Welcome to our second panel. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves?

Good morning, everyone. My name is Paul Miner. I am head of policy and planning at the CPRE, the countryside charity known formerly as the Campaign to Protect Rural England. I am also a chartered town planner.

Good morning. I am Silviya Barrett, director of policy and campaigns at the charity Campaign for Better Transport.

Good morning. I am Stephen Frost, head of transport policy at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Good morning. I am Professor Karen Lucas, director of the Manchester Urban Institute and professor of geography at the University of Manchester.

To each of you, what does transport-related social exclusion mean in practice, and how widespread do you think it is?

In terms of rural bus services, we see social exclusion happening on a number of fronts, in particular the effects on older people being able to access services, and younger people being able to stay connected and to reach schools and colleges. Looking into it more widely, there are clear issues of class, gender and disability. The gender issue was put very powerfully in a recent paper by Unison, which the Committee is aware of, showing that being unable to access rural bus services particularly impacts women, who are often likely to have childcare or other caring responsibilities and will also be in lower-paid or more precarious work. Work done for Transport for the North found that there were particular effects on people with disabilities from reduced access to bus services. Similarly, there are issues of class. People on lower incomes are often unable to afford to buy or run a car and in those cases will be particularly reliant on public transport.

Thank you. Silviya?

There are many statistics that I have prepared to demonstrate the value of buses and the impacts that bus cuts have on people, but I would like to start by relating some of the statements I have read from the thousands of supporters of our charity who write to us every day with their experiences. These are heartbreaking stories. I have read about whole villages being cut off, leaving people without any connectivity at all; people missing hospital appointments; disabled people, or less able-bodied people, who need to wait for a long time for a bus, not knowing when the next bus will turn up, even for just a few stops on a short journey; people making round trips to work that take four to five times longer by bus than if they were made by car; children missing out on out-of-school opportunities, particularly in holidays, because of infrequent services; and people being priced out of using buses, even if they want to, because of the increase in the fare cap. That has affected many people. Going back to the statistics in the research we have done, in 2021 we did a report on left-behind neighbourhoods. These are the 10% most deprived communities, with poor community infrastructure. The top-line finding was that 84% of those left-behind neighbourhoods have poorer transport connectivity than the national average. That lack of transport connectivity exacerbates existing disadvantages. Going back to the quotes, people used words like “outrageous” and “tragic” about the lack of connectivity that they experience, so that really demonstrates to me that buses are an essential public service. They need to be treated as such and they need to be funded as such. I hope we will come back to the minimum level service guarantee later in the session.

Stephen.

I cannot add a huge amount to that. In terms of our understanding of transport-related social exclusion, it is the barriers that people face in accessing the opportunities to get on in life, to basic services, to community life and friends and family and caring responsibilities. It is also the life challenges that are created by the cost of transport, the time spent travelling, and the stress and anxiety that can arise from trying to travel long distances and fit in everything that you are meant to do in our modern lives, particularly if you have caring responsibilities on the top of jobs and other parts of that. As has been alluded to, that sits within a wider context of social, economic and environmental inequality that touches on issues of income and poverty, gender, as we have heard already, sexuality, ethnicity and disability. Focusing on the issue of affordability of transport and the barriers that creates, the work that the Social Market Foundation has done found that the cost of transport was bringing 5 million people in Britain below the poverty line, and that is adding to an existing 8 million people who are already below that poverty line. You can see the role that travel can play in creating new barriers in people’s lives through those kinds of statistics.

I have been studying transport-related social exclusion since the last Labour Government and the social exclusion unit, and I don’t see any reason to change the definition that they came up with; you are in social exclusion from a transport-related cause if you cannot easily, reliably and affordably access transport resources in order to carry out your key life-enhancing opportunities—failure to be able to fully participate as a result of lack of transportation. There is definitely a joint issue around social deprivation and poor public transport. Those two things are absolutely linked. Transport for the North, which we heard about earlier and in the last panel, have been doing a lot of analysis to try to identify the areas and the populations that are affected in the worst places. They carried out the first analysis in 2019, and found that 19 million people were at very high risk of transport-related social exclusion. It is not a small issue. They have done that analysis again. They haven’t published their report, but I have been allowed to release the figures, and it has gone up to 22 million people who live in areas that are at very high risk of transport-related social exclusion. I have to say that at least half of those people will be relying on cars even though they cannot afford them, and therefore they have car-related economic stress. There will probably be only one car in the household, and that means that not everybody in the household will have access to the car at any time. Ten per cent. of those low-income car owners will be suffering from economic stress in a way that means that they cannot afford food, they cannot afford shoes for their children, and they cannot afford, basically, to pay their electricity bills. We know that there is a huge cost of living crisis. The worst affected people are welfare claimants, but they may not be travelling so regularly. Badly affected are low-paid workers, especially shift workers and non-paid carers, because they have a lot of travel responsibilities for escorting their children and other people around; young people not in employment, education and training who see the cost of transport as a barrier to them taking up any of those activities; and particularly low-income households with children. It is not only a rural phenomenon. I am sorry to go on about this but it is my area. I probably won’t talk much more. The Transport for the North mapping is interactive and you can go online and look at very small areas, which are output areas now for the latest one; before, it was lower super output areas. You can look at it at the level of about 100 households, and you can see that it is spread across the whole of England, and we probably think Wales and Scotland as well, although that analysis has not been done, where it is perhaps even worse. It is a rural issue, but there are much larger proportions of people in small urban conurbations and on the periphery of big cities. We talk about Greater Manchester being one of the more capacitated cities, but there are plenty of incidents of transport-related social exclusion in Wigan, Rochdale and Oldham. You can see it all around the outskirts, maybe less so in Salford, which is a bit more central and has the metro going there. Most of those areas will be bus-dependent. They may have one or two train stations, with very poor connectivity between buses and rail. We have had that already, the integrated stuff. As our colleagues here have said, it is the availability issue—not having a car available and then having poor public transport. It is an accessibility connectivity issue inasmuch as the transport does not connect where people want to go when they want to go there and may be irregular at different times of day. It is an affordability issue, even with the bus fare caps, especially for those young people and so on who do not really even have an income. It is a sort of acceptability issue, and that may be more what we see with older people—issues of safety, comfort, length of journey and the journey experience. It is those four As. It is easy to remember them. I will shut up there.

