The next item of business is a Scottish Government debate on affordable bus fares. I call Stephen Flynn to speak to and move motion S7M-00367.
15:07
Presiding Officer, I—[Interruption.] Sorry, Presiding Officer—I forgot to put my card in. I am stuck in my ways from down the road, as I have not been used to putting a card into a machine.
I lodged the motion in my name because the impact of the cost of living crisis on people across Scotland is impossible to ignore. Every MSP in the chamber should know that the rising cost of absolutely everything is having a devastating impact on too many of the people who sent us to this place—an inability to take the kids out, to enjoy some down time with friends or simply to pay the bills. The scale of the crisis demands that we do everything that we can with the powers that are available to this Parliament to make lives easier and better.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
On that note, I am happy to give way to Mr Rennie.
I do not disagree with what the cabinet secretary says. However, does he also recognise that people in my constituency and in many other constituencies complain about the lack of bus services altogether, and they want routes developed into more communities so that they can go to work on time, when they are expected to be there?
I thank Mr Rennie for his intervention; I will come to address those points during my speech.
To return to my speech, that is why, in the election just five short weeks ago, the Scottish National Party put tackling the cost of living crisis at the very front of our renewed pitch to the public. Central to that pitch was saying to the public that the transport on which they rely needs to be affordable, reliable—as Mr Rennie outlined—and enjoyable.
Right now in Scotland, 73 per cent of all public transport journeys are made by bus. Those journeys are people going to work, to school, to college, to university, to the doctor, to visit family, to see friends, to pop down to the shops or maybe even to see the football on a Saturday afternoon. To many, our buses are not just a matter of convenience; they are the only option. That is why we have acted decisively in the past and why we will continue to do so throughout this session of Parliament.
Members do not need me to remind them of this fact, because I am sure that the public have made them very well aware of it over the course of the election campaign, but concessionary bus travel—the bus pass—has been one of the many success stories during my party’s time in office. It was a choice that we made and one that the public have chosen to embrace.
Members do not even need to take my word for it—all they have to do is look at the numbers. In 2025, some 113 million journeys were taken by those who qualify for a bus pass due to disability or by virtue of being slightly more senior than others. For our young folk, we have today celebrated 300 million journeys using the free bus pass over the past four years.
[Made a request to intervene.]
I can see that Mr Johnson is very keen to welcome that fact.
I invite the cabinet secretary to welcome the fact that it was the Scottish Labour-Lib Dem coalition Government that introduced the bus pass for the over-60s—I am sure that he was just about to do so.
We are challenging each other now to welcome facts. I notice that he did not do so in respect of the young people’s bus pass. I see that he is now correcting himself—he did.
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
Yes, of course I will take an intervention from Mr Harvie, who I would imagine is about to indicate his role during the course of the previous parliamentary session.
The cabinet secretary has predicted correctly. Just to complete that conversation, I will say that I am sure that the cabinet secretary is proud—and he should be—of the free bus travel for under-22s. I know that he was not here at the time, but does he recognise that that happened only because of Green budget negotiations, first for under-19s and then for under-22s? The Scottish Government allowed itself to be pushed out of its comfort zone, but that did take some work.
I am not sure that we have ever willingly been pushed out of our comfort zone, let alone by Mr Harvie.
We are proud of the commitment that we have made to Scotland’s young people. In a Parliament of minorities, it is important that, where we can get consensus and work together in relation to the budget, we seek to do so.
In real terms, more than 3 million journeys are being made every single week with the Scottish Government bus pass. I had the good fortune to visit Buchanan bus station in Glasgow this morning to hear from young folk who have been making the most of it. They told me about the positive impact that free bus travel has had on their lives, saving them money and opening up work, education, leisure, social and even relationship opportunities—
[Made a request to intervene.]
—which Mr Hoy seems to have a particular interest in.
I rise not in a spirit of self-congratulation, unlike the other members who have intervened so far. I have a question about young people beyond the cities. I recently met young carers of Dumfries and Galloway, who raised with me not the cost of bus travel but the absence of bus travel. Does the cabinet secretary accept that there is a trade-off? With a finite budget, if the Scottish Government is going to continue to expand discounted and concessionary travel, that is likely to be at the expense of lifeline services in areas such as Dumfriesshire.
Mr Hoy tries to drag me into a conversation in relation to the reliability and availability of buses, but he need not do that, because I understand and recognise the importance of access to buses in our rural communities. I would like to think that there would be agreement and consensus on that. Is Mr Hoy doing the “6-7” gesture there? I am not entirely sure what he is doing. Is it a wee dance?
It is important that we all work together to ensure that the public have access to the services that they feel that they require. I will come on to that later in my speech, as I said to Mr Rennie.
For our young people, free bus travel has opened up a sea of opportunities. I think that I speak for us all—indeed, most of us—when I say that we would have loved to have had those chances in our youth. I am proud that it is a Scottish National Party Government, supported during the budget process by others, that has chosen to provide them to that generation.
It is not only about giving our young folk more choice and a better life; it is about the core value of reducing daily costs for families. With 85 per cent of our young people saying that the bus pass has done just that, we can safely say that it has done its job. I make it clear to the Parliament that, although I celebrate the work of those who came before me and the cross-party support that there has been for those actions, I see the policy as only a starting point. It is for us in this parliamentary session to take action to ensure that public transport is affordable for everyone.
I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for being so generous in taking interventions. Does he agree that one of the further steps that needs to be taken is to make free bus travel for asylum seekers permanent, following the pilot of that policy? That would be a way to ensure that asylum seekers in our communities are able to access the services that they have a right to reach.
I understand Mr Harvie’s argument and I am more than willing to engage with him on that particular issue.
However, I turn to a different pilot. Earlier this year, the SNP Government launched our £2 bus fare cap pilot in the Highlands and Islands. Backed by £10 million of public money, the pilot was designed to make travel more affordable, accessible and straightforward, the importance of which for our rural and island communities cannot be understated. From the early feedback that I have heard, it is doing just that—it is reducing the cost of everyday journeys and supporting people to take the bus.
As the First Minister has set out, and as per our manifesto commitment, we are now working at pace to expand the benefits of that £2 fare cap beyond the Highlands and Islands. Initially, that means making progress within the first 100 days of this Government to extend the cap to Glasgow, Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Inverclyde. Beyond that, we will introduce the legislation that is needed to deliver a nationwide £2 fare cap by the end of this parliamentary session.
For several years, my constituents have been frustrated that they are paying the most expensive bus fares in the United Kingdom when other parts of the UK have enjoyed a £2 bus cap for the past three years. They are also frustrated that bus franchising is still not being implemented in Scotland while other parts of the UK have delivered it. Why is the pace so slow?
I am not sure that I can go much quicker, having just been elected to this Parliament, than to give the commitment that I just made in relation to our party’s first 100 days in office. I am hopeful, based on what Mr Sweeney said, that he will back our proposals when it comes to the budget, because history dictates that his party has not been as co-operative during the budget process as it perhaps could have been to move some of those issues forward in the way that he described.
Will Mr Flynn take an intervention?
I will make some progress, if that is okay—actually, I see that Craig Hoy is desperate to come in, so I will let him.
For clarification, is the cabinet secretary now proposing to extend the pilot scheme to the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport area? In light of the experience of the pilot, will there be any subsequent changes before legislation is introduced, or is that a phased roll-out that will require legislation?
I feel as though I need to repeat myself: we just ran an election campaign with the commitment to extend the £2 bus fare cap to those areas front and centre. We will seek to do that as quickly as is practically possible. We will then seek to legislate on doing that across Scotland, as per the very sentences that I just said in the chamber. However, I appreciate that Mr Hoy is maybe a bit slow on the uptake on the odd occasion.
I assure the chamber that I and my officials are already working with operators, regional partners and stakeholders to make sure that we deliver on the promise that we have made to the people. I know that many members will be keen to learn more, and I hope to be able to share some good news on timings soon.
Our ambitions for a £2 fare are clear but they are only part of the story. We need buses that are affordable, but we also need them to be available. There is much good work taking place across Scotland by operators to ensure that that is the case. I know that only too well, given the service that I use at home every week. However, I recognise and understand that my good experience is not everyone’s experience. If we believe that buses should be not just a commercial service but a core local service, we need to continue to work with operators and stakeholders to ensure that everyone has that good experience in their community.
That is why we have already worked to ensure that local transport authorities have more flexibility to respond to their own unique transport challenges. Through legislation, we have given local authorities powers on partnership working, franchising and the ability to run their own services.
That may be true, but why have no such partnerships been brought forward? Why did it take six years for the Government to publish guidelines on bus franchising? Those were published only in March, despite the Transport (Scotland) Bill being agreed to in 2019.
The SPT has come forward with such plans, as I am sure Mr Johnson is aware.
