening and Sunday services in and between most towns. Nowadays almost none of this exists. Yes city centre bus routes are much more frequent than they were in 1986, and obviously the vehicles are more modern, but everything else is worse outside densely populated areas. The bus companies extract as much £ from their city centre / trunk route customers as possible to pay thrit shareholders. Any routes which are marginal are run solely at the cost to the taxpayer. It is much more cost effective to the taxpayer and better for society in general to force companies that want to run buses to cross sunsidise the marginal routes. And if they don’t want to run a bus company in exchange for this lower profit margin then the government can do it instead.

You were lucky, routes where I lived were very poor. Buses were infrequent and an expensive way to travel.

 

[Geordie driver]

There is more chance of me winning slimmer of the year than there is bus nationalisation.

 

[Eyersey468]

in the months before privatisation we had a vast relatively frequent rural bus network virtually everywhere with good evening and Sunday services in and between most towns. Nowadays almost none of this exists. Yes city centre bus routes are much more frequent than they were in 1986, and obviously the vehicles are more modern, but everything else is worse outside densely populated areas. The bus companies extract as much £ from their city centre / trunk route customers as possible to pay thrit shareholders. Any routes which are marginal are run solely at the cost to the taxpayer. It is much more cost effective to the taxpayer and better for society in general to force companies that want to run buses to cross sunsidise the marginal routes. And if they don’t want to run a bus company in exchange for this lower profit margin then the government can do it instead.

There is a limit to the amount of cross subsidy that can be done though

 

[BazingaTribe]

Yup. Reading Buses is still in local authority hands and for many years it struggled to keep a route out to the villages south of the M4. Private sector involvement actually kept the services going (albeit with a price war from Stagecoach) but after Reading Buses took them over in the 2010s, there was a drastic reduction in service and then an outright cancellation. They brought it back under an offshoot of a park and ride scheme, but there's still no Sunday service at all. They also keep changing the times of the buses.

Ultimately they too are affected by the need to keep things relatively profitable and economic to run. We're unfortunately not Luxembourg which can afford to completely subsidise public transport for everyone.

 

[Ghostbus]

in the months before privatisation we had a vast relatively frequent rural bus network virtually everywhere with good evening and Sunday services in and between most towns. Nowadays almost none of this exists. Yes city centre bus routes are much more frequent than they were in 1986, and obviously the vehicles are more modern, but everything else is worse outside densely populated areas. The bus companies extract as much £ from their city centre / trunk route customers as possible to pay thrit shareholders. Any routes which are marginal are run solely at the cost to the taxpayer. It is much more cost effective to the taxpayer and better for society in general to force companies that want to run buses to cross sunsidise the marginal routes. And if they don’t want to run a bus company in exchange for this lower profit margin then the government can do it instead.

Having grown up in a decent sized middle income maket town in the 80s, I would dispute this recollection as hyperbolic at best. By the 80s villages were already getting a raw deal in the face of rising car ownership. They were the first in line to be withdrawn completely, and were otherwise given the lowest frequencies with the crappiest buses.

The privatised operator of "country" services inherited a situation where life expired full sized buses were running almost if not actually empty to remote villages. They tried to save them by leveraging the cost savings of brand new small minimises and even this new fangled midibus concept. It didn't really work, the trend continued, but without that investment, some villages would have been cut off years earlier. Some arguably only have a service today because of it.

And it was as true then as it is now that a bus operator looking to maximise income, whether because they are a private company aiming for profit or a publicly owned concern under budget pressure, will run a while host of marginal routes or even loss leaders, to draw as many people as possible into their network and give maximum value for a day ticket.

It is only the worst performing routes that bring few or even no passengers, that are left to the council. The inability to recover after Covid has shown that a surprising amount of commercial routes were being run for marginal gains, and are now an unsustainable drain on the companies as a whole.

It was as true then as It is now that investment matters, and scale matters, far more than the nature of your market. In my town, the council owned "town" operator could only serve a small area and was only sustained by local taxpayers, whereas the country operator had a network covering almost half the county and was backed by central government. this is arguably why that by the 1980s it was the council operator that was running a tired looking operation hamstrung with a militant workforce which looked deeply unattractive to purchasers, whereas the "country" operator was snapped up quickly and was soon registering services to compete with the council, but run with brand new double decker buses.

The legislation recognised the problem and tailored a solution to fix it. The flaw was in assuming councils would properly fund socially necessary provision. That situation has only got worse. It is blindingly obvious that even if councils had access to every last penny made from bus fares, they would still need to provide not just a massive operational subsidy but a level of investment that would far exceed what they are making.

So without specific legislation preventing it, rural services and evening/Sunday Buses would continue to be the sacrificial lamb. Benefits of nationalisation like cross subsidy and less duplication only brings marginal efficiencies. It still matters far more what you can charge at the fare box and what you can get from the magic money tree, or indeed if you have a tram or subway network that you can use as a source of subsidy.

 

[mangad]

It was one of Khan's pledges if he were to be re-elected as London Mayor last May.

Sadiq Khan to review bringing London buses into public ownership

Sadiq Khan has pledged to create a new London bus company which would look at bringing routes into public ownership.

www.cityam.com

Well got to give something for the next Tory mayor to sell off for a short term cash boost.

(And so the cycle continues...)

 

[camflyer]

It was one of Khan's pledges if he were to be re-elected as London Mayor last May.

Sadiq Khan to review bringing London buses into public ownership

Sadiq Khan has pledged to create a new London bus company which would look at bringing routes into public ownership.

www.cityam.com

Sounds like it would be an expensive policy for very little practical benefit and tries to solve a problem which doesn't exist.