You have answered a few of our questions coming up.

The Campaign for Better Transport and the CPRE published a report in 2020 about transport deserts. It did not cover the south-east of England, but the concept is instantly recognisable in my patch of Kent’s countryside. If our experience is anything like that of others, the challenge compounds in rural areas where transport deserts often coincide with education deserts, which I have in Cranbrook, and healthcare deserts. I could go on. How do these areas develop, and what do you hear about how they affect daily life?

We based the work that we did on transport deserts, which you mentioned, initially around small towns of settlements between 5,000 and 30,000. We define a transport desert as existing where the choices and opportunities available to a community are limited by a lack of public transport. We looked at three dimensions: whether there was a regular bus service, whether there was a regular train service and an open station, and whether there was access to other motor transport such as community-led transport or ferries. As you say, we did not look at the south-east. We mainly concentrated on the south-west and the north-east. We found that 56% of small towns were in a transport desert, and two thirds, 66%, had no train station, so there is a major issue. I was quite interested to hear what the earlier panel said about a mixed picture more recently. One area, the Chew Valley in north Somerset, had no bus service for pretty much a whole year. The metro Mayor, Dan Norris, took an initiative to get some bus service improvement funding for that area, which now gives it about six buses a day or something like that, but you still need to change buses at least once to get to the major towns, and the level of service is still well below what was being provided before, when the bus services were nationalised in Somerset.

The places that were specifically poorly connected in the north-east included Northumberland and County Durham; and Dorset and Devon in the south-west. We subsequently did the left-behind neighbourhoods analysis, which essentially identified those areas again in those regions, and we covered the rest of England as well. That provides a much more detailed picture. The areas that we found in that analysis were clustered in coastal areas like Tendring in Essex, former industrial towns in County Durham in the north-east, and small towns where transport deserts were focused as well. Those areas are more reliant on buses even though they have seen bigger declines in buses over time. Because of low levels of income, people are more reliant on buses, and they still use buses more despite service cuts. It makes connections worse to hospitals and to employment sites; 34% of those left-behind areas have longer travel times by public transport to the nearest hospital. It takes on average twice as long. In terms of employment, people have lower levels of car ownership in those areas, so if the buses are cut, they are further excluded from those opportunities.

This is a small piece in terms of how things develop over time. It is the role of Government policy and decision making around investment priorities over the last 10 years and more, which followed, “Where do we predict that we are going to need more capacity?” It is in cars, it is in road expansion, and it is making places more attractive to reach by car. As people then buy cars because those places become more attractive, it undermines the viability of public transport, which is then removed from villages and towns, and people increasingly move out of those villages and towns, as do services and other things, towards more urban areas. We have seen more recently a more welcome shift towards, “We don’t really want that. We want to resolve the issues. We want more vision-led planning.” That is the emphasis behind integrated national transport strategies. It is recognising that we do not want to follow the same path any more. We cannot get by just on predict and provide, and we need to have a clear sense of where we are going and how to reverse that tide.

The point was made earlier about the role of land use planning. What I am seeing in the rural area where I live are huge amounts of housing development. Some of it is for socially affordable housing and the bus services are absolutely negligible, if there at all. If you want to live in that area, you have to have a car—if not one, many. Why are we building houses in places for people who cannot afford cars and in places where there are no buses or train services? We have to put the two together.

That is a very good point.

You have already all implied that there is a correlation between transport, poverty and economic inequality. If you have any other comments on that, I would welcome them. I want to ask you specifically about your views on a subset of economic inequality, which is those who are jobseekers. How does a lack of reliable or even existent bus services affect jobseekers in particular?

There was an excellent study done a few years ago by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with Sheffield Hallam University looking at the experience of jobseekers. The headline from that was that public transport was a barrier to accessing work; it was not enabling them to find work, and some of that is because it did not take them where they needed to go for the kinds of jobs they were qualified to do or wanted to do or that were well paid. It simply was not reliable enough for them to get to interviews and get to those places. It is a barrier for those who are unemployed. If you are in a low-paid job and you are looking for further work, where can you get to? Public transport provides a barrier to that as well.