Of those powers, franchising has perhaps been the subject of the greatest attention from members in the chamber, such as Mr Simpson, and from the public outwith it.
The cabinet secretary has been extremely generous with interventions. I want him to address the question on franchising. I know that the issue precedes him, but there has been huge frustration about the time that it is taking in Scotland. Will he use the opportunity presented by any legislation that he introduces, or any other means, to speed things up?
I will come to that point in just a second.
It is that interest that led us to work on a cross-party basis during the current budget process and to commit up to £4 million to support local transport authorities in developing business cases for local bus improvements through franchising, using the powers that were created in the legislation to which Mr Johnson referred.
It is essential that, if that is the route for buses that some choose to take, the business case is robust and considers all available evidence.
As the First Minister said in Parliament two weeks ago,
“We want to work with local authorities to advance such propositions, because they would be in the public interest.”—[Official Report, 4 June 2026; c 28.]
With those words in mind, I advise Parliament that we will build on the work that has already been undertaken to date by developing better buses legislation during this session of Parliament.
The legislation, which will take a considered—I am sure that members will be pleased to hear this—cross-party approach, will aim to help to enhance the delivery of bus services across Scotland. We will engage with operators, local transport authorities and others to inform the development of our proposals. I look forward to working with members across the chamber to put the needs of passengers at the very heart of the process.
Deputy Presiding Officer, I am conscious of the time, given the number of interventions that I have taken. To conclude, I repeat my view that affordable bus fares are essential for helping with the cost of living. For many of my constituents, particularly those who are under 22, older people and disabled people, the bus pass that this Government has delivered is making a huge difference to their lives. For some, it is the thing that breaks down the barriers of isolation and brings them into the heart of their communities and our society.
We will go further. Our vision for transport is rooted in affordability, accessibility and sustainability. I note for Mr Hoy that, by the end of this session of Parliament, we will introduce legislation to put in place a £2 bus fare cap across Scotland, which will include our pilot in the Highlands and Islands. That step of providing more affordable bus travel will help to change lives and tackle the cost of living. Our action will benefit families, the economy and the environment, and I look forward to working with colleagues across the chamber to deliver that.
However, before we get to that, I give the final word of my opening remarks to the unsung heroes of our buses—the mechanics, the office teams, the route planners and, indeed, the drivers. They are the glue that binds our service together—the friendly face on a dreich morning and the ones who hold the bus when we make that last-minute sprint to catch it. I say to them, the choices that we make in this Parliament will matter to you, and we will work with you and the public to make our bus service the best that it can be.
I move,
That the Parliament recognises the importance of affordable bus services connecting people to employment, education and essential services; welcomes the success of the free bus schemes available to 2.4 million people, including all those aged under 22, over 60 and disabled people; believes that more can be done to make it easier and cheaper for everyone to get around and supports, therefore, the phased rollout of a £2 bus fare cap, building on its introduction in the Highlands and Islands; endorses the introduction of the £2 cap in Glasgow, Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire and Inverclyde as quickly as is practicable as part of the next phase of a national rollout, and welcomes the opportunity to develop Better Buses legislation in the current parliamentary session to support the delivery of affordable fares nationally and foster new routes, not least in rural areas.
I call Graham Simpson to speak to and move amendment S7M-00367.1.
15:24
I congratulate the cabinet secretary on devising a motion that we can support. I am looking forward to working with him—I genuinely am.
I have always been of the view that we need to make public transport easy and cheap to use and that it needs to cover all parts of the country. It is all very well having a bus fare cap, but that is no use if people do not have a bus that they can use.
There are far too many bus deserts in Scotland, and they are not just in rural areas. Franchising, where it is wanted, could help to alleviate that, but there are other models, too. I said during the cabinet secretary’s first debate, which was on growth, that his predecessor in the transport brief often listened to me and took my ideas on board, and bus fare caps are an example of that.
No praise like self-praise.
Well, everyone else is doing it.
I have been talking about bus fare caps for at least three years, and I have been talking about simpler low fares for longer. At general question time in April 2023, I said:
“If the minister was serious about getting people on to buses, he would take action on bus fares, as he is doing on train fares. Why does he not replicate what England has, which is a fare cap on local bus journeys?”—[Official Report, 20 April 2023; c 3.]
I did not get anywhere then.
In a debate on bus services the following month, I said:
“fares can play a big part in getting people on to public transport. We await the introduction of a cross-modal travel card of the type that was given to delegates at the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26. We can only look south with envy at the £2 fare cap”.—[Official Report, 17 May 2023; c 27.]
I tried again at First Minister’s question time in November of that year and, later that month at general question time, I was banging the same drum, when I said to a minister:
“The minister is perhaps missing an opportunity here, because we could have a Scottish bus fare cap if she chose to consider it. Is the minister prepared at least to look at the proposal and what it might cost?”—[Official Report, 30 November 2023; c 7.]
I kept on and on, and I was getting quite exasperated, but eventually the Government came round to the idea of a bus fare cap and, naturally, it badged that as a collaboration between it and the Greens, but such is life—it came to the right conclusion.
I want fare capping to succeed, as it has down south and as have similar schemes when tried elsewhere in Europe and indeed in these isles. The evidence is there already. In London, bus and tram travel is capped at £5.25 a day and £24.70 a week. Here in Edinburgh, Lothian’s TapTapCap system already caps journeys at £5.70 a day and £26.50 a week.
In the time that it has taken the Government to even consider introducing the equivalent of the Oyster card, the technology has been superseded not only by the tap-in, tap-out technology that Mr Simpson refers to but now contactless technology and even the use of phones in the form of things such as Uber for public transport, which means that we do not even need the fare-gate infrastructure that we once did. This is so easy to introduce, so why has the Government not done it? Surely that is a missed opportunity.
Paul Sweeney is absolutely right. I, too, have been talking about advances in technology, both in public and in private. The Government needs to get on board with that. Why it has not done so is a mystery to me. I cannot answer for the Government, but I wish that it would get on with this.
We have other examples. In Dublin, the fare for Leap card users in zone 1 is capped at €6 a day or €24 a week. Across England, many single bus fares are capped at £3. In North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, the cap is a monthly spend of €63.
The idea is good, and we want it to work, but making public transport cheaper will work only if it is there for people in the first place and if we make it easy to use. That is where my amendment comes in. Franchising is allowed in Scotland but, so far, only SPT, which covers Strathclyde, is pursuing it. The frustration is that franchising exists in law but, for too long, it has looked easier to legislate for than to deliver. If it takes years of assessments, consultations, audits and approvals before a single new bus appears, passengers will wonder exactly what is going on.
Scotland cannot keep congratulating itself for giving councils powers if using those powers is slow and cumbersome, with the result that communities see no benefit for years. The process here is heavily bureaucratic. A local transport authority has to go through multiple costly hurdles, as SPT is doing.
At the end, if franchising gets that far, there is the added hoop of having to get the whole scheme approved by an independent, unelected panel that is convened by the traffic commissioner for Scotland, who is a United Kingdom Government appointee. After years of effort, the whole thing could fall at that point, which is wrong. Therefore, I support the Get Glasgow Moving campaign’s calls to simplify the existing legislation early in this parliamentary session. The cabinet secretary needs to look at that as a matter of urgency.
The Government needs to commit to funding SPT for that work. We also need multimodal ticketing—the national smart ticketing advisory board is taking far too long in its work. The second part of my amendment calls for that work to be sped up, and I am glad that the Government recognises the need for that. Again, parts of England are way ahead on that model. The West Midlands probably provides the best example, but the broader lesson is that parts of England are moving ahead with integrated planning, ticketing and on-demand travel while Scotland is still talking about it. Last week, I suggested that once the cabinet secretary is back from the States, if he indeed goes—I hope that he does—he should use the summer to get out and about to see what is going on elsewhere.
If ministers are serious about affordable public transport, the test is simple—to make it cheaper, make it easier and make sure that it actually turns up.
I move amendment S7M-00367.1, to insert at end:
“; believes that any such legislation should aim to streamline the process of introducing franchising, and calls on the Scottish Government to speed up its work on introducing multi-modal smart ticketing across Scotland.”
15:31
I am sure that the cabinet secretary is thinking exactly what I am thinking, which is that we should bookmark today’s Official Report, go back in five years’ time and look at Graham Simpson’s contribution to find out what we should have done back then, given his prescience. In all seriousness, I think that Graham Simpson made a lot of sense.
In these matters, Edinburgh members go forward with a degree of jeopardy if we extol the virtues of the system that we have here and look quizzically at why other parts of Scotland do not have it. However, the Lothian bus model does require some examination.
There are a number of interesting anniversaries this year. In 1926, the Annandale Street bus depot opened, which made possible 12 routes and 43 miles of service spanning the city. In 1986—the anniversary for this is in October—Lothian Region Transport was set up as a publicly owned arm’s-length company. There was an attempt to encourage it into the arms of Stagecoach through a management buyout, which was resisted due to the foresight of Labour councillors on Lothian Regional Council. The company’s structure was maintained, and it survived local government reorganisation.
