Non-franchised Derbyshire buses, including the excellent 199
As you will have seen from my previous journalism on bus re-regulation, one of the predictions I made (as early as 2019) was that the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign was a fight that had national repercussions. Crap bus services weren't only pissing people off in Greater Manchester after all; the whole of the UK was feeling knobbed off about it, and had been doing so for years, decades even.
It wasn't a surprise then to see campaigns for re-regulation starting in (to name a few off the top of my head...) West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol, and Peterborough. Not to mention the already pre-Manchester campaigning that had been taking place in Glasgow.
At the very end of 2023, I also became aware of the existence of the newly founded national Better Buses campaign. A coalition of campaigns and campaigners that seeks to keep everyone up to date on what's going on where, and how they can get involved. You can find out more here. You can also read and download their campaign statement here. Meetings are held on Zoom and are open to anyone interested in attending. Just email them for the link.
What's particularly gratifying about the national campaign is that, like all the local campaigns I've come across, they don't view franchising as the end of the re-regulation process. They welcome the recent change in the law that now allows local authorities to set up their own bus companies, but what they ultimately want is a return to the status quo, pre 1986, but with better services. A laudable ambition that would be better than franchising.
I do urge anyone who is concerned about the state of their local bus network to get involved with the national Better Buses campaign. There is bound to be a local campaign going that would fit your concerns and, if there isn't, you would be able to meet people with similar concerns who would be able to help you to launch your own local campaign. They are a formidably organised bunch and they are getting shit done.
This piece was originally published by Act Build Change on the 27th May, 2021. It is no longer available online and is being re-published here with the aid of Authory, who back up my articles for me to ensure I never lose my work.
The UK bus revolution begins, not ends, in Manchester
Image: Athena Mellor
A lot of people in the UK don’t know who runs their bus network.
This was an issue that came up regularly when Pascale Robinson, activist and central organiser of the Better Buses For Greater Manchester(BB4GM) campaign, began talking to local people about their buses in 2018. “People felt that buses were particularly unreliable in Greater Manchester, and they felt they were really expensive.” She says.
This overall feeling fed into the campaign; videos reiterated the fact that an hours travel in London is capped at £1.50 thanks to the ‘hopper’ fare but that there is no hourly fare in Greater Manchester, meaning an hours travel on any bus in the region can be anything from the £2.50 it would cost me for a single fare for the 15 minute bus journey into my local town centre to the £5 upwards it would cost for a day ticket (single operator tickets are cheaper, tickets you can use across more than one operator cost more and are not widely promoted). It’s an eye watering comparison, one that summed up the central argument of the BB4GM campaign: Why can’t Greater Manchester have what London has?
How did our bus networks end up this way?
UK buses (outside London) were de-regulated in 1986. The Secretary of State for Transport at the time, Nicholas Ridley, believed that the existing publicly run system had led to a twenty year decline in services and to the creation of monopolies that were restrictive. He believed that opening up the bus network to the private sector would increase competition and improve services. His speech to parliament on the occasion of the second reading of the Transport Bill in February 1985, in which he makes these points, can be found here. Since the passing of the Transport Bill in 1986, buses have been run by private sector bus companies, leading to new monopolies rather than competition and a race to the bottom in terms of quality.
The We Own It sponsored BB4GM campaign was inspired by legislative changes put forward by the Bus Services Act 2017. While it doesn’t make possible a full reversal of de-regulation (it doesn’t allow local authorities to create their own bus companies as they had been able to pre 1986) it does open the door for public control in the form of a franchising system, putting local authorities in control of routes, fares, payment systems and information.
Organising in Greater Manchester
BB4GM began with a public meeting in early 2019. Robinson estimates the attendance as “Over 150 people.” The meeting (filmed and later featured in a documentary), brought activists, academics and bus users together using “the barnstorm model”; a large scale in person or online event that creates sufficient energy and inspiration to get people to commit, at the event, “to a really clear but big action.” Specifically, to meet their council leaders on a bus, or at a bus stop for a conversation about buses.
Robinson and the campaigners were creative in their thinking when it came to devising eye catching activities. As well as helping to ensure that the campaign remained inclusive, “It makes it really fun to do something really silly.” The fight for better buses went on for a long time “so we had to think of interesting ways to keep the momentum up.”