We did a study in 2019—we are talking about pre-covid bus service levels—and 57% of jobseekers were living in areas where they could not get to a centre of employment where there would be job opportunities within 45 minutes. Over half could not get one way, so 90 minutes either way. The Department for Work and Pensions standard for being able to access a job and therefore be eligible to come off benefit is a 90-minute journey, which is why we set it at that level. We realised that that obviously is going to be huge. It is not just availability but the cost as well. If you are job seeking, you need the money to be able to get there. To take up a new job, you basically have to have the money up front. There used to be schemes whereby there were benefits; there were free bus tickets, but a lot of local authorities do not provide that any more, so you have to find that money from somewhere. If you are already in a low-paid household, it is difficult for a young person to find that money.

Would you go as far as to say that investing in public transport could reduce the welfare bill?

Absolutely. To add a point on unemployment, from our research on left-behind neighbourhoods we found that 24% of households in those areas were out of work and had no access to a car, and that was double the national average. It just exacerbates the lack of opportunity. The same goes for jobcentres. We had a case of a person who had to walk a several-mile round trip to the nearest town to access a jobcentre just to sign on because the bus service was cut. There is an impact on shift workers as well. I am not sure if there is a separate question on that. When it comes to industrial estates and people working shifts, it is a 24/7 operation. It is difficult to provide an adequate bus service if that is in a rural area, and make commercial sense. There are some large companies like Amazon that can subsidise shuttle buses to their depots, but that is very rare. We need to think about how we address the needs of jobseekers and companies to improve economic prospects in those areas. If we can open up those opportunities, surely there will be a saving for the welfare bill in that respect.

You have already touched on some of what I am going to ask you, so feel free to expand on what you have already said. What do you feel are the main factors discouraging people from using bus services? Cost presumably is a factor, as is reliability and route coverage. Do you think there are other significant challenges separate from those?

I will read you a quote. “In the morning, it’s like an interesting one, because I used to get the bus at 10 past 8, which is fine, but it’s turned into a school service. So I can’t get that bus at 10 past 8 now. Not that I don’t want to, it’s just that they won’t stop for you. So my husband has to bring me to work early in the car because I’ve got a little one. So he has to bring me to work at 7 o’clock.” She lost an hour with her kid in the morning. She is now car-dependent because that one bus service has been changed and she has lost that. That is in the outskirts of Wigan in a place called Hindley, which is not a rural area. You can read loads of these things. “Waiting for 45 minutes.” “I can go there but I can’t get back, so I’m frightened to take the bus out.” For older people, it is the reliability of the bus, waiting at a bus stop and all sorts of issues around safety. The journey length came up a lot. People say, “Okay, I live in this area where it’s an hour and a half for me to take the bus, not because the journey is so long but because the bus stops all the time in the urban area, and then by the time I get to my peripheral area—” It is that hub-and-spoke-type design of bus services, which is largely around strategic corridors, and largely what happens when trying to run profitable services rather than socially necessary ones. I would say all buses are socially necessary when it comes down to it.

Thank you. You have the next question Olly, or has that been covered?

Yes, you have largely covered it.

Fine. We’ll move on.

Some students in rural areas—some of the previous panellists touched on this—face long bus commutes to access education. I have some secondary school students who take an hour to get to their school, particularly in the morning when there is traffic, as you just mentioned. What effects does that have?

We have lots of quotes from people and evidence that having poor bus connectivity can really disadvantage young people, especially at an age when they want to be more independent but they have to be reliant on their parents to take them either to school or to social activities. It means that they might not be able to access higher education as a result. It can diminish people’s life opportunities. There are examples of bus services that are reduced during school holidays. There might be a skeleton bus service during term-time that becomes virtually non-existent during school holidays, which means that young people are either stuck at home or reliant on parents. They miss out on social opportunities as well as life opportunities. It can be demoralising. Young people then aspire to be able to drive and afford a car for themselves, and as a result we are losing a whole generation of potential future bus users exactly at a time when we are trying to encourage more people to use buses.

There is really good research done by Sustrans and the University of the West of England on the experience of young people of the transport system which points to much lower trip rates by 16 to 24-year-olds compared with the working age population of 24 to 64. Some of that relates to the fact that when they are travelling, particularly in rural areas, they run out of time to do any more trips. They do not have access from those educational opportunities to cultural opportunities and social opportunities and other things, so it is a real restriction on their independent mobility exactly at the moment when they are coming into young adulthood and looking for what they are going to be. There is a real cost to society and a long-term cost to the economy from that restriction.

It is not just young people; it is children as well. Children who have arduous bus journeys quite often end up not turning up to school on time. They will be tired in the classroom. They will not have had time to have breakfast. Breakfast clubs are overwhelmingly populated by people who have to drop their kids off early because they are using public transport. Non-affordability of the bus fares means that kids do not turn up on a Friday, because the week’s money has been spent and there is no more money for bus fares. It is very interesting.