I make that point because, although the points that have been made about fare capping are important, we ultimately need a good model that can deliver public services with low fares and good infrastructure, which is what we have in Lothian Buses. It is because of the model—of a publicly owned, arm’s-length company that is run in the interests of public service—that we have those benefits.
Will the member give way?
I am happy to give way to Craig Hoy, although I think that I will not agree with him.
I thank Mr Johnson for taking the intervention and for extolling the virtues of Lothian Buses. My experience as a South Scotland MSP until the election was that, as we go further into the Lothian Buses region and particularly the rural areas beyond Edinburgh, the approval rating drops significantly. Does that speak to the point that we should always look through the lens of rural passengers as well as urban passengers when debating the future of our bus services?
We always need to look at the detail and, critically, I agree with Craig Hoy that we need public transport services that provide a service to all people, wherever they live. I disagree with him on the words that are in the Conservative amendment, because I do not believe that good service is achieved through competition. In the past 40 years, we have seen what competition has delivered: the destruction of services and of availability. Ultimately, it is through public ownership that those things are regained, which is very much the tenor of the amendment that we have lodged.
On the Government’s motion, I very much agree with much of what the cabinet secretary said. We have to focus on practical measures that deal with the cost of living, and there is no doubt in my mind that addressing the cost of getting to work and going about daily life is fundamental to that. Labour members will welcome anything, particularly around the bus fares cap, that can contribute to alleviating those pressures.
However, a number of questions need to be answered. First, the cost of the subsidy for long-distance journeys will, inevitably, be higher. For example, in the Highlands and Islands pilot, the £2 fare cap reduced the cost of a fare from Inverness to Wick from £28 to £2. Will all long-distance journeys be covered by the fare cap? If so, what is the projected cost?
Secondly, there is a real risk that the fare cap will benefit operators that charge higher fares. First Bus single fares range from £2.45 to £7.10, whereas publicly owned Lothian Buses, which won awards in both 2024 and 2025, has a flat fare of £2.40. It would be not only ironic but downright unfair if a higher subsidy was provided to bus operators that currently charge the public more, with publicly funded services being disadvantaged. There is also the matter of flexible ticketing, which Graham Simpson mentioned, and multimodal ticketing—bluntly, tickets that span trams and buses. How will they be dealt with?
Thirdly, and most importantly, as Graham Simpson and Willie Rennie have highlighted, it is all well and good capping bus fares, but there need to be buses available for people to use. The reality is that we have since 2007 lost 1,400 bus routes in Scotland. We need to hear from the Scottish Government how that issue will be addressed, because it cannot be addressed in isolation.
A wider point needs to be made. Transport is not just a convenience or a daily function; it is critical to economic growth and a healthy economy. We know that there is a big disparity in productivity across our cities. There is about a 50 per cent difference in output per hour worked between Edinburgh and either Glasgow or Dundee. Data from Centre for Cities shows that the Glasgow city economy is £7.3 billion smaller per year than it would be if it performed comparably with other similarly sized western European cities.
The critical issue is people’s ability to get to and from places where they can get better employment and better wages. Buses are absolutely central to that. According to the Resolution Foundation, in small towns, a 30-minute commute by car connects workers to 20 times more job opportunities than would be available using public transport, and, in core cities, such a commute would connect workers to seven times more job opportunities. We need to address the challenge of providing people with the ability to travel to better employment.
That is why Scottish Labour included a number of transport priorities in our manifesto. In that context, we must look at, for example, dualling the A9, delivering a modern metro system for Glasgow, how we link our cities across Scotland and how we fund route development across the world. We are talking not about conveniences but about fundamental economic links.
Franchising, which has been mentioned quite a lot in interventions, is a fundamental and important mechanism for delivering better bus services. It is not an accident that it is used across the world in places such as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Singapore.
We must face the simple reality that, whereas guidance on the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 was published only in the past few months, franchising was being brought forward in Manchester within a year of the equivalent legislation in England being passed in 2017. Across England, there is now franchising in Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire, and franchising plans in South Yorkshire and the West Midlands are well advanced.
Could the member wind up, please?
That is the critical difference. How are we going to make progress? Frankly, the comparison does not stand up to much scrutiny.
I move amendment S7M-00367.3, to insert at end:
“, and calls on the Scottish Government to take active steps to make bus franchising a reality, by providing the funding and support necessary for Regional Transport Partnerships to fully and more rapidly exercise the powers set out in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, and to advance public control of farebox revenue so that Scotland’s passengers, not private operators, benefit from a restored public bus network.”
15:39
I join Mr Flynn in paying fulsome tribute to those who work across our bus network. It can be a challenging job with the rise in antisocial behaviour, and we need to recognise that. I will return to that later in my speech.
Today, the Government runs the risk of potentially putting its ambition to deliver cheap headlines and its pursuit of the free ahead of two fundamental propositions: the fairness and the consistency of bus provision for passengers right across Scotland. As Mr Johnson said, the Scottish Conservatives believe that competition between different providers is, in many instances—but, I accept, not all—an effective way to achieve those things.
Until the minister spoke, I was unsure as to whether today’s announcement was, in effect, about an expansion of the Highlands pilot into the greater Glasgow and SPT area or a signal of intent that the Government now intends to legislate for a national £2 fare cap. I take it that it is the latter. Regardless of our views on a fare cap, we should be concerned about the possible cost implications and the implications for the wider transport market, given the already significant costs for free bus travel for under-22s and over-60s—which we have supported, but which we now need to recognise is very costly. Costs are also associated with the policy of free travel for asylum seekers, which is still in pilot. I note for the record that the Scottish Conservatives continue to oppose that policy in the new session of Parliament.
This question is not so much for the minister as for the Deputy—
Will the member take an intervention?
I will.
The member is focusing on the cost of policies, but he is looking at only half of the equation. He is talking about the shared costs that the public sector funds for policies that we choose to pay for collectively. In the absence of those policies, those costs fall on families, on individuals and on workers. Surely the member agrees that, at the moment, the costs of bus services in much of Scotland that fall on the shoulders of individuals and families are unacceptable.
I accept that there is work to do around the fare cap. It was a Conservative Government in the rest of the UK that introduced the pilot scheme in England. As always, the devil will be in the detail, and I will turn to that now.
The Scottish Government faces the tightest of all fiscal corners, and—
Will the member take an intervention?
I am afraid that I do not have time. Today’s announcement potentially serves only to—
You will get the time back.
I will take the intervention if I can have the time back, Deputy Presiding Officer.
You will get the time back.
The member has expressed his concern about the loss of some services, particularly in rural areas. I think that most members would agree with that point. However, I note that he is changing his wording slightly. His amendment says that there should be
“affordability and reliability and that competition between different providers is the most effective way to achieve”
the provision. Is it not the case that he is arguing for two polar opposites at the same time? He is complaining about the loss of services in the free market, but he is then arguing that only the free market can provide services effectively. Both cannot be true at the same time.
I am not saying that. I am saying that, in most instances—probably all instances—effective competition with an element of state subsidy, particularly for rural areas and hard-to-reach parts of the UK, is the sensible approach. Nobody has questioned that in the chamber. We will still need to have supported bus services, now and into the future.
Wherever members stand on concessionary travel, both at the present level and were we, for example, to pursue the Greens’ position of universal free bus transport, there is surely sufficient economic literacy in the chamber for us to recognise that it is not free. It has to be paid for by someone—
Collectively.
—regardless of whether or not they use bus services.
That brings me to a point that Mr Harvie is perhaps not fully recognising. Services are paid for regardless of whether people have access to bus services in their communities. One of my issues with the SNP’s motion is that, although it is very specific on the £2 pledge, it is far less specific about what the fairer and better rural bus service would look like and whether a specific support scheme would be drawn up for rural bus services, as the Scottish Conservatives propose.
Does Mr Hoy not recognise that the deregulation of buses in 1986 was a complete and abject failure? The sort of competition that he is describing is not really possible with these sorts of services. How does he account for that failure, if competition is the guiding principle for success in bus services?
There are different models in different parts of the country. Daniel Johnson referred to Lothian Buses, and I have referred to East Lothian, where Lothian Buses has taken over commercial routes from local operators. With its full might, it has been able to go in with a lower bid, but it is delivering poorer services in certain locations and it is putting city buses on rural roads. Some of the issues are as simple as that.
I will give an example of where competition has, in part, worked and the private sector has stepped in. Last year, in Dumfries and Galloway, Stagecoach—which, in my view, behaved appallingly and was a bad actor in that marketplace—simply withdrew, keeping only two services that it believed to be commercial and leaving others to go to the wall. However—
Will the member take an intervention?
