BUS CAMPAIGN SPEECH 21ST AUGUST 2023
The South Yorkshire I grew up in had a world class bus network. It wasn’t just efficient, and comprehensive, it was cheap. When I was a kid, 2p was enough for a ticket to anywhere. That was about more than just convenience. To me, it meant access to a whole new world around me. Trips into town, to see friends and family, into the Peaks were an everyday luxury.
They were the product of the time our national government would honestly argue “nothing is too good” for our communities. A time when we ran the buses. We decided the fares, the routes, and timetables. When buses were a viable first choice, not the last choice.
Just last Tuesday, I met with bus users from across South Yorkshire. We talked about what we had and what we’ve lost.
Today, people who know public transport would call the network South Yorkshire once had ‘best practice’. The Government call it a London-style transport system. In South Yorkshire, we can call it our heritage.We’re here today to call time on an inheritance denied.
To say to the Government: we heard your offer to level up the country. We now expect you to make good on that promise.
Because we have been denied. We were promised that’s what levelling-up would mean. I don’t think any of us imaged we would get a tube line from Doncaster to Rotherham, or cable cars over the river don, but we do expect proper funding and support for our bus network.
Because young people in South Yorkshire today deserve the same opportunities that I enjoyed growing up.
Indeed, our kids are just as worthy of support as those kids growing up in Birmingham, or London, or Bristol.
We are here to say to people across our region: we will only succeed if we do this together. South Yorkshire has led the way before, but only by coming together across our communities. We have a proud history to draw on – from organising pit-to-pit or workshop-to-workshop, pioneering national efforts in LGBTQ+ and refugee rights, to demanding utopian ambition from our public authorities. If we are to succeed again, we need to channel our community energies once again.
Because the forces we are up against are organised. Make no mistake: right from the abolition of South Yorkshire County Council in 1986, to today, the piece-by-piece dismantling of our public transport network has been a political project.
The first step was a botched and rigged privatisation. Private companies, not democratically elected local leaders, put in the driving seat. It is literally illegal for me or for my colleagues in a local authority to set up a bus company and compete to drive up standards. Instead, we are left to pick up the pieces as private operators cherry pick the most profitable routes and then demand money from local government to cover the rest.
After a decade of austerity, and with patronage down a fifth since the pandemic, problems that could once be masked by throwing money at them were now plain to see. We have lost nearly half of our bus services since the start of austerity. Every time we think we are recovering we take another knock: most recently seeing the money we get for our buses from Westminster cut by 50% earlier this year. Beneath the abstractions of market design, or the number of routes that have been cut, we need to remember that every reduction in services has a real impact on us, on our neighbours, on our community, on our economy.
I know - from the people who write to me, my regular meetings in town and village halls, or from my monthly radio phone-in – what this looks like in practice. It is the disabled person, stuck in their home unable to travel independently after a bus had to reroute away from their stop. It is the young apprentice, unable to take that life-changing job at the Advanced Manufacturing Park because they can’t reliably get there in time, when the buses in their village don’t start running until gone eight. It is the family who have had to give up on home ownership for another year so that can buy a car to make up for their lost bus.
When I talk to those people I hear their anger, their sadness, or – perhaps worst of all – their resignation. It’s that final one that upsets me the most. The people who think that this is their lot in life, and they are destined to suffer it in isolation.
To add insult to injury, we now have the evidence to show that South Yorkshire has been singled out for bearing this burden. When we asked for our fair share of ‘Bus Back Better’ money, we got nothing. When the Government announced its plan to wind down pandemic-era bus support earlier this year, the little funding we were left with was cut in half. Per person, in South Yorkshire we receive about £4 of support for buses, compared to something more like £32 in West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester or the West Midlands, let alone London.
Even the millions we asked for from the so called ‘Levelling-Up Fund’ to trial and test new approaches to ‘demand responsive transport’ was denied.