There is one question that a colleague wanted to raise. I don’t know if any of you know about post-16 SEN transport. There is a gap in the law where it is not a requirement—it is effectively discretionary—and there is a mixed picture. Could any of you address that issue if you are aware of it?

It is basically that they just do not qualify all the way through for free transport. In London, you don’t think about it. All young people have free transport until the age of 25 as long as they are in education or apprenticeships, but it is not like that for the rest of the country. There is a loophole whereby if you are not in education, training or some sort of an apprenticeship scheme—nowadays, it is in school until 18—they basically do not qualify for that.

For young people with special educational needs, apparently for a lot of areas that cuts off at 16.

It is 16, yes, because that is the statutory requirement for local authority provision. They don’t go to school any more, so they don’t get the fare allowance any more, which is hugely awkward for them at a transitional period when they may be trying to go through independence and some supported living, and at that point they lose out. It is after-school activities as well; because they catch the school bus, and there is nothing after that, they cannot participate in after-school activities.

If I can make a very quick point about young people’s concessions in general, there are vast discrepancies between different parts of the country, which again disadvantages people who are not entitled in those areas. There is a big case to be made about standardising young people’s concessions. I know that is something the Department is looking at as a follow-up to the cap.

That is useful.

Turning to the issue of growth, something this Government are particularly interested in, do you think that there is a link between poor bus connectivity and broader economic challenges such as low productivity or growth? To flip it on its head, is there a link between good bus connectivity and higher levels of growth?

You can definitely make that argument. These things are always complicated when you look at cause and effect on local economies and declines in connectivity. It is a simple point to say that better-connected labour markets and better-connected local economies are going to be good for regional prosperity. Having seen the lack of investment made in transport connectivity, particularly around public transport in the north of England, you can see the discrepancy that exists between there and London and the south-east. When colleagues of mine looked at the gross value added, GVA, of the bus sector, you can track a decline from 2011 to 2023. The total decline is about £8.9 billion removed from the economy over that period. We calculate that some of it moved to other modes. Some of the people who would have been spending their money because they were coming in by bus to different areas may have moved to car. The total shift removed from GVA on buses is about £2 billion because of that. That would make a big difference in many communities across the country. Any next step, such as an integrated national transport strategy and thinking about how we allocate funding to buses in the future, could look at including an indicator around potential productivity in those places and how it aligns with the local growth plans that will be coming through in all those areas.

There is much evidence on the economic benefit of buses, particularly by CPT. Two quick points that I would like to make are about value for money and investment in public transport, specifically buses, producing much higher returns on investment compared with road investment. For buses, it is a return of £4.55 for every £1 spent, whereas for road investment it can be as low as £1.10 or even a negative value for money if we take the full externalities of road schemes. It is a point for prioritising investment in public transport over expanding road capacity and generating additional congestion. Public transport reduces congestion and increases productivity. If you are stuck in traffic, obviously you are creating the cost of congestion and reducing productivity for the economy overall.

Controlling for all other issues and externalities around land uses and likelihoods of employment and so forth, if you live in an area that is well served by public transport, there is 10% less likelihood that you will be unemployed. There are factors around where people live, where they choose to live, self-selection and all those things, but, nevertheless, all things being equal, you are 10% more likely to be employed in an area with good public transport services. It is not the whole picture, is it? That is the point.

Another quick point is that local buses help to spread growth. Rather than attracting all investment to the centre of cities, they support local economies in the suburbs and in towns, where people can make shorter local journeys and spend in their local economy instead.

There is very good evidence of there being an economic impact on investment in buses. There is overwhelming evidence of their role in providing inclusive growth opportunities and access to employment for more people.

You have been making the case for subsidised buses throughout the evidence you have been giving. Is there a price that you would put on that? What do you think is a reasonable per passenger journey subsidy? These journeys are being paid for by the taxpayer when it comes down to it. Would you want to put a figure on it at all, or a range?

Many of these journeys are delivering benefits that affect that as well, for people who haven’t got into their car and the wider benefits that we have talked about from that. My colleagues are currently working on a report that will put a figure on the scale of investment that may be required in buses over the next few years—a five-year timeframe—something that colleagues from earlier would welcome. I am not going to pre-empt them with that working out. The estimates vary greatly on the scale of investment required to get buses back to pre-covid levels or up to the level where they are carrying the number of passengers that would meet our environmental commitments. You could go from anything from double existing subsidies through to seven times existing subsidies, depending on where you look.

There is a difference, isn’t there, between subsidising in a more remote area and a more connected area? The price will be a great deal different because, fundamentally, it is more spread out and the bus has to drive along further. Therefore, I was wondering if you thought there was a specific number that should go across all different passengers.

In all your considerations about buses, there are just so many different time situations, types of buses, and types of service for different people. When you are trying to talk about subsidising young people to travel on buses, it is a completely different story from when you are talking about old-age pensioners not using their concessionary fare passes to travel on buses. The rural situation is completely different from the urban situation and the urban peripheral situation, where bus services are quite twilight and not commercially viable. You cannot think of a one-solution-fits-all type for how much you get. There is an issue of the social value of that subsidy and therefore not giving a subsidy that is above its social value. There has been a lot of work done on the social value of bus services in different contexts by economists who know these things. Therefore, that is a way that you would find to set the social value. It will be different in rural areas versus urban areas, for sure.