I will not. I want to make progress.
It was not only the council that stepped in. Small providers such as Houstons and other operators stepped in—[Interruption.]
The member is not taking an intervention, and he will be winding up.
—to make sure that those services would be kept alive. The one-size-fits-all model that I suspect that Mr Johnson would like to see, which involves using franchising to, in effect, nationalise Scotland’s bus services, does not recognise the work of operators such as Borders Buses. Those operators manage their routes very effectively, but I accept that in certain conditions they need state support in rural areas. That principle is established.
I return to the specifics of the £2 policy. There are critical questions that the minister needs to address, which have been asked not only by me but by others. How will additional demand be modelled and funded? What will be in and out of scope? What will we do for long journeys and for journeys for which the subsidy will be far smaller? Why was £2 chosen and not £1 or £3? What implications will there be for existing integrated ticketing schemes? What impacts will there be on other transport modes and their revenues, including the Glasgow subway and ScotRail, which is now under SNP control? What consideration has been given to the operational changes that will be required to implement the scheme across a vast region?
We are holding judgment on whether the £2 pilot fare can be rolled out across the country in an affordable and achievable way.
I draw attention to one other reason why we cannot support the SNP Government’s motion, which is that it paints a rosy picture of the introduction of concessionary travel. I accept that it is very popular, but there are problems in relation to, for example, antisocial behaviour. The motion sweeps the problems under the carpet and focuses only on the positives. Before we roll out something as significant and, potentially, as costly as this to all parts of Scotland, we must make sure that a full evaluation—
The member must wind up.
—has taken place. The minister has not yet given us an assurance that that is the case.
I move amendment S7M-00367.4, to leave out from “believes that” to end and insert:
“considers that a functioning bus network should be centred on affordability and reliability and that competition between different providers is the most effective way to achieve this; notes with concern the deteriorating provision of bus services across Scotland, including the numerous routes, particularly in rural areas, that have had their service levels reduced or removed; warns that the expansion of concessionary bus travel could increase the risk of inequality in access to bus services between urban and rural areas; calls on the Scottish Government to take greater action to protect bus drivers and tackle anti-social behaviour on buses, and agrees with the views that the regulations and code of conduct implemented in the previous parliamentary session to remove passes from passengers who commit anti-social behaviour are not strong enough.”
15:47
I welcome the fact that this debate has been secured and I am glad that the Government is so proud of many policies that the Greens persuaded it to adopt. We have all enjoyed a bit of knockabout with us all claiming credit, but I genuinely believe that this Parliament is at its best when political parties seek out the common ground between one other and find ways to work together. On bus travel, that has been achieved, and I am glad of it.
The Greens have worked hard to protect local routes in our communities up and down the country. We have worked to give voice to bus users, who are very rarely heard from, in contrast with the likes of the road lobby. We have worked to expand free bus travel, first for under-19s and then for under-22s and asylum seekers. I restate the need to make that scheme for asylum seekers a permanent policy after the pilot scheme, which closed some time ago.
The £2 bus fare cap came up in a budget discussion with the SNP. At the time, we were told that a national £2 bus fare cap was not achievable and all that we could get was a pilot. We were glad to see that as a small step in the right direction; I am even more glad that the Government now acknowledges that we were right in the first place and that a national roll-out of that policy is the right way to go.
All those measures, policies, interventions and subsidies—and those on infrastructure, the provision of information to passengers and the transition to low carbon, on which we have more to do—demonstrate that privatisation and deregulation as a model of bus service provision has comprehensively failed. It has failed for decades. I genuinely think that the most comical aspect of today’s debate is in the text of Mr Hoy’s amendment, which says that
“competition between different providers is the most effective way to achieve”
affordability and reliability. I invite members to consider the parallel universe in which that statement would be true. In that parallel universe, we would have seen, for the past 40 years, continual improvement in the reliability and affordability of bus services throughout the country. Buses would be as cheap as they are in the most progressive European countries. They would be a ubiquitous, reliable way for people in every community to get about.
However, that is simply not true. In truth, private sector operators cherry pick the routes that they want to run; they cut the services that they do not want to run or restrict the times of day at which they operate; and they hike the fares to meet the commercial needs and interests of the owners, rather than the transport needs of communities. After all that, they still want subsidy. They still want to benefit from public money being put in, whether to cut the fares, to improve the vehicles or to address other aspects of how the system is run. Therefore, we do not have a private sector, market-led, competition-led model that works; frankly, it is a farce.
Does Mr Harvie agree that the most extreme example of how the argument has been polarised is the Conservatives’ opposition to the concessionary travel scheme for people seeking asylum, when there was previously consensus on that measure, which included members such as Mr Carlaw? While profit is being extracted from the system, the Conservatives want the weakest members of the community, who are banned from working and banned from social security, to be—in their view—penalised.
Mr Sweeney knows that I agree very strongly with him on that point. The opposition to free travel for asylum seekers is not really about bus services; it is about a desire to punch down against a marginalised and vulnerable minority for populist reasons. It is disgraceful.
We have an opportunity, because the solution is before us—we must shift to franchising. That process needs to be accelerated, made less bureaucratic and given financial support from the Government, because that is how we can protect service standards, including in the rural areas that many members have talked about. We must take away from operators the power to simply scrap routes and abandon communities. At the same time, we must ensure that the public sector, which is paying for the subsidy, sets the service standard. From there, we will be able to move on.
I say unashamedly that we should deliver those franchises to publicly owned operators, whether they are nationally owned or—as I would prefer—locally owned, with their routes in the communities that they serve, because that is how we can provide public transport that is a genuine public service, which is what Scotland deserves.
15:52
When the cabinet secretary described his new bus bill, I was intrigued by what he meant by one little line that he did not expand upon. He indicated that we might require legislation for the bus fare cap, but he also indicated that we could potentially need it in relation to regulation. Was he indicating that new legislation will be required to speed up the process? I am happy to take an intervention from him to hear whether that is what his intention is.
I will come back to the member on that.
Okay—that is fine. It is intriguing in itself that the cabinet secretary is not able to answer that question straight away.
For me, the issue is all about routes. In Fife, I experience the almost annual round of bus changes, which radically disrupts people’s lives. I will give an example. For people who live in Auchtermuchty and work in Perth, the bus route has been changed twice, and they now have to change bus several times in order to get to work. Many people simply cannot make it work. They have to get up extraordinarily early to make it possible to get to work.
The bus companies just go around cherry picking. I have to say that Stagecoach is the worst, because it just picks the routes that it wants. It tries out routes and gets people to use those bus services, but once people have created new lives and new working patterns, it pulls the rug away from them in the following year. Meanwhile, the council has to come along and fill in the gaps, together with Moffat & Williamson, which is a very effective bus company. Not all the private operators are profiteers. Moffat & Williamson works well for its communities—it works with the council to fill in the gaps in services. That happens almost every year. Meanwhile, Stagecoach just chooses the routes that it wants.
I want to urge a little bit of caution, because it was found from the English pilots on a bus fare cap that it did not represent particularly good value for money. The network support grant has been cut by about 31 per cent in real terms since 2012. I worry about us putting more money into a cap and concessionary fares. The effect of that could be that we shift support from rural areas to urban areas. Of course I am in favour of the cap and concessionary fares, but I want us to think carefully about how we use public funds in a time when public finance is restricted.
I do not know whether the cabinet secretary has an answer yet to the regulation point, but maybe we will keep on waiting. Is the cabinet secretary going to come back to me today or wait until he consults his officials? I am genuinely intrigued. As far as I am aware, we do not need legislation for the bus fare cap, so why are we introducing a bill if it is not for something more substantial? I think that an awful lot of organisations, such as Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, would welcome a simplified process that takes a shorter time than the seven years that it has taken to get to the stage that we are at now. If a simplified process is coming down the track, I would very much welcome that.
I took a little time to respond to the member’s point, because I think that he might have misheard me earlier. I was looking at my speech and I am not sure that I used the phrase that he intimated I used.
On the point about legislation regarding the £2 fare cap, that is indeed what we said in our manifesto. The better buses legislation is something that I will seek to work on with Mr Rennie and others to ensure that we can secure better services for people across Scotland. However, I do not think that I used the specific phrase that he mentioned. Maybe we can check the Official Report later.
I am still not sure that that is very clear, because I am not quite sure what “better services across Scotland” really means. Maybe we will find out more when the cabinet secretary comes before the Transport Committee later this year and he can perhaps explain the position in full.
I will support Graham Simpson’s amendment on multimodal ticketing. We should have had smart ticketing some time ago. People, particularly those in rural areas, who move from one bus to the next or even to the train require a much more simplified process.
15:57
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which states that I am a sitting member of Angus Council.
