Our bus industry insider paints a gloomy picture of the current state of the industry, but does feel that something can be done
It is not that our industry has not been through cycles of peaks and troughs in the past, but the current low point has a more sinister feel to it than most other phases of the obstacle course it has trodden throughout my career, and morale with the prevailing uncertainties is the lowest I can ever remember. It is of course spilling over into new bus manufacturing levels as well.
The deleterious effects of internet shopping on the fortunes of the traditional high street and therefore bus companies’ patronage have been well aired. I will therefore limit my comments to hoping the most recent signs, that Chancellor Hammond is beginning to wake up to the fact that the current system and level of business rates is overly punitive, might actually become a reality and galvanise him into action. His and his predecessor’s niggardly refusal to increase fuel duty in the decade has of course largely caused the phenomenal rise in traffic volumes which now besets us. [wlm_nonmember][…]
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I keep hearing that cars can apparently be leased for just a £99 deposit with no credit check and subsequent weekly payments of just £20. Going anywhere now just takes longer and longer by whatever mode and if I have to use a car, I am now making mental additions to customary journey times of between 25% and 30%, particularly if using the M6 and key dual carriageways.
Empires of urban traffic signals, rarely varied to suit changed or exceptional circumstances, increasingly fail to cope with capacity, and some are actually funded by Section 106 developer contributions and are often actually contributing directly to slowing bus routes down. Bus schedules have become subject to all too frequent lengthening. Which company has succeeded in actually taking out running time from an established bus route in the last five years because of operational benefits bestowed on it?
Frustration is one of several parallel factors which have led to the rapidly deteriorating standards of UK driving and respect for others by most categories of road users. Bus drivers are amongst the biggest victims of arrogant car driver behaviour. No political comment about this is ever made either with soft messages or enforcement.
The studies in the last few years that suggested that people were increasingly concerned about the way their journeys needed to become greener in the future seemingly only have real appeal if they apply to others, and are another reason for the penalisation of buses and commercial vehicles in so called environmental improvement projects.
Returning to ‘government,’ in all its forms, as one of the key causes of failure to ameliorate industry fortunes: In central government, the ruling party is characterised by disinterest in buses, believing erroneously, as shown in the rarest of mentions in the recent Prime Minister’s question time, that they are now really for local authorities to deal with.
Only lip service is paid to all the reports produced, which demonstrate that for every pound spent on buses, at least five pounds are reaped in social and economic benefits to the community.
Nor have they done anything meaningful to outlaw Low Emissions Zones which merely seek to wreak higher and more expensive standards on buses and trucks but without a single restriction on cars, for which of course they also have passed down the detail to local authorities as a political hot potato. Buses are still not seen as the solution rather than the problem.
It is still prepared to pump eye watering amounts of public money into rail investment to compete with buses, often at lower fares and with cheap or free parking and subsidised bus feeder services, at a time when tendered services are being withdrawn elsewhere. The Welsh Valley rail network is one sample case in point.
The opposition party is equally bad, in that it dogmatically believes in state or municipal control, not accepting that politicians make the worst ever transport planners and meddlers in something best left to professionals and you rarely, if at all, hear of a socialist politician speaking of partnership working. Control is what motivates them, irrespective of the irrelevance to the passengers.
Conversely, dynamic managers will never want to go back to failed regimes of political control.
With its financial taps forcibly turned off in austerity, there is hardly a spark of positive life left in local authorities to help with the provision of evening and some rural services to reinforce the feel of a credible network from the user’s point of view.
Introduction of new bus priority measures and other congestion busting schemes, and effective enforcement of anarchic parking in town centres and in residential areas to ensure the smooth passage of buses, continue increasingly to look like a pipe dream despite the new Act.
More ominous for everybody are the number of city region mayors now seemingly about to flirt or more with franchising, with Teesside being the next to emulate on a small scale (£150k) Andy Burnham’s disgraceful waste of no less than eight figures of public money to carry out investigative work in Manchester.
