A row about a well-used bus service in Craven, North Yorkshire, has highlighted the glaring gap between local and national government policies and their actual delivery to communities, a failure so easily exploited by populist demagogues.
Ever since Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Company (now Lonsdale Buses) took over the core 580 bus route between the market towns of Skipton and Settle from the now defunct Pennine Motors in 2014, they have operated it as a successful hourly bus service with steadily growing passenger numbers. It has been integrated for many years with the onward North Yorkshire Council-(NYC) supported Lonsdale 581 service for Ingleton, Kirkby Lonsdale and Lancaster. As a result, local communities have enjoyed a semi-commercial bus service and a showcase for what can be achieved by a small bus operator in a mainly rural environment along a strategic transport corridor, in this case the A65.
The sudden withdrawal in April – without proper notice or consultation – of the services that terminate in Settle, reduced the core bus service by a massive 50%, to a two-hourly frequency. This was allegedly because of rapid increases in diesel fuel costs caused by the US-Israel war on Iran. But the cuts are having a grotesquely disproportionate impact on local communities along this key travel corridor, and indeed on many people who visit the area.
The impacts of drastic service cuts
Visitors, unlike local people, have a choice, and that includes going elsewhere and taking their spending power with them. This is more likely in the face of reduced journey opportunities in an area of the Yorkshire Dales hugely dependent on the visitor economy.
But it is the local people in this part of Craven who are paying the price. These bus cuts mean:
- Massively reduced travel opportunities for the several thousand people who live in Skipton, Settle and along this important transport corridor.
- A two-hourly bus service is not only 50% worse than an hourly service, it causes the loss of many vital onward connections.
- Reduced job and educational opportunities.
- Restricted social and shopping opportunities especially in Skipton and Settle.
- Worsening access to hospitals/medical centres for personal treatment and for visiting relatives.
- Creation of more car and taxi journeys on already traffic-heavy roads and, in Skipton, increased congestion in the town centre and pressure on car parks.
- Worsening lifestyle choices leading to out-migration of young people and less affluent families – a form of subtle “social” cleansing. This will also create labour shortages in critical service industries.
- Higher fuel consumption at a time of worldwide shortages.
- Greater CO2 and other pollutants contributing to the growing climate catastrophe.
National and local public transport policy
In simple terms, reducing a core bus service to what is a skeletal service has massive social, environment and ultimately economic costs. Yet this goes totally against the stated policies of national government and of both NYC and York & North Yorkshire Combined Authority (YNYCA). They all claim to prioritise the improvement, not a massive 50% reduction, of public transport along key corridors. It also undermines the core purpose of the new YNYCA to change and improve the quality of peoples’ lives and to support the local economy, for which decent public transport is a basic pre-requisite.
To suggest that NYC – one of the wealthiest local authorities in the UK – cannot ‘afford’ to provide even a basic extra subsidy to allow the hourly Monday to Saturday daytime bus 580 service to continue (and, indeed, provide a badly-needed Sunday bus service) is simply mendacious. The road maintenance budget is over £50mn and there is an, albeit parsimonious, public transport support budget of around £7mn (for England’s largest Unitary Authority area). The actual cost of persuading the bus operator to maintain the service on an hourly basis would be a tiny fraction of the wider economic and social costs to society of this massive loss of travel opportunity.
Deciding what is ‘affordable’?
NYC has made a shameful policy decision not to support anything better than a two hourly bus service, even along as busy and crucial a transport corridor as this. There is no way the people who made such a decision would themselves tolerate the isolation, loneliness and reduction of travel choice that they are imposing on several thousand of their fellow citizens, for what can be shown to be trivial cost savings.
When it comes to such issues as vastly increased staff costs in what appear to be overlapping transport sections of NYC and the YNYCA, there appear to be unrestricted resources for endless strategy reports, policy papers, business case studies and risk assessments costing many tens of thousands, while in the real world, small ‘top-up’ subsidies to a local bus operator to ensure essential needs to communities are met are unaffordable.
This is simply unacceptable.
In blunt terms, bus users in North Yorkshire are being treated like second-class citizens, despite its huge dependence on its visitor economy. The needs of weekday non-car-using visitors, who cause least environmental damage, are treated with disdain.
No passenger left behind?
In contrast to the huge success of the volunteer-managed weekend DalesBus and Moorsbus networks in the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors, many weekday services to key visitor destinations in the Yorkshire Dales are so poor that on sunny days, even during the school holidays, passengers are left behind. This includes many visitors from abroad and from other parts of the UK.
Only recently, the totally inadequate 74A 16-seater minibus service between Ilkley and such major visitor destinations as Bolton Abbey, Burnsall and Grassington (and which does not operate on Tuesdays or Thursdays) left no less than 18 passengers behind. Visitors to Malham, forced to use an equally cramped and uninviting minibus 210/211, cannot spend a full day in this nationally important and iconic tourist centre, as the last return bus on weekdays is at 13:35.
The slightly better Saturday morning 75 service (a standard bus with a well-timed return service) from Skipton to Malham a few weeks ago left around 20 passengers unable to board in Skipton bus station, with no other service for several hours.
Failing on sustainable transport
To our knowledge, nowhere else in the British Isles does this situation occur, where a parsimonious local authority refuses to meet the needs of more socially-responsible visitors who choose more sustainable forms of transport. It, in effect, restricts access to the Yorkshire Dales National Park to those who have access to a private car.
Yet NYC is currently threatening legal action over alleged cuts by YNYCA to its generous road maintenance budget, a scandalous waste of council tax and public money. What is needed is an inquiry into the constant, systematic failure of NYC to provide adequate public transport to meet either core local community or visitor needs, and the consequent social and economic impacts this failure is having on the lives of people in the whole Yorkshire region.
Fundamentally, this exposes an even more serious issue – the failure of national, regional and local government to actually deliver on their promises, in this case transport policies. And it is not just a failure to achieve pledged improvements, but even to sustain existing public services for what are, in the greater order of things, pathetically small financial savings.
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