One of these actions was a long queue for better buses, complete with authentic looking bus stop, which was held outside Andy Burnham’s office. Similarly, a central motif of BB4GM’s videos, marches and demonstrations was a feline figure in business dress: The Fat Cat, a visual reminder of the bus barons and their shareholders, the identified villains of the campaign.
And then there was Bus Regulation: The Musical!, a theatre performance created by the artist and activist Ellie Harrison, which told the story of Greater Manchester’s bus network from the 1960s to 2019 through the lens of musical theatre, taking the campaign story to new audiences.
Harrison, founder of Bring Back British Rail and Get Glasgow Moving, says the idea for the musical came from a childhood obsession with Starlight Express as well as a desire to create something “very upbeat and family friendly” about BB4GM. She had been commissioned by Manchester Art Gallery to create a piece that would tie in with their summer 2019 season; loosely based around crowds and protest in a nod to the double centenary of the Peterloo Massacre. Her secondary concern was to “Communicate this really complex history of public transport policy that so many people don’t understand”. Performances of Bus Regulation: The Musical! were filmed and used as part of the Manchester campaign.
Bus Regulation: The Musical by Ellie Harrison at Manchester Art Gallery in September 2019 (Image: Andrew Brooks)
Robinson met Harrison in Glasgow during her first few weeks leading the Manchester campaign. “I went with them [Get Glasgow Moving] to visit [the Scottish] Parliament, and they had this brilliant group of passengers, they had a really good media coverage from that visit. And they won their campaign to make public ownership legal in the legislation” she says, referring to The Transport (Scotland) Act 2019. “We’ve learned loads from Get Glasgow Moving in terms of their consistency of messaging, their ability to keep a group going over lots of years, it’s brilliant campaigning.”
On the 25th March 2021, after two public consultations (the second was deemed necessary because of the devastating impact of COVID-19 on public transport and the economy), the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, announced his intention to use the powers of the Bus Services Act 2017 to take control of Greater Manchester’s buses under a franchise system. While buses would still continue to be run by private companies, the GMCA (Greater Manchester Combined Authority) would have control of it’s fares, timetables and routes for the first time since 1986. Burnham also announced plans to introduce integrated ticketing across buses, trains and trams; something the ten Greater Manchester authorities have never been able to do previously.
When he made his announcement on the 25th March, he originally planned to introduce franchising in three phases across three years but, buoyed by a successful re-election campaign, the Mayor took to Twitteron the 10th May to announce that he was bringing his plans for the buses forward by a year. This is unlikely to have impressed bus operators Stagecoach, who – along with First – dominate the bus network in Greater Manchester, and who are currently pursuing a judicial review of the Mayor’s original decision in March.
Given that an earlier, pre-2017 legislation, attempt by campaigners in Tyne & Wear to re-regulate their bus network back in 2015 was scuppered by legal action from bus companies, it’s surprising that BB4GM aren’t more worried about the threat of a judicial review. While they are watching carefully, they are confident that the two public consultations were done properly and, as such, they have faith in the ability of GMCA to win through.
Bus Regulation: The Musical by Ellie Harrison at Manchester Art Gallery in September 2019 (Image: Andrew Brooks)
Visions for the future beyond Greater Manchester
What’s really interesting is the way that, even before Burnham’s announcement in March, other towns and cities were looking to the Manchester campaign and were being inspired to start their own local campaigns for better buses.
The TUC, along with We Own It, have been running Better Buses For Yorkshire since 2019. Unlike Better Buses For Greater Manchester, which was led by passengers, Better Buses For Yorkshire is “Really trade union led” according to Gareth Forest of West Yorkshire TUC. “They’re led by people involved in the bus industry – bus drivers, cleaners, people who build the buses in our region, as well as bus users.” They began from a position of advocacy rather than active campaigning and the shift to campaigning has been a relatively slow, considered one.
The pandemic has created several challenges, given that face to face campaigning is a strong trade union tactic. When lockdown hit in March 2020, they had “a fallow period” but continued to hold regular meetings while focusing on building a community.
In October 2020, they ran a “Reverse town hall” event on Zoom, taking in West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. “We had bus users basically at the top of the meeting, talking about why the service was so bad, why it was failing them and why they needed a change” says Forest.