We did some further research following the transport deserts work that advocated an “Every village every hour” approach to rural bus networks, and we put a figure on that, which we can write to the Committee about if it will be helpful. Even if you are not necessarily able to implement or invest in an “Every village every hour” network, you can look at a number of changes to make the network in rural areas more consistent in terms of the benefits it provides and how easy it is to navigate. With the rail network, you could probably criticise Great Western Railway for higher fares in recent years, but with their rural rail services they have set much more consistent timetabling through clock-face timetabling for services for places like Exeter to Barnstaple, which has massively increased train usage on that line because it is a much more reliable and consistent timetable. More recently, they have connected buses to further-out towns like Bideford and Ilfracombe to that, again, on the same clock-face principle, and that seems to have worked well in boosting usage. Similarly, you should have a one-ticket approach so that it is much easier for people to use and to understand how much they are going to pay. Regardless of what happens to the £3 pound fare cap in the future, there is still a lot that can be learnt from the London example of having a single contactless approach or a single Oyster card. West of England and Wiltshire have a one bus ticket option, but the Somerset County Council area has never had that. That shows very simple changes that could be made that could benefit a lot of rural areas just by having best practice followed more consistently.

To add to your original question, Alex, yes, there needs to be a reasonable level of subsidy cut-off, and that would obviously depend on the area. It would not make sense for a bus journey per passenger to cost as much as a taxi fare, which would obviously not be a very good use of public funding. There needs to be a more sophisticated set of metrics created to determine allocations for funding and to determine what are, in effect, socially necessary services and a reasonable level of service. Things to take into account include population density—obviously different levels between urban, suburban and rural settings; car ownership levels, which would reflect the potential demand for bus services in that area; targeting under-served demographics in specific areas; income and employment levels; planned development and opening access to development and new growth areas; level of revenue, as we mentioned; and the gaps in connectivity to specific destinations. All those things are different metrics that need to be used when you define a minimum level of service guarantee, which is something that we have been the main proponents of. It is not a simple answer of frequency or number of bus stops. It is about connecting to destinations from a location. I know that the Department for Transport and the Treasury might be nervous about setting in legislation a service guarantee because of the revenue requirements that will be needed for that. At Campaign for Better Transport, we don’t think it is fair that there should be a postcode lottery for what bus services people have access to. It is a social justice issue. It is about making sure that everyone has access to at least a minimum level of service that is reasonable to that location. It is about plugging the gaps in places with inadequate provision. Such a measure would be very popular as well. We surveyed the general public, and 87% of people agree that every community needs to have at least a minimum level of service. How can it work? It is about effectively making socially and economically necessary services defined by guidance from the Department for Transport, setting the metrics that I outlined, and then mapping and determining a reasonable level at local level, as people on the previous panel commented. That would determine the level of need. The Government have moved to needs-based funding allocations. That can be your main “need” metric to target the investment of existing funding to places most in need.

In terms of young people’s travel specifically?

People do not like young people on buses; they are rowdy and noisy. Drivers go past them. There are a lot of issues around driver training and driver behaviour. It was interesting what was coming out about the skillsets that were there. There are a lot of educational issues that could go on around young people contributing to the bus industry as well as using it. Maybe then they would value it more. We get a lot of good stuff from young people in youth parliaments who are coming in and telling us how to improve the services. A lot of the young people’s institutes are coming in and talking about their needs for buses. Basically, it is all this thing about out-of-hours services. It is about where people want to go and understanding better the links between a route and a destination. It seems crazy, but buses run where they do not seem to be connected to the hospital or the town centre. They stop too early for young people. Young people would like to see things happening. Of course, a lot of young people are employed, so there are the same sorts of issues. They may be in low-paid employment. The cost thing definitely comes up. That is the real big barrier. Young people aspire to own a car because it gives them a sense of freedom and a sense of independence. They may be still at home. It may be that the first thing they do is want a car. You can improve the buses until you are blue in the face, but if you don’t do anything to look at car restrictions and car operations and where cars are applicable and where they are not, you really will be chasing your own tail. As they said before, it is a whole package deal. Buses on their own are a blunt instrument. It has to be thought of in terms of multimodal connectivity. It is like the flat fare. Are we going to talk about the fare at all? That flat fare is not affordable for lots of people.

Yes. Don’t worry, it’s coming.

If it is a flat fare per journey, which it is in lots of places, basically, every bus you get on you pay. You get the bus and then the train, and it is 10 quid to get into Manchester from where I live. It is not cheap; £3 is not an affordable amount for a lot of people—there and back is £6. There are all of those things. We have let the industry atrophy completely, so the investment that is going to be needed is huge. We have to bite that bullet and accept it. Even if we come in with these new franchises and so forth, it will be expensive. That needs to be costed. Like Silviya says, what is the social value? Where should we do that investment? We can’t do everything. You won’t be able to afford to do everything. It will be billions and billions.

Do you have anything to add, Stephen?