I hear they are all enquiring of London how it works, and at least one person has been dumbfounded to hear officer information that actually very little in London washes its face financially, such that cross subsidisation of non-commercial and unaffordable pet projects like orbital routes in provincial cities would be impossible even if necessary!
London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, continues his considerable financial damage to the London bus network in my opinion, both with his politically inspired, but fool hardy, fares freeze and Hopper fare (and priority for cyclists), given ‘consultation’ on what look like significant future route cuts and the misguided desire to push everybody underground in Oxford Street. With rail oriented staff apparently in the supremacy in London following the significant exits of bus personnel, it is perhaps also not surprising.
The more surprising, if no less disappointing, element of lack of respect shown for the bus industry came this year from the Department for Transport itself when it implemented changes to the service registration process at the shortest of notice with no proper consultation.
I want now to turn to look at bus management itself and begin with two quotes.
The first was from the late Peter Huntley, who predicted that the industry would just about get itself performing to our satisfaction when we would start to have run out of good managers after significant levels of retirement.
Although the industry was fairly successful in achieving good levels of organic passenger growth in many areas until recently, albeit generally more in the south of Britain than in the north, nobody could have predicted the cancer of congestion and failure to resolve it on the scale currently being suffered, and that it would strike so deeply into the fortunes of companies and of course the quality of service to our customers whom it is our greatest task to satisfy and retain.
It is, however, true that we are now suffering a significant dearth of good, mature managerial talent, with gifted commercial people being the most critical shortage.
Far too little has been done to nurture and train in this business area, which has from time to time suffered from the image of being considered in some way secondary to operations and finance when the reverse is actually true. Graduate and management training programmes have not been adapted to reflect this. This problem needs to be addressed immediately whilst there is still some good talent available to pass the skills on.
The dearth of fully home grown and mature talent to fill MD and CEO posts with both product knowledge and suitable skill sets is also making itself felt currently.
Occasionally in the past, the industry has resorted to recruiting from outside, but nearly always with negative and sometimes disastrous results as when British Bus recruited from the likes of the Milk Marketing Board for area managers and Stagecoach, a former apprentice footballer for Chief Executive, and there are worrying signs that this could happen again. Industry outsiders rarely stay very long, with the possible notable exception of Werner Heubeck who developed very special additional skills needed to work in Northern Ireland at the time he was in charge of Ulsterbus and Citybus.
As Oliver Howarth neatly puts it in the booklet entitled ‘Characters of the Bus Industry’ in my second quotation “the bus industry, possibly because of its low pay rates compared to other industries, does not tend to produce many maverick geniuses.”
I think few would deny that a bus manager gets substantially, perhaps as much as 50% less than a railway manager for doing considerably more and with far fewer support staff.
The pay gap can be even greater when comparing a provincial bus driver with a train driver. I know personally how much more difficult it is for our drivers, who of course also have to face abuse from passengers and other road users as I have described earlier and handle cash as well as fighting the variability of congestion to adhere to schedules which are fit for purpose on some days, but not on others.
It is hardly surprising that there is now high driving staff turnover and chronic shortages in virtually any place you care to mention, and it is no better for engineering staff either as so many of our skilled engineering staff are in their 50s and 60s. As fast as we train apprentices, we are at constant high risk of them being offered jobs at more pay doing fewer hours at antisocial times in a cleaner and more pleasant environment.
With virtually no staff welfare facilities left and hard pressed middle and senior management tied up with ever greater levels of record keeping and increasing central HQ demands on their time in the biggest groups, insufficient time is being spent to encourage the very life blood of our organisations who need to feel valued in what is a loan worker industry for many.
There is simply no slack left in the system to manage and lead in the way that most of us would like and contrary to the impression given in current management recruitment literature, as the devil is always in the detail, so all of us have to be good at it as well. Managers who do not perform detailed functions are unaffordable.
There are unwelcome signs of strengthening centralised functions putting their total faith in new technology and trying, for example, to abandon the use of printed timetables. An article illustrating difficulties in getting accurate information from websites, journey planners and apps, many of which are so user-unfriendly as to beggar belief, is on my agenda.