A bus fare is not just the price of a ticket. It can be the difference between a journey made and a journey missed. For the young worker in Arbroath travelling to Dundee, it might decide whether it is practical to take a job. For the mum in Glamis trying to reach an appointment in Kirriemuir, it is one more cost in a week already stretched. For the older person trying to stay connected, it can be the difference between being part of community life and being cut off from it. That is why fares matter. They are not only about the cost of travel; they are about the practical choices that people make.
Scotland has already made important progress: free bus travel for young people has widened access to college, work and training; concessionary travel protects the freedom of older and disabled people; and new powers give councils more tools to shape services around local need. That is a record worth defending, but we must go further. For working-age adults on low incomes, people just outside existing eligibility and families counting every penny, a fare that is too high does not simply make travel dearer—it can make travel impossible. That is why a £2 cap matters. It gives people certainty before they take the job, book the appointment or visit family.
However, price is only half of the promise. A cheaper ticket matters only if there is a bus that people can actually use. The test is not just about what the fare costs but about whether the bus fits the early shift, whether it connects with the train and whether it gets someone home again. That is especially important in rural and small-town Scotland. In many areas such as mine, people use cars because that is the only practical option. We should not lecture people out of cars when the bus does not meet the shift, the appointment or the last train home. We have to make public transport a real and practical choice. That requires action from Government, and it requires operators to not only consider passenger numbers and profit but properly listen to the views and needs of our communities. I associate myself with the comments of Mr Rennie in that regard. A £2 cap should not stand alone. It should come with buses that meet shifts, timetables that connect with trains and community transport where a fixed route cannot do the job.
As a councillor, I was proud to help to secure a demand-led transport service for some of the smallest rural communities in Angus. I have travelled on that service and spoken to the passengers who use it. The main phrase that stayed with me was that it “wrapped around” their lives. That is the point. Public transport works best when it fits people’s lives, instead of people being asked to fit their lives around a timetable that does not work for them. Demand-led transport is not the answer everywhere, but in communities where a traditional fixed route will never meet every need, it can be part of the answer.
That reminds us what the debate is really about. The fare is the price of the journey, but the value of that journey is what it makes possible: a shift accepted; a hospital appointment kept; a grandparent visited. That is why action to make fares more affordable matters. It puts more money back into people’s pockets and shows a Government that is on the side of passengers. We should be proud of that. A £2 cap can make the fare fairer, but the next task is bigger: not just lower fares, but services that are built around people’s lives.
I remind members that, if they wish to speak in the debate, they should press their request-to-speak buttons.
16:01
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests: I am a Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency-approved driving instructor and a serving councillor in Aberdeenshire. I should also say that members might have a little bit of déjà vu, as my speech echoes quite a few of the views that have already been stated, especially those of Lloyd Melville.
When we talk about public transport, we are talking about not just buses, timetables and ticket prices, but freedom: the basic fundamental right to connect, get to work, attend school, access healthcare, socialise and see loved ones. We are making immense strides in that respect. Scotland boasts the most generous concessionary travel scheme of anywhere in the UK. Through the SNP Scottish Government’s commitment to the future, we are providing entirely free bus travel to everyone over the age of 60, those with eligible disabilities, and all children and young people under 22. That is a total of 2.3 million Scots who can hop on a bus without reaching for a penny, thus saving families money.
However, we cannot stop there. The reality for working adults and families who fall outside those brackets is that, because the daily commute in my area can cost upwards of £15 a day—which often amounts to more than an hour or two of wages—people are forced into their cars. It is cheaper to drive and pay parking fees, especially if family members travel together. That is not just an economic penalty on working families—it is a hurdle to our environmental ambitions.
That is exactly why the push for fairer, capped and affordable fares is critical. We have seen the tangible difference that has been made as a result of the trial of the regional £2 bus fare cap pilot across the Highlands, Argyll and Bute and our island communities. By capping exorbitant rural fares at just £2, we are putting money back into people’s pockets, and giving them their time back. We are replacing a prohibitive cost-of-living burden with a simple, practical and accessible transport alternative. The evidence is clear: when public transport works well and is priced fairly, it gives communities a new lease of life.
However, as has been mentioned by others, and as the cabinet secretary has acknowledged, the same right to public transport is not afforded to those who live in small towns and rural areas. Small-town circular services are pretty much a thing of the past, and people connect to the main cities mainly through a hub-and-spoke model—which, as Willie Rennie and others have pointed out, involves routes being cherry picked. People have to go into the hub to connect and make their journey back out to their destination. Because buses between small towns and villages are few and far between, there is a disproportionate amount of transport poverty in rural areas such as my constituency of Angus North and Mearns, where people might have to travel miles before they even get to a bus route. That said, the introduction of Ember buses has had a hugely positive impact in Angus and Aberdeenshire.
The matter is one of equal opportunity, as regular and reliable public transport makes it possible for those who cannot drive to get about and access town and city centres. It is generally taken for granted that the majority of people are capable of driving, but there are myriad reasons why a good proportion of the population cannot do that. Age is one such reason, with young people relying on their parents for transport, and people losing their ability to drive in older age, with the loss of the independence that comes with that.
There are also medical reasons why people cannot drive, such as loss of sight or blindness, or conditions such as epilepsy—or, indeed, any form of non-epileptic seizure. A person cannot legally drive if they have had a seizure in the previous 12 months. Even if they have a seizure only once every few months, they cannot get behind the wheel. Moreover, neurodivergence can prevent some from learning, or it can take them a longer time to learn, which can be cost prohibitive.
That brings me to the issue of cost. The cost of learning to drive puts it out of reach for many people, and for those who do pass their test, the fact is that cars are expensive to buy and run, given the current skyrocketing of fuel prices, vehicle tax and the exorbitant insurance that so many people cannot afford.
I agree with Lloyd Melville, Willie Rennie and Graham Simpson that we need more accessible public transport—a truly representative network that connects all communities—to make buses a viable option for our rural population as well as those living in our urban areas. Transport Scotland’s tier 1 bus infrastructure funding needs to be used by regional transport partnerships and local authorities to increase remote connectivity, which is vital alongside making buses affordable. Those are the prerequisites if we are to achieve the national transport strategy’s goals of cutting carbon emissions, reducing our reliance on cars and bringing our rural and urban economies closer together.
Let us commit to creating a Scotland where reliable, affordable bus travel is not only a temporary pilot project, but a permanent reality for everyone.
16:06
Not to overegg it, but the Greens very constructively negotiated the £2 single bus fare cap pilot in a previous budget. It was an incredible example of constructive negotiations, and an example of how we will seek to work throughout this parliamentary session.
I am proud that the pilot was rolled out in the Highlands and Islands, which is the region that I represent. We know from data from April, provided by Highland Council, that the number of fare-paying passengers increased by 25 per cent during the first month. That is incredible. People are transforming the way that they move around at remarkable speed.
When I was out and about in March and April talking to people, the pilot was one of the things that they wanted to tell me about—and why not? The fare for travelling from Wick to Inverness went from £31 for a single to £2, and the fare from Inverness to Elgin went from £15 to £2. The pilot is incredible, radical and life-changing, and people in the region are embracing it.
I am delighted that the pilot was rolled out in the Highlands and Islands. The Greens have been calling for an island and rural community-first approach, so let us try things out there. I want us, during this parliamentary session, to try things out in our rural and island communities and not leave them as afterthoughts, as has so often been the case in the past.
Having solved the affordability issue in the Highlands and Islands, we are now looking to roll the pilot out across the rest of Scotland. However, as we have already heard in the debate, issues with reliability have not been solved. When the Government chooses to act on something, we get results. The problem, though, is that we might have cheap fares, but in some cases we have no, or infrequent, buses. If there is no bus, people cannot get to work, to hospital or to watch football. People need to feel confident about choosing to use the bus. When they are standing at the bus stop in the pouring rain, they need to know that the bus is going to show up.
We need changes to the system. We need to move away from the private cherry picking that leads to services being cancelled out of the blue, people being stranded and communities having to spend weeks and months fighting to get the service brought back. Even if it does return, it might be less frequent. Along with affordable buses, we need reliable buses. They matter, as they get people to work and create confidence.
We also have an incredible opportunity to reduce car dependency, as that will help meet our climate targets, an issue that we discussed at great length in the previous session. We need to stay on course to meet them.
Addressing this issue will require giving councils real powers of full franchising and municipal ownership. For a start, we must have a minimum service standard. Buses must be an essential part of our public infrastructure; as others have said, they must be a joined-up form of transport. Buses, ferries and trains must all be connected, so that people can start their journey on one mode of transport and work through other modes in order to arrive at their destination.
The Highlands and Islands pilot has been extraordinarily successful, and I welcome its roll-out to other parts of Scotland. It was good to hear the cabinet secretary say in his opening remarks that there will be work on service standards, potential ownership reviews and so on, but we absolutely need to see action on this matter in this parliamentary session. We must see results, and the Greens and I will certainly keep an eye on the issue over the coming months and years.