The only thing I would add, because that was a very comprehensive answer, is the role of the voice of young people in decision making both at national level and at local level. The integrated national transport strategy promises to be very people-focused. Are we giving an appropriate space to young people and children in shaping what they want transport to look like today and in the future as part of that? That is a practical consideration. It aligns with addressing barriers on costs and access, and integration with other modes.

Giving the people who really value the buses a voice is also something that is missing. You hear a lot of voices of people who don’t use the buses and think something of them rather than the people who absolutely rely on them.

Thank you, that is really helpful.

Continuing on social value, declining bus services can really impact on access to health services, particularly for those who are disabled and on low incomes. How do you think that we can address that?

The health services?

Access to health services by buses.

Lack of bus services can make it harder for people to attend medical appointments, particularly people with disabilities or those on low incomes. How transport challenges affect health outcomes is important to look at as a system. Public transport is fundamental to enabling access to healthcare services, especially given the number of missed appointments that there are a year. There are 7.8 million appointments missed every year. Approximately 10% of those are estimated to be due to travel requirements. There is research showing that about two thirds of people cannot reach their nearest hospital by public transport within 30 minutes. It is quite a significant amount. If you do not have a car, it is very difficult for people. Again, our research showed that on average people must travel 2 kilometres further to their nearest A&E if they live in a left-behind neighbourhood, as I explained before, in areas that are already deprived. Improving public transport and walking and cycling around hospitals can improve people’s health. It can be a positive contributor in addition to improving access to health services and improving health in that way. Physical activity and reduced air pollution through greater use of public transport and active travel all impact on people’s health and can create savings for the NHS if we invest in public transport. Issues such as obesity and diabetes have huge costs to the NHS and can be tackled through better investment in active travel and public transport. There are statistics that if everyone switched two car journeys to bus a month it would result in £14.9 billion-worth of cumulative health benefits. It is a huge amount. We need to include those wider benefits in the assessment of our investment in public transport. One more point is that we need better co-ordination between local transport services. NHS trusts are responsible for non-emergency patient transport. They have separate budgets. They are frequently commissioned without co-ordination with other local transport providers such as bus operators, community transport or tendered local authority services. If we were to work together by pooling budgets, it would create efficiencies and budget savings. As well as unlocking travel for patients, we also benefit visitors and the wider community if we use those funds better.

Thank you. That is really helpful. What role do you think poor bus connectivity plays in the context of mental health?

Public transport has many proven benefits for mental health. Poor transport can contribute to social isolation and loneliness. If people are cut off from seeing their friends and family or from leisure activities, it contributes to the feeling of isolation. There are statistics that show that about 18% of adults feel lonely most of the time. It is a huge problem. If you think about a bus, you get on, you chat to the driver, you chat to your fellow passengers. It opens up a community connection for people. There are huge benefits.

It is a two-edged sword; there is a land use issue as well. Hospitals chose to locate on the outskirts of cities that are not easy to serve by bus. There is no requirement that buses serve hospitals at all. Think about what First Bus said about the profitability issue and if it is not a profitable route. It might be essential for people who want to get there. Hospital appointments are at all different times of the day and night. You have shift workers and nurses. Basically, the services that are going back and forth to hospitals are not regular enough, and maybe not even there at all. You have health centres and clinics that are not even connected to the bus services. There has been a drive from the health perspective. It is the same as happened with colleges. The land uses have dispersed, and it is much more difficult to develop a reasonably dense network at an affordable level. The bus operators have done the best that they can with changing land uses, but while there is no statutory requirement to guarantee that people have a bus service to go to A, B, C and D, you obviously have a problem. In 2019, 66% of older people over the age of 65 could not get to a hospital within 35 minutes by public transport. Thirty-five minutes is a reasonably long journey. They have the free bus pass, but they can’t use the bus. There are all sorts of issues around that. That is why I am saying it is a blunt instrument. You cannot hope for the buses to do everything. You have to have a co-ordinated approach with other things. Planning and land use are connected with service provision.

You have talked about a couple of different groups, but are there specific demographics that you would say are disproportionately affected by poor bus connectivity?

Anything that has not been already said.

I covered young people and older people. Women are the only one to point out. We have been working with Unison on a report on social carers, particularly home carers who deliver in-home care to patients. They need to travel long distances between different points across the day, and that has made them heavily reliant on personal vehicles because buses are frequently inadequate and cannot cover the whole range of journeys that they need to make. Care workers are undervalued, overworked and low-paid. They can barely afford to keep a personal private vehicle. That is why it is important to make sure that we consider the needs of people on low incomes and the people they care for. They provide a vital service, but they are disadvantaged by poor bus services.

Does anyone else want to comment on what needs to change, looking at the gaps in policy, to be able to make sure that we are not disproportionately impacting women when it comes to cuts to bus services?

We need to look at concessionary fares across the board. The concessionary fare bill is huge. There are people who are not using their bus passes. Obviously, they are not costing us anything, but nevertheless it is saying that the older population are poor and in need of subsidy. They are in certain circumstances, but not always. Younger people who have no money or people on very low wages are not eligible for any concessionary fares or half-price fares. Even some children under 16 do not get half-price fares going to school. We have to look at the whole fare structure and think about where we want to spend those millions of pounds of subsidy every year, and in terms of propping up the fare costs, because there are definitely groups of people travelling on buses for free who don’t need to—without a doubt; elderly, still in work over-60s. They are still working on big incomes and they have a free bus pass and they use it. We have to think about what those subsidies are for. Are they for allowing people who are poor to travel, or are they something else, which is about shifting people out of their cars? They are not the same two things. Subsidising the poor is not the same as trying to get people out of their cars on to buses. It is not the same policy.