700 people sent emails to their council leaders ahead of the meeting, meaning “We got a very quick response from the council leaders”. The leaders were also discombobulated by the format of the reverse town hall: “Not speaking first, hearing from the constituents: We set the agenda – This is what we want to talk about, and we want very specifically to hear from you about if you will do this thing we’re asking you to do.” Forest says.
The leaders committed to public control of buses at the meeting, which Forest said “Energised and mobilised and brought people into the campaign. It was much more effective than just me having a bunch of private meetings with council leaders.”
The Yorkshire campaign was given support early on from BB4GM’s Pascale Robinson, who was able to advise those across the Pennines as to what had and hadn’t worked when campaigning in Greater Manchester. With the Yorkshire campaign taking off in 2020, Matthew Topham was hired by We Own It in February 2021 because it was felt that there needed to be a designated person within the organisation to work solely on the Yorkshire campaign with Gareth Forest and the TUC. Topham has been inspired by the success of BB4GM “To see it happen, to be able to say to our political leaders ‘Look! Others have gone before us, let’s just get on and follow them’” is, he feels, “So powerful, so inspirational, and it’s so pleasing to see that result coming out.”
Tracy Brabin, the newly elected Mayor of West Yorkshire, has strongly suggested that she is in favour of public control, so the signs for the Yorkshire campaign are good.
What we can learn from these campaigns
What all of these campaigns have in common is a focus on a very specific geographical area, strong coalitions of campaigners from different backgrounds, often with different interests and skills sets, and an immense sense of creativity and ingenuity when it comes to devising campaigns that can attract and maintain the attention of both the public and the media over a long period of time. They have been inclusive, rather than exclusive, campaigns not only in terms of the campaign language used (the Bus Services Act 2017 isn’t an easy read after all) which have attracted both the the young and the old, the urban and the rural, seasoned campaigners and newbies and have received support from groups as varied as the Women’s Institute and Friends of the Earth, the latter of whom brought the Fridays For Future climate kids to the BB4GM petition hand in in January 2020. Not only does this reveal how central the issue of good, accessible public transport is to many very different lives, but also that, in an age of division, it is possible to bring different groups of people together to build coalitions to fight for a cause that is widely shared and affects many people.
About the author
Cazz Blase (She/Her) is a writer/blogger from Stockport. She mainly writes about public transport and women and music. You can follow her on Twitter.
This piece was originally published on the 3rd of October, 2019 in City Metric. City Metric shuttered at some point during the pandemic, and this piece can no longer be found online. It is being re-published thanks to Authory, who back up my articles for me, ensuring that I never lose my work.
What Bus Regulation: The Musical can tell us about the follies of privatisation
“Are you here for the bus event?” asks the woman, with just a trace of weariness. Myself and two other people confirm that, yes, we are here to attend Bus Regulation: The Musical.
We are directed to the first floor of Manchester Art Gallery where a lengthy queue is forming outside gallery 12. Staff, who seem surprised but unfazed by the high turnout, begin sorting us into two queues; those who booked ahead and those who didn’t. It is going to be a full house, despite the torrential rain outside.
This 30 minute musical, a collaboration between Manchester Art Gallery and artist Ellie Harrison, was inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1984 musical, Starlight Express. It seeks to tell the history of bus regulation in the Greater Manchester area from the 1960s onwards.
Our compere is Barbara Castle (ably played by Summer Dean) who, as transport minister in the first Wilson government, sought to unite and integrate the 11 municipal bus companies operating in the Greater Manchester area. Castle introduces the audience to the bus fleets, each of whom is represented by a skater from Arcadia Roller Derby. They are dressed in capes like superheroes, and proudly sport the crest of their local corporation on their t-shirt.
As Castle describes the various stages of bus regulation, from local control to the founding of the Greater Manchester Authority and greater integration of council areas and services, the “buses” echo the changes, removing their town crests and donning the orange branding of Greater Manchester’s integrated fleet, SELNEC. They seamlessly circuit the audience, holding onto each others capes, moving as a smooth, well oiled machine.
The audience are a mixture of ages and backgrounds, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. There is laughter at the often acerbic commentary by Castle, and there’s a good deal of pantomime style booing when we reach 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher.