 

[Dai Corner]

Whenever this subject crops up I always find myself saying that the quality of service is very much to do with the money the politicians are prepared to put spend and relatively little to do with the ownership or governance.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

Whenever this subject crops up I always find myself saying that the quality of service is very much to do with the money the politicians are prepared to put spend and relatively little to do with the ownership or governance.

The clever trick (which I don't think anyone has definitively cracked) is how to stop that money leaking out. One of the points of privatisation was to try and remove the version of that leak which was low productivity: but now we find that private operation allows the leak as excess profits to go to the shareholders instead of creating a better service for the money.

 

[JonathanH]

And it's not like that would come under day to day government spending, it would be in the investment column, paid off over decades, with the efficiency savings kicking in hard within just a few years. One uniform supplier, for example.

Is it better to have dual sourcing to reduce costs or single suppliers?

 

[Man of Kent]

The clever trick (which I don't think anyone has definitively cracked) is how to stop that money leaking out. One of the points of privatisation was to try and remove the version of that leak which was low productivity: but now we find that private operation allows the leak as excess profits to go to the shareholders instead of creating a better service for the money.

Dividends are rewards for those who have lent capital to the company. If you did not pay them, then capital would need to be borrowed from the banks, generally at a higher overall cost than paying out dividends. Dividends are by no means guaranteed - it is quite common for shareholders not to receive anything: check out the accounts of First Group over the last decade, for example. Banks however are not noted for giving such financial holidays.

 

[BazingaTribe]

Dividends are rewards for those who have lent capital to the company. If you did not pay them, then capital would need to be borrowed from the banks, generally at a higher overall cost than paying out dividends. Dividends are by no means guaranteed - it is quite common for shareholders not to receive anything: check out the accounts of First Group over the last decade, for example. Banks however are not noted for giving such financial holidays.

Agreed. A lot of the value in shares is through trading them rather than actual dividends.

And of course shareholders are you and me and everyone else who hold pension plans. They're not some mythical creatures whose interests are wholly separate from the general public -- just as employees are also generally customers at the same time but often have different interests depending on what side of the argument they're on (you only have to look at the Disputes and Prosecutions sub-forum to understand that).

 

[greenline712]

@Ghostbus at 1049 .... exactly that!!!
As someone whose bus career spanned 1975-2020 .... deregulation worked fine when councils financed the loss-maker routes; often when consulting the bad bus barons along the way.
It all fell apart with the recession in the 2010s .....

 

[Mwanesh]

The clever trick (which I don't think anyone has definitively cracked) is how to stop that money leaking out. One of the points of privatisation was to try and remove the version of that leak which was low productivity: but now we find that private operation allows the leak as excess profits to go to the shareholders instead of creating a better service for the money.

Buy shares in bus companies and see if you make a lot of money.I hold shares in a few bus companies have never made a killing.The only benefit was they were bought at a discount.

 

[Eyersey468]

Buy shares in bus companies and see if you make a lot of money.I hold shares in a few bus companies have never made a killing.The only benefit was they were bought at a discount.

Can you honestly expect a national bus company to work in this era.With metropolitan mayors caring about their areas only .

Exactly, a lot of bus companies are making single figure percent margins, even the big groups

 

[Mwanesh]

Exactly, a lot of bus companies are making single figure percent margins, even the big groups.

I would have been a millionaire if it was that lucrative.

 

[Simon75]

This is YouGov in July 2024:

Support for nationalising utilities and public transport has grown significantly in last seven years | YouGov

Large majorities of Britons now want to see water, energy, railway and bus companies nationalised

yougov.co.uk

Agree with you on cost though.

But like with.most surveys, how many people were actually surveyed.
In general aswell, most of the public don't understand that even when you had even nationalised business need to make money. Didn't the NBC have in late 70s a cost cutting scheme?

 

[Cesarcollie]

The clever trick (which I don't think anyone has definitively cracked) is how to stop that money leaking out. One of the points of privatisation was to try and remove the version of that leak which was low productivity: but now we find that private operation allows the leak as excess profits to go to the shareholders instead of creating a better service for the money.

Excess profits? Have you looked at many bus company accounts lately? I commend you to the Companies House website……

 

[Eyersey468]

Excess profits? Have you looked at many bus company accounts lately? I commend you to the Companies House website……

A lot of people seem to think that bus companies operate to large margins

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

Lots of comments on this thread and I've enjoyed reading them.

The idea that nationalisation in a pure sense (i.e. purchasing all the assets and running them) isn't going to happen as @Goldfish62 states. There's no enough money as it is, and if you had the cash to indulge in such things, a Labour government would probably look at utilities companies before the bus. Instead, you're going to have a few metropolitan areas having the cash to buy some depots and introduce franchising (though the term is a misnomer - they are simply service providers).

As for @philg999's recollections of 1986, that was a moment in time. I was brought up in a rural shire county and there was a greater service provision in 1986 than now.

Moreover, it didn't change appreciably in 1986 as many services moved to tenders (having already had council support) AND arguably provision was better by 2000 because of various funding schemes; instead, it was post 2010 when the coalition government slashed the grant to local authorities so that services got chopped. I'd also point out that in 1986, my county had worse bus services than in 1981 (when various council cuts and MAP schemes were enacted), and they were worse than 1971 when government funding was cut back.

Perhaps a pertinent question is to ask if nationalisation is the panacea, then why did bus patronage collapse through the 1950s up to 1986, and despite large amounts of overt and hidden subsidy?