Was that a question specifically about women and how to improve services for them? There are two sides to that. There was lots covered there. One was around what journeys we are designing bus services to support. Are they the standard A to B commuter trips that often men are making because of the disproportionate burden of care on women in society, or are they local trips that support trip chaining and getting between different destinations in more local areas? The other important aspect that this Government are focusing on is the social safety side. Do you feel safe from your doorstep to your destination and back using active travel and public transport? What role can the bus play in making people feel safer on the bus and, as we see piloted around the country, what is the bus driver’s role in stopping to help women they see in distress on the street? There is that side of things as well. There is a real public service aspect that is important to consider.

In addition to those points, in rural areas there are often particular challenges about the state of rural roads. Many rural roads have very high speed limits, and it can often feel incredibly unsafe to wait for a bus on a typical A or B road in a deep rural area.

Or to cycle as an alternative.

Absolutely.

On the question of policy levers, we have already covered fares and concessions. I would add a simpler fare structure to that. That was one of the benefits of the fare cap; you had no question about different prices for different lengths of trip. The two areas that I would like to cover are funding allocations and statutory requirements on local authorities. Previously, funding allocations tended to be competitive, which created winners and losers among local authorities. We heard examples in the previous session. Analysis that we have conducted shows that, prior to the most recent round of BSIP funding, there were 10 councils that received over £50 per head in bus funding and 14 councils that received less than £6 per head—huge variations. Authorities that received good levels of funding have managed to deliver transformations that boosted bus usage. There are many examples, I am sure, in the submissions. Authorities that did not have adequate funding have managed to do very little, and that has been a big issue. There has been little transparency in terms of the factors and the formulas used for the allocations, but the movement to a needs-based allocation has been positive. If I understand correctly, the factors used in the allocations formula, such as existing vehicle mileage and levels of deprivation and population, need to be more transparent and more sophisticated, referring to the factors that I related earlier. In terms of requirements on local authorities for socially necessary services, in the national bus strategy there was a promise of new guidance that would define those services, which has not come. There was mention of possibly introducing a statutory requirement for councils to deliver that if the BSIP funding was not managing to deliver socially necessary services. Again, there is a gap in that. The bus services Bill that was introduced in December only proposes requiring local authorities to identify existing services that are socially necessary, and safeguarding those if there is a threat to their cut, but that is not enough. There also needs to be a requirement to map the gaps in provision. Which are the socially and economically necessary services that are not currently there? What are the existing gaps in provision? Again, that goes back to my argument for defining the socially necessary level, a minimum level of service, and then delivering that through more sophisticated allocation of funding. Ideally, you would want the Department for Transport to be determining the factors that local authorities need to use. Currently, local authorities are required to deliver bus connectivity assessments, but there hasn’t been consistent guidance on the data that they need to use, so it has not been very comparative. There needs to be more work done on that, and then targeting the funding to deliver and fill those gaps.

I want to point out the difference between the capital funding that they are getting and the revenue. A lot of what we are talking about is running the services. It is not about having new buses, bits of pavement, guided busways, electric vehicles or whatever it happens to be. I am not saying that those things are not important. It is about a lack of services and a lack of service provision. That tends to be more of a revenue issue. The driver shortage thing is an issue around pay and work conditions because of the long hours. They have definitely looked at the way in which contracts are for workers. A lot more women came in as bus drivers when they thought more about flexible contracts, and that has helped. There are part-time jobs and so on, but that does not pay very well.

Thank you for all your contributions. I want to ask a magic wand question, but I will put some context around it. The magic wand question would be: how would you see resources allocated by Government or local councils to improve bus services? We have heard a lot about the problems or the negative impacts of poor services and a little bit about funding and the quantum. Silviya, you talked about how it should be directed based on need. The other question in my mind, as you think about the magic wand question and how you would direct resource allocation if you could wave a magic wand, is that it is all quite complicated. Do we need radical simplification of the way this is thought about? Do we need a different model? Do environmentalists like me need to get off the opinion that buses should be taking us from the start of our journey and instead think about car usage as a viable rural option to get us to a bus stop? What other changes that we have not talked about would you like to see considered?

To build on my previous answer, it is about identifying the level of need and having a better measure of need to use in funding allocations. We need to be honest that if you want a transformational level of improvements, London-style services, as the Government promised, for the rest of the country, you will need additional funding, but I don’t think we have done the analysis about what that is. It does not have to be as much as some people would think. We have been doing some gap analysis with one of the leading companies involved in bus connectivity assessments. It is early stages, so we will be developing it in more detail. Our analysis suggests that 139 wards across England out of 7,600 have severe gaps—a relatively small percentage. Another 2,864 require some enhancements. If you are thinking about density of bus services and connectivity to key destinations, it needs to be mapped at local level. That is what is required. We estimate that it would cost under £1 billion a year of additional funding to deliver those improvements in those wards. Then you need to consider that that amount would reduce as bus use increases. When you provide services, you attract more passengers, so the revenue demand will decline over time. I mentioned earlier better co-ordination with other local services. Again, you can achieve efficiencies and budget savings. Franchising would help with that. If you are planning a network together, you can obviously cross-subsidise. We talk about the dichotomy between commercial provision and supported provision. If we can integrate that in franchising areas, that is a big benefit. What about areas that won’t franchise? We need to think about those as well.

