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02
Oct
Bus franchising not ‘a silver bullet’, council leader warns
North Yorkshire Council’s leader has warned that a franchising model for the county’s bus network is not a “silver bullet” for its problems.
Cllr Carl Les, Conservative leader of the authority, said Labour Mayor of York and North Yorkshire David Skaith’s move towards a franchise model was “premature”.
Bus franchising is when a local public transport authority controls the bus routes, timetables, and ticket prices. It then hires private companies to drive the buses.
Other Labour mayors, such as Tracy Brabin in West Yorkshire and former Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, have embraced the model.
At a York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority cabinet meeting today (October 1), Mr Skaith, who has claimed that services in the region are “broken”, signed a statutory notice of intent to start the assessment for a franchise model in the region.
However, Cllr Les told the mayor that he felt that the move would not solve the problems that faces the county’s bus network.
He said:
I accept that this is your decision and this is what you want to do. My concern is that I feel it is premature. Only four weeks ago, we actually endorsed an enhanced partnership way of working about buses.
Clearly you believe that franchising is the silver bullet. I’m not convinced about that. We can have a disagreement about that. We have set up pilots in a large part of the geography of North Yorkshire and I don’t understand why we aren’t waiting to see the actual results from that.
He added:
Having dealt with public transport in a rural area for many years now, we know that it is easy enough to create demand. You announce a new service and put a service on. The challenge is keeping that demand sustainable. Our experience is that we have subsidised a lot of empty buses running around the county, which is why we have rowed back on those subsidies.
Cllr Les asked Mayor Skaith if he could give assurances that there would be no levy on North Yorkshire taxpayers to pay for subsidised buses under a franchise model.
David Skaith, Mayor of York and North Yorkshire.
In response, Mr Skaith said it was too early to make a decision on a levy for the model.
He said:
That’s a point for another day down the line. What I would say is that’s the power of a franchising model, where you will have routes that are profitable and functioning and routes that won’t. Instead of money going to shareholders and private operators they come back into the system to help support those routes that will not be fundamentally as sustainable and would need further subsidies.
That is fundamentally the model of franchising and that is the model that I think we can start exploring with this work. As long as we have the system that we have, it will rely on subsidising, subsidising and subsidising. Money that is generated profitable from those routes is not then currently reinvested into areas where it could be.
Today's cabinet decision means a franchise assessment will be carried out at a cost of £3.5 million.
It will consider how a franchised bus service may look in York and North Yorkshire and give the authority the powers to request patronage and revenue data from bus companies.
The mayor said the move did not necessarily mean the combined authority will franchise the bus network, but that it would be the “start of a journey” towards a franchise model.
You can read our explainer article on why David Skaith is taking the first step towards bus franchising in North Yorkshire here.
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