As the decades flash by, and the effect of bus deregulation in 1986 becomes manifest, we can see the impact on the buses as the circling skaters become more chaotic: logos and capes are changed at an increasingly giddying speed, representing the rapid acceleration of company buyouts and takeovers. There are fewer buses and those that are left begin to overtake and menace each other in an echo of the city’s infamous bus wars. They begin to bunch up, leaving long gaps in the circuit, suggesting bad timetabling and a scarcity of services.
And then, just when you think all is lost, a bit of sunshine comes over the horizon in the form of the 2017 Bus Services Act and the tantalising carrot of public control.
The buzz of conversation after the show suggests that the audience have enjoyed the performance but that they have also been left with a lot to think about. Many stop to talk to Harrison or to campaigner Pascale Robinson of the Better Buses For Greater Manchester group, who is handing out flyers by the exit.
I first became involved with the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign in late 2018.
I'd become aware of the campaign via Twitter, but hadn't made it to their first meeting in Manchester because I'd got cold feet about going to it. I hadn't been sure what to expect and, anyway, it was horrible weather that night and I didn't feel very inspired at the prospect of traipsing into central Manchester on the 192.
Thankfully, hundreds of other people made the opposite choice and attended.
That first meeting was filmed and shown as part of the Association of British Commuters documentary The Fight for Greater Manchester's Buses, which you can watch below.
A few months later, I joined Pascale Robinson and a number of other activists in St Peter's Square to drum up numbers for Better Buses for Greater Manchester's petition to have the buses taken back into public control. I had originally planned to go in order to write about them but, inevitably, I was always going to be in the activist rather than journalist camp.
It has been the continuous theme of my work as a journalist writing about BB4GM that I have been writing from within, not objectively, in the main and - given the remit of the publications who accepted my work - this felt highly appropriate at the time.
I wrote up the experience in St Peter's Square as part of my piece for Four Goods which, thankfully, is still up online. I then went on to write about Ellie Harrison's Bus Regulation: The Musical for the New Statesman's Cities blog, City Metric, which was my first piece for them under editor Jonn Elledge. City Metric shuttered at some point during the pandemic, so you can't find my article online anymore but you can watch the Manchester edition (and it's sibling productions in other cities) online.
Over the next week I intend to re-publish some of the campaigning journalism about bus re-regulation that I wrote between 2019 and 2021. Not because I intend to stop talking about the reality of bus re-regulation in 2025, but because I think it's worth stopping to remind myself and others of why we wanted re-regulation in the first place.
As part of Reliable, they do publish weekly Bus punctuality reports, which means that it is possible to get an idea of how the network is performing overall, and how the network is performing by the three different tranche's. While this is all very commendable, and certainly represents a massive step up compared to what we had before under deregulation, there are a number of problems with the reports as they stand at the moment.
The main problem being that TfGM appear to have insufficient data to be able to report on how the buses in tranche 3, ie the buses that joined the Bee Network on the 5th January 2025, are performing.
Guys, it's nearly a month now! I'm limbering up to write my first complaint to you about how the 385 is performing (or not performing...) and you've not put together the data to see whether I'm right or not.
In the meantime, if you want to see how tranches 1 and 2 were performing between the 19th and 25th January, knock yourselves out.
Another problem with the Bus punctuality reports, and I'll admit it's probably a minor one for most people, is that you can't see how individual bus routes are performing within the data. Meaning that even if the data for tranche 3 was available, I wouldn't be able to use it to look at how the 385 was doing. Presumably someone working at TfGM would be able to, but not me.
You could say that it would be impossible to build a tool to show, in real time, the performance of every bus across the Bee Network. Certainly the Bee Network app, on the rare occasions I've used it, seems to struggle with the real time aspects of where my bus is, but... It is not impossible.
The reason I know it is not impossible is because my former editor at City Metric, Jonn Elledge, recently wrote in his newsletter about the wonder that is the M62 Corridor Bus Tracker. You can read his take on it here (and please do sign up for his newsletter).
