MPs urge protection for bus funding

24 Jun 13
Funding for local bus services should be protected in Wednesday’s Spending Review, MPs said today. The Environmental Audit Committee said spending on buses was vital to ensuring that people were able to access a host of public services.

By Richard Johnstone | 24 June 2013

Funding for local bus services should be protected in Wednesday’s Spending Review, MPs said today. The Environmental Audit Committee said spending on buses was vital to ensuring that people were able to access a host of public services.

Examining the progress made in the decade since the last government’s Social Exclusion Unit published a report on the impact of transport on social exclusion in 2003, the committee said cuts were ‘inevitably contributing’ to declining accessibility.

For example, hospital accessibility to hospitals continues to fall, with nearly half of people not having ‘reasonable access’ to their nearest hospital.

Despite this, neither central government departments nor local authorities are taking action.

Currently, funding support for bus services primarily comes from councils, while the Department for Transport’s Bus Service Operators Grant helped cover fuel costs. But the MPs found that around 70% of councils reduced their funding for bus services following the Spending Review. BSOG grants to operators from the Department for Transport have also been reduced.

Osborne must therefore do more to protect funding in Wednesday’s Spending Review announcement.

Committee chair Joan Walley said further cuts to funding would make it harder for young adults, pensioners, disabled people and those living in rural areas to access public services.

She added: ‘Growing numbers rely on public transport to get to job interviews or work, attend college or training, visit hospital or access other public services.’

The committee also called for greater coordination of the ‘fragmented’ public sector funding for bus services in England.

An ongoing Department for Education review into the procurement, planning and provision of school transport in England should be extended to include all public sector funding for local transport services. Such a review should consider how savings could be achieved by pooling budgets and procurement or sharing vehicle use for different purposes.

• Meanwhile, a report published by the Institute for Public Policy Research today has called for the North/South divide in transport investment in England to be addressed in the Spending Review.

An analysis by IPPR North found that, of the government-funded projects proposed in the Treasury’s National Infrastructure Plan, the spend per head of population is more than £2,500 in London but just £5 per head in the Northeast. Overall, 89% of planned capital investment will be concentrated in projects in London and the Southeast.

IPPR North director Ed Cox said: ‘Skewed spending benefiting London and the southeast is nothing new but as we head towards new announcements at the Spending Review, these figures will strike most people as deeply unfair.

‘Fairness aside, the more fundamental problem is that they will continue to hold back northern economic prosperity and widen the yawning productivity gap between the capital and the rest of the nation.’

The report called on the government’s revised infrastructure plan, which is set to be published on Thursday, to include a commitment to a ‘regional rebalancing’ of spending.

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