Opinion: Public transport should be run as a service for the public

Cllr Alan Dowson is our City Mayor, and I am his deputy: these are both largely ceremonial functions but also involve supporting community groups across the city.

But we also have Nik Johnson, who is the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: that is an executive function with real power and budgets..... and one of the areas he covers is local bus services.

You may have read in the PT that Stagecoach are proposing to axe 18 bus routes across Cambridgeshire, with three of them here in Peterborough, including the nos 23 and 24 routes which serve the Lynch Wood Business Park, potentially leaving lots of people struggling to get to work.

Less obvious impacts include a merging of routes which leads to reduced services for Eye and Thorney and a reduction in Saturday services on the no2 route serving Paston.

These cuts are all the more shocking, as Stagecoach has just received a new large government grant....given for the purpose of maintaining bus services.

On the plus side, my Lib Dem colleagues in Gunthorpe are pleased that at last the Manor Drive estate is getting a bus service....albeit over ten years after the first houses were built.

So Mayor Nik and the Combined Authority are now trying to put in subsidy to maintain some or all of the bus services which are being cut.

It's how bus services are run in England under a Tory Government. Tory "bus deregulation" in the 1980s was supposed to deliver competition but most areas of the country have ended up with only one dominant private operator. Bus companies cherry pick the services they want to run and councils and combined authorities have to try to step in and provide other services which they think are necessary for social, economic or environmental reasons.

It really need not be like this. Like all mayors of combined authorities, Mayor Nik has "bus franchising powers". He could step in and take over the bus network and "franchise" it out to bus operators, as already happens in London. It's an expensive process but he needs to seriously and urgently look at whether it can be implemented in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.

In the longer term, perhaps we should to go back to the days when councils ran bus services and could use profits from some routes to subsidise others.

Public transport run as a service for the public and not to boost the profits of large private bus companies. That's how it works in many other European countries and it could work like that here too.....is that really too much to ask!