Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [Lords]

Olly Glover Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is great to see this Bill come to the Commons. I applaud its desire to improve the quality and availability of bus services. Buses are at the core of our public transport system and are often wrongly neglected in favour of what some—although definitely not me—would describe as sexier and more alluring methods of transport, such as trams and trains.

As we have heard, there is much that is good in the Bill—particularly the empowerment of local authorities to operate their own services and the provisions to implement services for socially necessary routes—but it could do more to address the needs of rural areas, including through VAT exemptions for small public transport vehicles to encourage demand-responsive and community transport schemes. It could do more to help local authorities to transition to net zero vehicles. As has been said, we should look again at restoring the £3 bus fare cap to a £2 cap.

In Oxfordshire, the county council feels that its bus partnerships with operators are delivering improvements, particularly when it comes to Oxford Bus Company and Thames Travel, which serve my Oxfordshire constituency of Didcot and Wantage. Franchising has the potential to bring further improvements, although it is good that the Government have acknowledged that we do not necessarily need a one-size-fits-all approach. Franchising will be viable only if local authorities are given long-term funding certainty and support to acquire the expertise and capacity in their passenger transport teams.

We Liberal Democrats consider access to primary healthcare facilities to be socially necessary routes. In my constituency, the decision was made in the past few years to change the route of a bus going through the village of Harwell and into Didcot town centre. The change meant that people who live in Harwell can no longer catch one bus to the GP surgery in Didcot, despite it being only 2 miles away. That is the sort of thing we need to consider.

Much about the current bus provision in my constituency is good. The integrated rail and bus terminal at Didcot Parkway enables a convenient interchange. There are decent bus frequencies and journey times during the daytime between Didcot and Wantage, Grove, Oxford and Wallingford, and between Wallingford and Oxford. There are good examples of partnership working between the major employment centres at Harwell campus and Milton Park and the Oxford Bus Company and Thames Travel. For example, Milton Park’s £20-a-year bus pass offer for people who work there is leading to measurable achievements in encouraging modal shift. There is generally decent daytime village provision.

But there is also much that needs to improve. Many villages have no evening or Sunday service, particularly Stanford in the Vale, which has seen significant housing growth. The buses that serve Culham campus, which the Government have proposed as an AI growth zone, are meagre, with no evening or Sunday service. In the evening, service frequencies drop on all routes, meaning that the integration between train and bus at Didcot works less well. Reliability can also be patchy, particularly on routes that involve Oxford, although that is mostly due to road congestion.

I am delighted to be a member of the Transport Committee. In April, we visited Ireland to understand the reasons for a significant increase in rural bus patronage, which increased fivefold between 2022 and 2024. That was achieved through increased public funding and by engaging communities—particularly the local equivalents of town and parish councils—in the design of routes. The core principle is, as a bare minimum, to have the restoration of morning, early afternoon and early evening services—there are also late evening services in many instances to address the issue that was mentioned earlier in respect of pubs—to create a viable alternative to driving.

Ireland has set itself extremely ambitious targets to grow its public transport youth share, from 8% today to 19% in 2030. That would nearly match Swiss levels, which are the highest in Europe. To achieve that, Ireland is investing large amounts in high quality continuous bus corridor infrastructure in urban areas, particularly in Dublin, and there are longer-term plans for significant journey time reductions for inter-city train routes to improve integration between bus and rail. As well as all that, people told us that they are concerned about the social, environmental and economic objectives that they are trying to hit, rather than looking simply at the cost in isolation.

There are good examples in the UK of the Ireland approach. I was on holiday in North Yorkshire in April, and North Yorkshire council had taken over a route abandoned by a private operator, using its own minibuses—route 11 between Clitheroe and Settle. It offers a two-hourly service, and connects well with hourly train services between Clitheroe and Manchester.

Integration is critical to making public transport more accessible and attractive, as Switzerland has shown. For those reasons, the Government’s integrated transport strategy is eagerly awaited, and will be an essential component in achieving better use of our public transport system, to the benefit of the economy, the environment, and reducing social exclusion. Although the Bill goes a long way towards improving bus services, there are a lot of things that the Liberal Democrats would like the Government to go further on, so that we can achieve our ambition for our transport system and ensure that it fulfils our social, economic and environmental needs.