16:10
I am a regular bus user; I frequently bus across north Glasgow and beyond with my two young children. Buses are an essential part of my day-to-day life, as they are for many of my constituents. I see what works well, but I am also well aware that improvements must be made, for example in the provision of evening or Sunday services on some routes, in parts of the bus network where there are clear gaps in provision, or in relation to capacity issues, such as when a single-decker bus arrives at peak times when double-deckers are required. Can you get a seat? Can a parent with a pram or a disabled traveller with a power-assisted wheelchair navigate on to a bus? Of course, there are also issues regarding reliability.
For balance, bus passengers, including me, do not tend to highlight when our bus services run well—and they do run well at times. There are occasions when buses are on time and the service is efficient and of high quality. We want to encourage more people to use buses, not fewer. However, we remember the occasions when we feel let down by the bus service.
On a positive note, affordability issues for those who use the bus have been eliminated for those who are under 22, by and large, and for those who are over 60. Our Scottish Government has put in place a substantial financial model under which it is free for those groups to use all services in Scotland—a model that I hope to return to later.
Bob Doris has perhaps identified one of the contradictions in the policy. He says that he is a frequent bus user, but he is also on £80,000 a year. By making that cheaper provision available to all—including many people who could afford to pay a marginally higher fare—does he recognise that the potential trade-off is that there is less money to spend on the reliability and punctuality of bus services?
I thank Mr Hoy for that intervention, but that point is really for the birds. The trade-off is that I should pay higher and more progressive tax for public services in our country, which is something that I support.
Concessionary bus travel has been a significant success, but it is a job that is only partially done. If a person is over 21 and under 60, bus journeys will not feel like good value. A few stops on a First Glasgow bus will cost £2.45, and it is only a few stops; most single journeys are £3.25. I therefore strongly welcome our Scottish Government’s commitment to a £2 cap price for bus fares in Glasgow. That will make a real difference in our city, but it needs to be carefully implemented.
Bob Doris is making some good observations about Glasgow. I commend him for his collegiate work on advancing the pilot on free concessionary bus travel for people seeking asylum in the previous parliamentary session. Does he agree that it needs to be a priority for the Government to make that a permanent scheme as soon as possible?
My views on that have not changed. I want it to be implemented in a sustainable and workable fashion, and I hope that we can deliver on that.
Many bus users cannot take a single bus service to where they wish to go. Often, bus users will be required to change buses to reach their end destination. At times, four, as opposed to two, tickets will be required, with a change in the city centre or elsewhere to make the return journey that passengers require. That would cost £8 under a capped-fare system. Many commuters in our city rely instead on a First day ticket, which costs £6.30, to make such journeys. That would mean that a capped-fare system would cost those whose bus journeys require changes considerably more in comparison with those who have direct end-to-end routes, so there could be an inequality there. I urge that arrangements should be made with bus companies to ensure that those who require to change buses in such circumstances do not lose out.
After all, public money that is pumped into bus operators must be used for the public good. Indeed, it is anticipated that, in the current financial year, the budget to be invested in bus services is £528 million—I will say that again: £528 million—and £472.8 million for concessionary travel. There is a lot of money in the system, but the financial model needs reviewed to see whether it is working as well as it could for the public good. I am sure that SPT, which is continuing to develop its bus franchising model for Strathclyde, would be particularly interested to see how it could use that money in the Strathclyde area.
We also need to look at the relationship between the reimbursement rate for concessionary travel, which is 52.9 per cent of a single journey, and the cost of a single journey. There is an incentive in the system for bus companies to increase the price of a single journey, because their reimbursement for concessionary travel is directly linked to it.
In closing, I welcome the £2 bus cap, and I look forward to franchising—I hope—in Strathclyde, which will require partnership funding with the Scottish Government. We have to use the massive amount of money that has already been invested by the public in the system in a way that works much better for the public good.
16:16
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, as I am an elected member of West Lothian Council.
Affordable and reliable public transport is not a luxury but an essential public service. If we are serious about tackling the cost of living and encouraging people on to public transport, price really matters, so I welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to a £2 fare cap across Scotland. That is the next logical step to enable us to build on the success of schemes such as the under-22s scheme, which—as we have heard today—has reached 300 million journeys since it was introduced.
Earlier this week, when I knew that I would be speaking in the debate today, I mapped out my family's travel patterns for the week and compared the time and costs of the journeys that I have to make both with a car and without one. Between work, school runs and clubs, shopping and evening meetings, I calculated that I would need around nine hours of travel time with a car. Without one, that doubled to more than 18 hours, not to mention missing many of the tighter meetings in the schedule.
For some of those journeys, there was almost no feasible alternative to the car, but not every journey was a clear-cut choice. Where trips could easily be made by bus, cost became crucial. When all other factors are broadly equal but public transport is more expensive, people will understandably choose the car where they are able to do so. If we want people to be able to leave their cars at home, we must therefore make public transport the natural choice: we must ensure that it is faster, more affordable, safe and seamlessly integrated into their lives, as we have heard today. The £2 fare cap is part of that process.
Countries such as the Netherlands and Germany have shown what can be achieved through making sustainable travel the easy choice, but that requires long-term thinking and long-term investment. During the four years that I spent living in the Netherlands, it was the country’s transport policies that made the biggest difference to my quality of life. Its integrated transport card allows people to seamlessly combine train, bus or tram in a single affordable journey. The cities are quieter and have better air quality and the safer streets enable young people there to have independence earlier in their lives. That is the prize for us, and it is what we should be working towards.
Sadly, however, that is not the experience of many communities across Scotland. In West Lothian, some bus services have been withdrawn at incredibly short notice, with no consultation of the people they are meant to serve. Villages have been entirely cut off early in the evening, with no Sunday service, and in some of the most deprived parts of my constituency, people are having to use taxis to access medical appointments or do a weekly shop—and that is in the central belt.
In many cases, there is no choice between using car or bus. The most recent census showed that more than 20 per cent of residents in West Lothian had no access to a car, so, without affordable public transport, the risk is that those people become isolated in their communities and lose access to vital public services.
Our fragmented bus network too often fails the passengers it is meant to serve, and it is a result of bus services being run according to commercial profitability rather than public need. That is why the Scottish Government has pursued subsidised travel schemes that help to sustain services and why we continue to explore greater public control through franchising partnerships and public ownership. Where public ownership exists, we can see the benefits, which we have heard about today. Lothian Buses has returned tens of millions of pounds to the public purse over the past decade. That money has been reinvested into services rather than distributed to private shareholders.
The success of removing peak rail fares is evident—it makes the train a more affordable and accessible option and it grows people’s use of it. Where public confidence in a service grows, so, too, does its sustainability. If we fail to provide an alternative to car use, we lock families into higher transport costs, increase congestion and the impact on our economy, and make it harder to meet our climate ambitions.
The £2 fare cap is a step towards a system that is fairer, more affordable and more accessible. If we all accept that transport is an essential service, we must ensure that it is delivered for the public good and that it is accessible to everyone who relies on it.
I support the motion, and I look forward to the cap coming to West Lothian as soon as possible.
16:20
I was keen to contribute to today’s debate on affordable bus fares because public transport is about far more than just getting from one place to another; it is about opportunities, fairness and connection.
For many people across Scotland, particularly in communities such as Uddingston and Bellshill, the bus remains an essential lifeline. As the transport secretary outlined earlier, residents rely on bus services to access their work and education, attend healthcare appointments and stay connected in their local communities. For those without access to a car, there is often no realistic alternative.
I am a non-driver. I rely on buses every week to get around my constituency and, of course, to travel through here to the Parliament. I have done that in my other life, outside of politics. I have always been a bus user, and I know how vital bus services are to people. That gives me a real appreciation of how important affordable, reliable services are.
The Scottish Government’s concessionary bus travel scheme has already transformed the lives of many people. We have outlined that the under-22s scheme has helped young people to access education, employment and training opportunities, while free travel for older and disabled people continues to reduce isolation and support independent living.
Those policies are making a real difference. However, many working-age adults continue to face significant transport costs. I recently heard from one of my constituents, Drew, who paid £6.20 for a single journey on the X44 bus between Holytown and Bellshill—places that you know well, Presiding Officer. That journey was not across Scotland or even outside the region; it was a short local trip home after a long night shift.
For many households that are already facing cost of living pressures, transport costs are often another barrier to opportunity. If we are serious about tackling poverty and expanding opportunities, we must be serious about the cost of getting to work, an education facility or community-based activity. That is why the proposed extension of the £2 cap to places such as Lanarkshire will be vitally important for people. For my constituents, it could make a real difference. It could help an apprentice to travel to their placement, support shift workers who are commuting across the region and make it easier for families to access sport and leisure opportunities.