I will, however, confine myself today by joining my voice to that of Roger French writing elsewhere to ask who would put in jeopardy the easy availability of the simplest and most portable source of information, the printed timetable, which is not dependent on the temperamental nature of electronics, when Passenger Focus studies show that around half of our customers use that medium?
On a recent visit to the Lake District, I saw many takers of the easily available Stagecoach timetable booklet in tourist information offices and on bus racks. They were being stowed in haversacks for use where no WiFi penetrates and to plan trips which Journey Planners are cumbersome at, and which in any case we might want to change as fancy takes us during the day. It is a classic reference document compared to unwieldy poorly formatted A4 sheets from the internet or squinting at miniscule print on a mobile phone, if it works.
I am sad to say that I had great hope pinned in contactless tickets speeding up boarding times, but have seen as many contactless transactions in the last fortnight take as long or in most cases longer than those with cash and it did make me wonder how many more or new passengers, if any, we are now carrying because of new technology. I do hope that technology is going to continue to improve, but I think Mayor Andy Street’s aspiration for 10% running time improvements as a result of contactless in the West Midlands will not be realised based on my travels to date.
I return to another often forgotten point on the part of all stakeholders. Namely that our businesses are essentially local and as such should be locally managed by empowerment with passion, but without fear. In that sense, I have to commend First West of England’s relaunching of its attractive Badgerline branding for Weston-super-Mare to go back to the future and perhaps draw a veil over 20 corporate years. The reported positive public interest is good news.
Having had to remain silently agnostic about corporate liveries for a large part of my career, I am now in no doubt that this would be a good time to reduce their impact or abandon them altogether. Stagecoach, for example, would not then need to unveil its long promised refresh of its 18 year old livery and I do not know anybody who is passionate about FirstGroup or Arriva’s latest liveries.
Everywhere I go where there is competition, I hear comments on the street which criticise the big groups but support the little local men, irrespective of how well and comprehensively the larger operators perform and how poor and cherry picking the small. Reverting to popular household names providing the quality of service can be matched to the reputation would be no bad thing just now and shake off the ‘big outsider’ image.
Curious though how the City Regions and the Republic of Ireland are starting to go the opposite way again and how uninspired their choices and colours of brand always are…
Staff morale is not at all good just now with all the prevailing uncertainties and needs to be raised quickly. I would be worried too if still in the frontline to hear about the potential levying of a 50p fare on pensioners after a dozen years of free travel.
It is not that many senior citizens cannot afford it and would prefer to pay something for a service than have none at all, but I am pretty certain that the operators are not going to be seeing any of that 50p which will disappear straight into local authority coffers and not necessarily with transparency, and certainly not into reimbursement levels or restored tendered services!
After painting such a gloomy, if realistic picture of what the key issues are, it is time to summarise.
We need to:
- Keep working at the politics nationally and locally. It may not yield much fruit, but you cannot stop trying.
- Lead and motivate our staff; it may cost us more support staff at depot level to achieve it, but staff turnover on the current and likely scale would surely cost more.
- Empower staff again to manage locally and take commercial risks again as we were doing until recently. We cannot run our businesses on short-termism like governments are currently running countries worldwide.
- Get the detail right on the ground all the time to delight our customers (which we are not doing in many places I am visiting). This may take extra resources, but we need to try and get to a situation very quickly where it is seen as ‘cool’ to travel by bus. It may also require recognition that basic operational and commercial skills, rather than excessive reliance on new technology, are what are required to deliver a good product.
- Train, develop and motivate all staff continuously, but seek to develop an increase in available commercial skills urgently.
- Establish an industry wide campaign with a suitable nationwide personality champion to restore the bus as a serious and credible alternative to the private car and be prepared to work even harder on the ground to deliver what is needed to achieve this. Claire Walters of Greener Journeys also echoes my view.
I make no apology for having made many of these points before in my series of articles.