I was going to attempt to explain how it came about and what it does, but I think the summary that Open Innovations provide on their website says it much better than I ever could:
Jonn, based in London, used the tool they'd created to track the real-time progress of the 192 between Stockport Town Centre and Manchester Piccadilly in September 2024 (there is only ten days of data to look at, and it's from September 2024).
I, in turn, have used it to track the real-time progress of the 385 (then run by D&G, not Diamond) between the Buxton Road/Nangreave Road stop and the Harvester on Bosden Farm Estate.
The visual representation of the data isn't massively interesting for the 385, and Jonn's charts for the 192 were definitely more visually interesting, but the data tells a story nonetheless:
If you hover over specific journey times, it will pop up with an info graphic to show how the actual journey time performed against the actual journey time. On every single one I picked, it showed that the bus had arrived early.
Early.
Not on time, not late, but... Early.
Essentially, the 385 was arriving at it's destination on average between 4 and 1 minute early. Despite setting off at the prescribed time.
I've been thinking back to September 2024 to try and remember if there was anything radically different going on, traffic wise, between Heaviley and Bosden Farm Estate that might account for this massive difference in how the 385 was performing in September 2024, and how it's performing now, but I really can't think of anything.
It would be great if the kind of detail Open Innovations are able to provide could be utilised by TfGM and the Bee Network to provide proper accountable real time data that travellers could see and use as well as TfGM, but I won't hold my breath.
Incidentally, the stats Jonn found for the average reliability of the 192 in September 2024, and the wildly varying estimations of its journey time, rang very true.
The 192 opposite the old Debenhams store in Stockport
Yesterday after work I caught the 192 to Hazel Grove to post the remainder of my nephew's birthday present: A computer game soundtrack that was only available on download and which, as such, had to be burned to CD's then painstakingly track listed. All 101 songs of it.
We did once have a Post Office that was a five minute walk away from the house, only it closed for good in January 2024. I presume that this was due to the Post Office being arseholes and, post Horizon scandal, no one wanting to work for them if they could avoid it, but no official explanation for the closure was ever provided so I have no idea.
Anyway, this sorry state of affairs did at least give me the opportunity to get the infamous 192 to Hazel Grove, go to the Post Office, then walk the rest of the way home. While not fun, it did at least offer me the opportunity to test a theory that I've been pondering since the beginning of January: Would it actually be quicker to get home via the 192 as opposed to the 385 or 383?
The reasoning goes like this:
I am currently doing a 30 minute walk to my superstop on Marple Road. I'm then on the bus for about 5-10 minutes. I am usually home just before 5pm.
If I get the 192 to Hazel Grove, it's a 30 minute walk from Hazel Grove to the house, but am I on a bus quickly enough for it to cancel out the 30 minute walk at the end and get me home just before 5pm?
The answer, it turns out, is a bit more complicated than that:
In theory, there is a 192 about every 5 minutes.
In practice, as I was reminded yesterday, there are less 192's to Hazel Grove than there are to Stepping Hill Hospital. This meant the wait time yesterday was 15 minutes.
Then the bus got stuck in gridlock on the A6 for 20 minutes.
Add on the 15 minutes queueing at the Post Office, and you're at an arrival home time of 20 past 5.
So, in reality, we are looking at about 10-15 minutes longer to get home that it would have taken travelling down Marple Road on either the 383 or 385.
The 385 remains the quickest way home, but only if it actually turns up. Which is where the whole problem started.
Incidentally, the post 4pm 192's largely suffer from the same issue that the 25 past 4pm 383 has: They are far too full. And, in the case of the 192, stop at loads more stops. That and the usual A6 traffic make the journey speed on Marple Road look like a round on the track with Lewis Hamilton in comparison. Which is a long way of saying that the 383 is slightly more crowded than the 192 during the post College rush, but that you move slightly faster along the route and it's moderately less boring.
I commuted by 192 for years, and I really don't miss it, though I have heard anecdotally that it's pretty good now that it's part of the Bee Network. Stagecoach, who ruthlessly destroyed all competition for the route through a series of bus wars in the 1990s and 2000's, are still running it but apparently there are regular patrols to see that people are behaving themselves. This sort of monitoring was promised under the Bee Network, so it's nice to hear that someone is benefitting from it, and given the 192's colourful reputation, it is sensible that this is a route where they would prioritise that kind of intervention.