Affordable bus travel is also good for our economy and our local environment. If we want fewer cars on the road—I think that we all do—lower emissions and less congestion, public transport must be an attractive and affordable option. People cannot be expected to make the switch if fares remain too expensive.
Affordability alone is not enough. We must continue to improve reliability, frequency and connectivity, and we have heard about that from across the chamber today. Constituents regularly tell me that they need buses that they can depend on, particularly in the evenings and at weekends. Affordable fares and reliable services must go hand in hand.
Affordable bus fares are not simply a transport policy but a policy of opportunity. They help to connect people to jobs, education, healthcare and community life. They help to reduce inequality and ensure that where someone lives does not determine the opportunities that are available to them. For those reasons, I welcome the Scottish Government—
Will the member take an intervention?
Yes, of course.
I find the member’s whole-picture perspective very refreshing. When it comes to violence against women and girls, this is an opportunity for us to empower women. Many women—including many in the chamber, I am sure—walk holding a key in their pocket when they cannot get public transport. That is part of the reason why I sometimes choose to travel by car. Does the member see the opportunity that these measures present to empower women and girls?
I whole-heartedly agree with Ms Campbell. The constituency that I represent contains small towns and villages in which, after 6 o’clock in the evening, people find it difficult to get a service to take them home. That causes problems not only for women and girls but for everybody, although I appreciate that women and girls have a different factor that they need to take on board every time that they make those journeys.
I welcome the Scottish Government’s focus on affordable bus fares, and I look forward to seeing the benefits of the cap in the communities that I represent in Uddingston and Bellshill and, indeed, all across Scotland.
16:25
I congratulate the cabinet secretary, who seems to have brought forward proposals in the motion that have united the entire Parliament—except for Craig Hoy, who I can see does not want to hear what I have to say, either. He obviously does not see the direction of travel, to use a pun.
What a welcome cost of living measure the proposals will be. I have already had inquiries from constituents about when the fare cap will be introduced. I welcome the fact that Ayrshire will, rightly, be in first tranche, which covers the Strathclyde region. I hope that that will give opportunities for SPT and local authorities to further consider franchising and take advantage of the potential increase in passenger numbers and revenue support.
What a difference the fare cap will make for my constituents who work or study in Glasgow and have a daily commute from Kilmarnock. At the moment, an on-the-day single bus fare is £8.10 and a return fare is just under £15. That will go down to £4 a day, saving people more than £50 a week. The cap will open up new job markets and education opportunities for those who were previously unable to afford the commute. What an incentive that will be to swap the car for bus travel, which is clearly a more sustainable form of transport.
One question that I have for the cabinet secretary is, how do we implement a subsidy that supports the new cap system? We can compare savings for passengers with some of the fares that bus companies advertise, but those are clearly different from the physical cost for the bus operators and the level of support that they actually need, especially if a critical mass of passengers is achieved. We need to make sure that we get best value and do not contribute to excess profits. As other members have said, the issue of excess profits is why we need more franchises under public ownership.
During my travels to watch the Scotland v Haiti game at the weekend, I started by getting the Lothian Buses service to the airport, paying what I thought was a reasonable £8.50 open return fare. In Glasgow, First Bus charges more than double that amount for a similar journey from Glasgow airport to the city centre. That example shows the potential of public ownership and the need to make sure that the £2 cap does not unduly reward a company such as First Bus, which uses its monopoly to charge higher fares.
I turn to a more local example in my constituency. I stay in Galston, which is five miles from Kilmarnock. A single fare into Kilmarnock is currently £5.10 and a return costs £9.20, which is unaffordable for many. Therefore, a £4 return fare will be a great saving. However, it will mean that the five-mile journey from Galston to Kilmarnock will be the same price as the 25-mile journey from Kilmarnock to Glasgow, effectively introducing a financial penalty for those who need to make a change at Kilmarnock bus station.
As Daniel Johnson touched on earlier, when the full service is rolled out, it looks as though, under these proposals, passengers will be able to travel from Glasgow to Inverness for the same £2 capped fare. There is a balance to be reached and a debate to be had on the distance that is allowed for the £2 cap. There should perhaps be a way of buying through tickets—that is the way that it used to be under Western Scottish Motor Traction, as my colleague Bob Doris mentioned earlier.
I have a few further considerations. At the moment, when travelling from Kilmarnock to Glasgow, the bus fare costs only marginally less than travelling by train. However, under the new system, bus travel will cost 50 per cent less than travelling by train. We therefore need to consider what the effects will be on train travel and whether the subsidy for train travel should be revisited.
What thought has been given to the possible requirement for a number of new buses for new park-and-ride facilities? The Kilmarnock and Fenwick areas in my constituency need new park-and-ride buses—there are pressures already in that regard. Also, how do we develop the new services?
There is an opportunity to transform bus services, which I hope will lead to public franchises, with all the money reinvested in those services. However, we must ensure that we get the model right for a fantastic initiative that will support many people across Scotland.
We move to closing speeches.
16:30
I was very grateful for Alan Brown’s recitation of his bus route. I thought that he was going to go all the way and regale us with the cost of every leg of his trip to Boston. I am grateful that he did not, because those of us who enjoyed the match did not really need to hear about the bus journey.
Craig Hoy, in the last part of his speech, hit on a point that I had hoped that the cabinet secretary would include in his remarks. We must be honest about behaviour on some buses, as it is an issue. We know that there have been violent attacks, but there are also issues about groups of young people congregating around bus stations.
There are certain hot spots, particularly in Fife—around Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes—but I hear that that is also true of Kilmarnock and other places across Scotland. We should be honest about it. This is a good policy, but that aspect is part of what is happening and we must try to mitigate it. I hope that the cabinet secretary will address that in his summing up, because I thought that Craig Hoy made a fair point.
I especially welcomed three contributions. One was from Lloyd Melville, who was appointed deputy convener of the Transport Committee this morning; another was from Dawn Black; and the final one was from Pauline Stafford. They all spoke about how certain communities and groups are cut off from society due to a lack of appropriate bus services. That is not just the case in very rural parts of the country—sometimes that is the case in isolated communities in the central belt. When looking at the use of public funds, we must consider how best to ensure that those routes and those people have the freedom that Dawn Black mentioned.
As I alluded to in my opening remarks, I sometimes worry that, in the race towards the bus fare cap, we are not giving sufficient consideration to the pot of money that we have available to ensure a rounded service across all parts of the country. There is no point in having cheap fares if we do not have a bus service.
The demand-responsive transport that Lloyd Melville talked about is a good way of ensuring that we plug particular gaps, often for elderly people who do not want to go on a general bus service and who want to know that the bus will come to their area when they need it. We should look at expanding that service.
We will, I hope, have the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism and Transport before the Transport Committee later this year, when we will be considering bus issues, which might be through his new bus bill, which will include provisions on the bus fare cap. That includes mysterious elements that we do not quite know about yet—he is still not telling us about them. I am looking forward to those evidence sessions when he will reveal all about what will be in the bus bill.
I want to consider the cost of all this, because at no point in the debate have we talked about the £5 billion financial hole that will exist in our public finances towards the end of the decade.
Sometimes, when we are talking about nationalisation and expanding the bus fare cap, we did not really think about the cost of all those things. Every member of this Parliament has a responsibility to think—
Will the member take an intervention?
A brief one, yes.
It is a brief intervention, Mr Rennie. I will be convening the Public Service Reform Committee in this Parliament. I note that we are spending £528 million on bus services this year alone. Do you think that we can achieve better value for money from that and drive efficiencies?
That is what I am asking us to consider. Rather than just thinking about the headline policy, we need to think about value for money and the impact that we get from the policy. I would sometimes like us to take a step back and look at everything in the round, rather than take a siloed approach to policy. We need to consider the overall cost and how we can best use the public finances.
We also need to consider that the costs for bus companies have gone up. The price of buying new buses is considerable, the cost of fuel has gone up and the cost of providing bus services in some parts of the country is higher than in others. We need to consider everything in the round to make sure that we have a bus service that is available for everybody in every part of our communities.
16:35
I will take up the point that Mr Rennie just made. In the round, the policy looks good but, in four years’ time, once we have had the pilot throughout the SPT area, including in the densely populated city of Glasgow, we might suddenly find that the costs are simply not affordable, or we might end up borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
That could happen in one of two ways. First, will the expenditure on bus travel mean less for supported services in rural areas, which certainly seems to have been the trend to date? Secondly, as Mr Brown referred to, what impact will the policy potentially have on rail travel? The cabinet secretary is responsible for Scottish Rail Holdings. If I were to go on the 5.06 train from Dumfries to Annan, it would cost £6.40. Under the fare cap policy, if I went by bus, which takes about 20 minutes longer, it would be a flat £2. Will that have ramifications for ScotRail, or will the Government have to extend the subsidy scheme to rail services in Scotland, which would make the policy yet more expensive?