So people here in South Yorkshire we are right to be angry. I’m angry. Our buses are not good enough. Our public transport system is broken. And we shouldn’t just sit back and take it.
I refuse to accept that we, the communities of South Yorkshire, are worth just one eighth of other proud industrial communities in the North and Midlands. This goes well beyond the rights and wrongs of bidding competitions. Manchester, Leeds, even London, deserve great buses too. This is about saying we all have the same right to vital public services. For our buses, that means having modern vehicles that don’t poison our air; options for safe travel for all in the early morning and late at night; the equipment we need to make buses accessible for everyone. We need regular, reliable, and affordable services if we want to cut down congestion or meet our goals on the climate or the economy. It’s no good producing jobs at the AMRC, at Barnsley’s Junction 36, or at Gateway East in Doncaster if people can’t get to them.
Even if we give the Government’s the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe that they can’t afford to properly fund public transport, underfunding our buses is self-defeating: what they gave with one hand just last month – announcing the UK’s first Investment Zone in South Yorkshire - they risk undermining with the other.
If we’re going to get out of the economic mess we’re in as a country, it's not that we can’t afford good public transport. We simply can’t afford not to have good public transport.
My first act as Mayor was to write to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, asking him to make good on his promise to level up public transport in this country. I’ve challenged both his successors since.
My second act as Mayor was to accelerate the franchising assessment process to change how we run our buses.
The lack of action from Government makes it all the more important for local politicians to make hard decisions. In addition to the £70m we spend a year on buses, my fellow MCA Board members and I have made every effort to protect routes and encourage patronage. We brought forward the £2 bus fare cap, extended it to the tram network and invested a further £17m - all from our flexible reserves - to keep buses on the road. Through the transport levy – the money raised locally through Council Tax – our local authorities are now putting more money into public transport than they have in a decade, diverting money from other pressing priorities.
And when bus driver numbers became the barrier, we even funded our own bus driver training programme because the private companies and the Government wouldn’t.
We are leaving no stone unturned within South Yorkshire.
We need a partner in Government prepared to do the same. They’ve made clear they won’t do that without pressure though. I think that, when it comes to South Yorkshire, they don’t know what they’re up against. Growing up here in the 1980s I’ve seen our radical tradition, our organised communities fighting against injustice, first hand.
I’ve called you here today to witness what I hope will be the start of the next turning point for our region; the point at which we claim our inheritance and restore our pride in public services in South Yorkshire.
I’m calling for a proper funding settlement for our buses. have written to the Transport Secretary requesting an urgent meeting to discuss our £205m plan to stabilise and turnaround South Yorkshire’s buses.
But I cannot engage in that fight for our public transport alone. The bus system we had in the 1980s was not the product of one person or even a single administration.
It was the fruit of decades of visionary local leadership, backed – or at least not held back – by reforming central governments. It was what we got when ordinary communities day after day demand more, demand better.
So, there can be no change without a broad-based, non-partisan campaign – perhaps led by me, and our other political leaders - but working alongside members of our community, from all walks of life. Those who use buses, and those who could use them in the future. Those who depend on buses to bring students, workers, or visitors to their place of work, their shop, or their café. Those who want to be proud of South Yorkshire leading the way on renewing our public services, tackling the climate emergency of leading the renewed growth of the north.
My role is to support those leaders in our community, and to represent them to Government. Some of them are in the room today.
And I am asking you, friends in the room and those here from the media, to join our campaign. Visit our website at southyorkshire-ca.gov.uk/fair-deal and sign up to be kept informed of community-led petitions and activities as they come up. Join me at one of the more than twenty public meeting I’ll be holding across our communities over the next few months. Please tell your friends and family too.
For too long we have been told that we don’t deserve the quality of services that others expect. In one united voice we now need to say: enough.
We need to fight, together, for a fair deal, and for that public transport system we don’t just want, or deserve or even need, but that public transport system that is our right to expect – here in South Yorkshire more than anywhere.