You can blame a lot on Margaret Thatcher, but she never delivered the famous line that “anyone seen on a bus over the age of 30 should consider themselves a failure”. The phrase is thought to have been coined by Loelia Lindsay, a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, and was probably a wistful reference to her own reduced circumstances following her divorce from the fabulously wealthy (and fabulously horrible) 2nd Duke of Westminster.
Nevertheless, politicians and journalists have continued to attribute the quote to Thatcher, who deregulated bus services in 1986, exposing passengers to a market she falsely believed would provide lower fares and more services (fares have increased beyond the rate of inflation and the number of people employed to provide local bus services has halved since 1980). But it would have been a surprising failure of political communication if Thatcher had admitted her contempt for the bus itself.
It is less surprising, given the failures of political communication this government has shown so far, that another pre-announced Budget measure – a raise in the cap on some bus fares – has proved to be hugely unpopular. Yesterday afternoon, Keir Starmer told an audience in Birmingham that the £2 cap, which was introduced in January 2023 by the Conservatives, had been funded until the end of this year, which implies they intended to remove it, but that Labour would increase the cap to £3.
An earlier leak of the policy allowed many to jump to the wrong conclusion. Jeremy Corbyn claimed, falsely, that the government was “scrapping the £2 bus fare cap” (the cap remains, it’s just higher). More than 62,000 people have signed a petition under the false impression that the cap is going to be scrapped. The Liberal Democrats claimed, falsely, that the increase in fares is a “bus tax” (it can’t, unlike inflation, be described as a tax because it won’t cause the government to receive more money from the public). The shadow transport secretary, Helen Whately, claimed that it will cost “£10 a week extra to get to work under Labour” (no fare increase has been announced so far, so the projected cost to any passenger can’t be anything other than fiction).
The introduction of the cap was good political communication because it affected lots of people for very little money. In the year ending March 2023 there were 3.7 billion passenger journeys by local bus, which is about half of all public transport (national rail account for 1.4bn journeys). But the £2 cap is entirely voluntary and does not apply to large numbers of routes (full list here), a fact conveniently ignored by those now railing against its non-cancellation, so while it encouraged lots of people to use buses, its real effect was to subsidise routes that were under-used and might have been axed. The cost of this per year was £350m, which is about one mile of HS2. (The government will still spend £150m a year on the cap at £3.)
It was also good policy, because according to a recent study by KPMG, every £1 the state invests in bus services returns £4.55 in economic benefits, mostly through access to work and education. This echoed previous studies, including work by the University of Leeds, which estimated that around 360,000 people are in a more productive job than they could otherwise access thanks to bus services, without which around 30,000 people would not have a job at all.
For a government fixated on growth and fairness, buses should be very much part of the answer to the UK’s economic problems. They improve public health and access to the labour market, they reduce potholes, they get people to high streets. Buses are also cheap to subsidise: bus services will receive about £1.1bn in subsidies next year, while train operating companies received £4.2bn in 2023.
The measures outlined in the Buses Bill make it clear the government recognises this and would like to do as much as it can to reap the rewards of bus use – or, if you like, the rewards of reduced car dependency – even though the bill won’t make any new funding available.
Such plans have now been overshadowed, however, by the suggestion that the fare cap would be axed to save a small amount of money. This could have been avoided by clearly communicating a longer-term plan – the £3 cap, it seems, won’t be scrapped either but replaced by “more targeted options” – and making the fare cap announcement part of a wider bus policy. Instead it has become one more item in a programme of aggressive fiscal rectitude, and the government has allowed itself to be be portrayed as imposing 50 per cent inflation on getting to work .
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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