It was back in April that I wrote my last column on buses, and how much has changed since then. No longer do we have to make plans while we watch our bus services collapse under the Conservatives, but we can now start the long hard job of making sure that communities in Tameside and across the UK have the bus services that they can rely on.
That is why I was delighted that on Monday my colleague Transport Secretary Louise Haigh announced £955 million in investment into bus services across England, with over £66 million coming to Greater Manchester. This is part of the biggest reform to England’s bus system in 40 years, that started last month with the announcement that councils across England are getting powers to bring community control to their bus services.
And thanks to Andy Burnham’s Bee Network we have a highly successful template right her in Greater Manchester for how we can deliver better bus services with community control. The Bee Network has seen both bus reliability and passenger numbers improving less than a year after bus franchising went live. And it is not long before we can feel more of these benefits locally when franchising is rolled out in Tameside.
Ahead of the roll out early next year, Tameside Council have set up a Tameside Bee Network Working Group to provide local input into the decision making on franchising in the Borough. So, if you have a bus route you want to see introduced or improved, now is the time to let your local councillors know.
Just as important as this funding is the change to the way it is going to be allocated. A reformed process will allocate funding based on need and will end the Conservative’s wasteful system of competitive bidding for funding, which wastes resources by favouring councils that already have sufficient resources and results in delayed and often incoherent decision making.
With the forthcoming Buses Bill, the Passenger Railway Services Bill and the Rail Reform Bill, this is an exciting time for us self-professed transport geeks. And, as I have said before and will say many times more, if we can’t rely on our buses and trains to get us to school, work, college and social commitments on time, then we can’t build the kind of thriving economy I want to see in Tameside and across the North West.