I would add to that contracted community transport services, so that, definitely in rural areas, they are not volunteer services; they are properly contracted and open to everybody and those able to pay for them as well on demand. There is a role for taxis and thinking about shared taxis. There is the role of MaaS, particularly in rural areas. Its potential is there, but it has never really been rolled out around bike hubs and stations and so on. There is that element for your environmentalist, but the environmental agenda is not the same as the social agenda. You are talking about different audiences with different needs and different demands. The buses come into both of those things, but they are not necessarily the same thing. That is what I said to you before. You can’t hit everything with the same hammer. You have to come up with, “That’s for the environment. That’s your CO2/net zero policy. That’s where the buses fit in there, and here’s where they do the social exclusion thing.” Sometimes that might come together.

One can support the other, of course.

They can, but they might not always, and you have to think about that. I agree with this analytical thing around thinking about what we have now, what we don’t have, and where we best direct the resources that we have available. That will be mostly concentrated not in rural areas or dense urban areas but around the urban periphery where there are large populations reliant on public transport that is inadequate. If what you are doing is hourly bus services to the countryside and they are running around empty, which is what happened last time we had a benchmark for hourly rural bus services, it was not a good policy and it didn’t work.

Okay, we still have a couple more questions and time is really pressing. Karen, you have touched on demand-responsive transport. Do any of you have anything to add on DRT, or do you want to send us some stuff?

There are examples in our submissions.

Sorry?

There are some positive examples in our submission that I can refer back to. There have been pluses and minuses. They work in some areas. It depends on how they are set up.

Passenger subsidies are higher.

It is not directly on DRT, but certainly there is a bit more I could add to Steff’s original question on the magic wand and where we are trying to get to, but I appreciate that there is not time.

Thank you. Olly, do you just want to touch on the fare cap?

Very briefly, because I am very conscious of time, as you say, Chair. We touched a little bit on the increase of the bus fare cap from £2 to £3. Professor Lucas, you were very clear that you thought that was a negative policy change. Do other members of the panel have any thoughts as to the impact of the increase in the bus fare cap?

What we found from the evaluation of the bus fare cap when it was £2, which is limited data—it only looked at 2023—is that in policy terms it did what it set out to do. It reduced transport costs, particularly for those on the very lowest incomes. It would be great to have an intervention that looked and did the same in the future. Our view in the IPPR was that we would have liked to see the bus fare cap stay at a lower level for this year, and then be probably more defined at a local level in the future once we have resolved some of the big questions about long-term funding and bus reforms and where that fits alongside devolution. Some of those decisions are better taken at the local level.

From our perspective, we would be prepared to be flexible about what ticketing system you have in the future. It is important to bear in mind the overall picture, which is that the costs of taking the bus overall have grown considerably greater for individual passengers since the system was privatised. If you compare the costs of taking a bus in this country with many other countries, it is much higher, even in London. There are a number of flexible things that can be looked at. The West of England Combined Authority has a single combined bus and train ticket for that area. It also has single bus tickets, which are cheaper than single bus and train tickets. That can save on the £2 bus fare if you use the bus or train more than three or four times in a day. There are a number of solutions that can be looked at.

I have two very quick things to add. In rural areas, £3 can still be very good value compared to the prices there might have been before. In urban areas, it has been a significant increase, and I know that it has priced some people out of using buses. The other point is about simplicity. Some places have gone back to point-to-point pricing, and that puts some people off. It makes things more complicated than just tap and go. Those are two factors that need to be considered in what follows it.

Thank you. I have one follow-up question. We talked about bus connectivity and economic growth. Have any of you done any specific work on the link between the health or otherwise of high streets and bus connectivity?

I tried to find some quantifiable examples ahead of the session. Because of the bus service improvement interventions being quite recent, it is hard to find specific examples. Another point is that when it opens up opportunity to local economies and local high streets, leisure and hospitality also need to thrive. Having poor weekend and evening services disadvantages those sectors.

An additional point to bear in mind is about making tourism more sustainable. If you have a good bus network in rural areas that are particularly attractive to tourism, it can massively reduce the number of cars on the road. In the South Downs, the service between Brighton and Eastbourne has been hugely popular, and it brings a huge number of people into the national park who would not otherwise get there. Chew Valley, which I mentioned earlier, is potentially a very attractive area for tourism, but, as I said, in 2023-24, it had no bus service at all for about 12 months.

Excellent. Thank you so much. We have all found that to be a really valuable pair of sessions. I thank all today’s witnesses. If there is any evidence you think we have not covered, please send it to us as we progress our inquiry. That concludes today’s meeting.