‘Bus companies only care about corporate greed, not local needs’

Delays, disruption, despair. Those three Ds dominate the minds of any transport user when news of a strike reaches them.

It’s hard to imagine one good thing about a strike when it makes you late for work or gives you even more stress than your journey normally does.

Many of you will have your head in your hands about the bus driver strike in our region.

Roadworks are already bringing many of our roads to a standstill. How will our beleaguered transport system cope with yet another disruption?

But we shouldn’t direct our anger at the unions or even the drivers for striking.

The anger we are feeling should be directed in three directions: to the bus companies, to our local politicians and to the Labour government.

If your anger is pointed those ways, you’ll find you are facing the same way and have the same interests as the bus drivers taking strike action.

So why should we be angry at the bus companies?

The bus companies have made hundreds of millions in profits while our services and our communities have suffered.

The near-monopoly bus operator First has made an “operating profit of £204.3m and share dividends were increased by 45%, compared to the previous year”.

That is while bus drivers have been offered a pitiful pay increase of £1.

Then they only expand routes when subsidies are in play or when profits are there for the taking. The bus companies only care about corporate greed, not local needs.

So why should we be angry at our local politicians?

While First and others have been running a near monopoly focused on profits, local politicians have done nothing to fundamentally change the system.

Yes, we have seen some more buses, such as those funded by Clean Air Zone money by Bristol’s Green-led council, but this isn’t enough. We cannot afford to fix our problems bus route by bus route.

Helen Godwin, our metro mayor, is responsible for transport across the region. She came in this May on a promise of change, but has joined her Westminster colleagues and her Labour predecessor Dan Norris in kicking the can down the road.

Public control – also known as franchising – is the tool that could allow us to set the fares and routes, and decide which companies could run buses in our area.

We could break up the First near-monopoly and choose companies that paid their drivers a fair wage.

We could go from powerless to all powerful but Godwin is halting hope by her inability to press the go button on a bus revolution.

So why should we be angry at the Labour government?

Labour have failed to fund buses sufficiently to retain the old £2 bus fare cap. And they have not restored the decade-plus long record of austerity in bus service funding.

Simply put, the Tories cut the funding a decade or so ago and it has yet to be restored.

They have given us more powers locally, but failed to back this up with enough money to reverse the decline, despite having plenty for doomed-to-fail schemes like billions for carbon capture.

So what is the solution?

Get angry, get engaged, get involved.

You should be angry at the bus companies, your representatives and the national Labour government.

You should get engaged in what’s going on with your bus services. Make clear your views to all those involved.

Most importantly you should get involved in making a change. To do that, I’d invite you to join the Green Party and fight for better buses with us!

This is an opinion piece by James Nelson, a Green Party councillor on Bradley Stoke Town Council and treasurer of South Glos Greens

Main photo: Martin Booth

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