Transport is an essential service. It is also a key factor in economic productivity, and essential to the social and democratic function of a modern society.
Transport accessibility improves productivity and enables the modern economy, allowing people to reach employment and leisure opportunities. Lack of transport is the first barrier to accessing many public services: if you can’t get to the school, hospital, doctor, or community centre, they are worthless to you. So ensuring the unconditional availability of transport is key to realising the value of other Services.
To ensure universal access to transport, the Prosperity 2030 programme makes using local bus services free of charge to citizens, with sufficient reach to access the other public services. A minimum service standard (such as enabling every resident to reach their GP, hospital, and school within one hour from 6am to 6pm) sets quality conditions that councils have to meet in order to preserve local control of funding.
In the first instance, starting with the new parliamentary term, all local buses become free to use. Operators are compensated directly and there is spare capacity in the existing bus network to absorb an increase in ridership of between 20% and 1000% depending on the route and time of day. To protect high use periods, such as commutes, local governments can restrict free access to exclude those times. First year costs are equivalent to the nationwide take from fares, which is £3.55 billion.
The policy is to double bus services over the parliament by expanding the fleet, service infrastructure and workforce. This involves recruiting and training 80,000 drivers, building 447 new depots, and adding 35,000 new buses. A range of estimated costs from 55p to 80p per trip are included in the Appendix. The modelled programme adopts a conservative cost scenario for the overall programme costs. By the end of the parliament, the bus services will have doubled and the total operating and capital costs will run at £15.5 billion a year, including replacing the current fare revenues. All capital is expensed over the course of the programme, not borrowed.
The appropriate service expansion will differ according to area, so the operating budget (£6.4 billion by Year 5) is dispensed to the newly elected Councils on a per capita basis with sparsity weighting, for deployment in locally appropriate ways. The capital budget (£5.2 billion by year 5) is granted based on expansion plans submitted by councils and dispensed against delivery milestones. Local governments that fail to achieve required increases in capacity and reach lose control of their funding and get direct assistance from DfT.