Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
A thought I had on the Manchester thread.
Social housing, which is in many ways similar to the provision of bus services (which are still in large numbers used outside London by people who don't have an alternative), is in the UK mostly provided by not-for-profit organisations in the form of housing associations. There are big ones (e.g. Guinness Partnership) and small ones, but that is the main way it is provided, and nobody seems ever to have got into the market commercially on a large scale.
Similarly, community transport (i.e. assisted dial-a-ride type services) are provided in a fairly large part by organisations like HCT (Hackney Community Transport) and ECT (Ealing Community Transport).
Yet these organisations have rarely got involved in commercial bus operation, sometimes doing tenders but sometimes not successfully (e.g. Manchester Community Transport was a failure):
I can think of one other CIC (community interest company) bus operation, Big Lemon of Brighton, which was somewhere between a recent graduate having a laugh "playing buses" and one of those family owned small operators that tend to knock around Aylesbury and I'm sure other small Home Counties towns. And I'm sure where you have "Little-Piddling-in-the-middle-of-Nowhere village bus" this sort of thing sits in that sort of space too.
But why not large operations like Guinness Partnership (say) is to housing? With no need for a 10%-ish profit margin, why can't they do the job cheaper and better?
Social housing, which is in many ways similar to the provision of bus services (which are still in large numbers used outside London by people who don't have an alternative), is in the UK mostly provided by not-for-profit organisations in the form of housing associations. There are big ones (e.g. Guinness Partnership) and small ones, but that is the main way it is provided, and nobody seems ever to have got into the market commercially on a large scale.
Similarly, community transport (i.e. assisted dial-a-ride type services) are provided in a fairly large part by organisations like HCT (Hackney Community Transport) and ECT (Ealing Community Transport).
Yet these organisations have rarely got involved in commercial bus operation, sometimes doing tenders but sometimes not successfully (e.g. Manchester Community Transport was a failure):
It had one, Manchester Community Transport. It held many TfGM contracts, and though briefly taken under the umbrella of HCT Group (parent of CT Plus, Libertybus, its Guernsey equivalent, Bristol CT, CT Plus Yorkshire and Powells in South Yorkshire) was a commercial failure and shut down in April 2020. Plenty of info by googling it.
I can think of one other CIC (community interest company) bus operation, Big Lemon of Brighton, which was somewhere between a recent graduate having a laugh "playing buses" and one of those family owned small operators that tend to knock around Aylesbury and I'm sure other small Home Counties towns. And I'm sure where you have "Little-Piddling-in-the-middle-of-Nowhere village bus" this sort of thing sits in that sort of space too.
But why not large operations like Guinness Partnership (say) is to housing? With no need for a 10%-ish profit margin, why can't they do the job cheaper and better?