I will refer to a few of the contributions that have been made. I seem to remember that, when Graham Simpson was in the Conservative Party, he persuaded me that we should have a fringe event on through-ticketing, and he made that fringe event very interesting. Today, he managed to make an international comparison of fare caps around Europe and the rest of the world equally interesting.
I have some sympathy with the concept of a fare cap, but the devil lies in the detail. My problem—and my party’s problem—with the motion is that it glosses over some of the deficiencies, such as those relating to antisocial behaviour, which Mr Rennie just made clear. The motion also fails to explain what the better bus service provision will be, whereas it is very specific on the headline-grabbing £2 fare, even though many of the questions that I raised earlier, which have also been raised by industry bodies and others, have not yet been addressed.
I thank Craig Hoy for lavishing praise on me, which I certainly was not expecting. I was a bit baffled by his first speech in the debate. Is there anything about the current bus system that he would like to change?
Yes, there absolutely is. The member will have looked closely at the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s manifesto, which included a clear commitment to a rural bus fund so that the very fragile supported services in areas such as Langholm, Closeburn, Sanquhar and Thornhill in my constituency continue. Those are lifeline services, and if the cost of concessionary travel continues to rise inexorably, my fear is that those services will become even more vulnerable.
I will close by repeating a couple of questions to the minister, but I will first read a quote from the Confederation of Passenger Transport, which said:
“Ambitious transport policy only succeeds if government works through the practical realities of delivery from the outset. Without careful consideration of deliverability in the short and longer term it could risk disappointing passengers, communities, and industry alike.
What impact will the £2 cap have on other forms of transport and their revenue, and specifically on train services? What impact might it have on the funds that are available for supported and rural services? How much will the policy cost, and will that be achievable after Ivan McKee and the Deputy First Minister have run their slide rule over Scotland’s finances in the coming years? How will it be paid for? Which taxes will rise and by how much, or which services will be cut?
Unless those fundamental questions are answered, I am afraid that this policy, like so many other SNP policies of the giveaway variety, is likely to fall short or to fall apart entirely.
16:39
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which shows that I am the outgoing volunteer chair of Dumfries and Galloway bus users group.
Along with my Scottish Green colleagues, I broadly welcome the intent of today’s motion. Affordable bus travel is not a nice-to-have; it is fundamental to how people access work, education, healthcare and community life, particularly in large rural and post-industrial areas such as the one that I represent.
The expansion of free bus travel for under-22s has been genuinely transformative, and that policy—as we have heard, it was secured by the Scottish Greens through budget negotiations—has opened up opportunities across communities such as East Kilbride, Galashiels and Dumfries for young people to reach college, apprenticeships and work. It has also freed up household income to be spent in local economies instead of on bus fares, which is real progress that deserves recognition.
I thank Paul Sweeney and Patrick Harvie for raising how crucial it is to maintain free bus travel for asylum seekers.
The scale of Government intervention that is now required in our bus services—through free travel schemes, emergency support for operators and fare cap proposals—tells us something really important about the state of our bus system. It tells us that the current deregulated, profit-led model is struggling to deliver affordable, reliable services, particularly outside our biggest cities and urban centres.
In South Scotland, the reality of bus fares is stark: a single ticket from Selkirk to Galashiels can cost £4.90 for a 15-minute journey; a return from Stranraer to Dumfries is £14; and even excellent community-run services, such as the 3C service from Strathaven to Glasgow, still cost £6.50 for a single journey. For families, low-paid workers and people in insecure employment, those costs quickly become prohibitive—and that is assuming that there is a service at all.
Although a £2 fare cap will undoubtedly make a difference—as Ariane Burgess pointed out, it has increased passenger numbers by 25 per cent in only a few months—it should prompt us to ask why such intervention is needed in the first place. Fare caps are not a substitute for a system that works by design rather than by rescue.
That matters not only for affordability but for our climate responsibilities. Transport remains Scotland’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. In rural and semi-rural areas, people are often forced into car dependency by the absence of affordable, reliable public transport. I thank Dawn Black for raising the issues of those who do not have a choice. If we are serious about cutting emissions while protecting household budgets, strong bus networks are not optional but essential.
That is why better buses legislation is so important. We must reshape how bus services are planned and delivered, particularly in areas where the market has consistently failed. The legislation must be practical, accessible and properly resourced.
A few hours ago, I received an email from Alex, a constituent who lives on a bus route and would like to use buses that connect to train services. He pointed out that consumer protection is lacking when buses fail and that there is no safeguard when someone cannot get the next service because their bus has not turned up. That goes back to the point that Ariane Burgess made about confidence in services and the point that Bob Doris made about the challenges of linking up different service providers.
If the new powers that come are weighed down by bureaucracy, or if local authorities and regional transport partnerships are given responsibility without funding, progress will be slow and rural communities will lose out. In South Scotland, we do not have time for reforms that take years to materialise. We need services that work now, integrated timetables, new routes and fares that people can afford. Although I welcome the motion’s ambition and the progress that has already been made, I urge the Government to treat better buses legislation as a moment for real change that puts public need, climate action and regional fairness at the heart of our transport system.
16:44
I am pleased to close the debate on behalf of Labour and to formally second the amendment in the name of my friend, the member for Edinburgh Southern.
Today’s debate goes to the heart of what our communities need: connection, opportunity and economic equity. We all recognise the immense value of concessionary travel. The original Labour and Liberal Democrat Government scheme, which delivered for the over-60s, and the more recent expansions for young people and disabled people have been genuinely transformative.
It is precisely because of that success that I was proud, in the previous parliamentary session, to lead a cross-party campaign to extend the concessionary bus travel scheme to people seeking asylum. It is a vital measure to ensure that the most vulnerable in our society are not cut off from essential services, legal support and their local communities, so it is important that the Government makes that provision permanent. It was one of the best things to be achieved in the previous session, and it involved working with Mr Ruskell from the Greens, Mr Doris from the SNP and Mr Carlaw, the former Conservative member. It demonstrates the Parliament at its best when we can look after the weakest in our society and ensure that social justice prevails.
Although we welcome such vital social interventions, alongside the roll-out of the £2 bus fare cap—albeit three years behind other parts of the UK—we must confront the basic reality that a concessionary pass or a £2 fare cap is completely useless if the bus simply never turns up or if the route has been scrapped altogether by a private bus company that has pruned its network to push up profits.
That is exactly the situation that my mum, as a bank worker, faced when her branch was closed. She was offered alternative employment in another part of Glasgow, but she found that she could not get to her shifts on time because the bus service would not deliver for her. She had to buy a car and commute by car, even though she had previously used the bus and qualified for an over-60 bus pass. That added an extra cost to accessing work and reduced her take-home pay. Many workers across Scotland face that dilemma, and it is a clear example of how changes could materially affect the cost of living and improve things for working people across Scotland. I am sure that that example is just one of many.
I am keen to get reassurance from the cabinet secretary on one issue. I understand that the commitment is to roll out the £2 bus fare cap in Strathclyde by 16 August, but that date is not in the motion, so it would be good if he could confirm that that is, indeed, the target date.
As the Conservative amendment says, bus provision across Scotland is deteriorating, but the solution is surely not more deregulated market competition. That Tory legacy has been an unmitigated disaster for Scotland, and the solution now is public control. I am afraid that the perspective that Mr Hoy offered was one of narrow accountancy, rather than showing a wider understanding of the economic value to our nation of a public transport system.
This is not just a matter of passenger inconvenience; it is a profound economic failure for our country. As my friend Mr Johnson said, analysis from Centre for Cities lays bare the true cost of our fragmented public transport system. Given that the network is currently so unreliable, it artificially sinks the effective size of greater Glasgow’s labour market. That connectivity gap stifles agglomeration, limits productivity and creates an economic loss equivalent to 4.5 per cent of the greater Glasgow economy’s gross domestic product, which is equivalent to that of the entire oil and gas industry in Scotland.
That staggering self-inflicted wound is holding back the Glasgow city region. That is before we even consider the multiplier effects of supporting our manufacturing sector in Scotland and of public procurement reform, with increased public demand for bus manufacturing supporting wider Scottish manufacturing supply chains. In a city with below-average rates of car ownership and above-average rates of deprivation, that level of self-inflicted economic damage is simply unacceptable.
I have been involved in this fight for a long time. A decade ago, I helped to set up the Get Glasgow Moving campaign. For 10 years, passengers across Strathclyde have campaigned to wrestle control of our vital public transport arteries back from private monopolies that have spent decades prioritising shareholder dividends over passenger service and economic growth.
We do not have to look far or too deep into our history to see what is possible in our country. In the early 20th century, Glasgow was a global pioneer in municipal transport. We built the most extensive electric tramway system anywhere in Britain. Recently, we marked the centenary of the Glasgow Corporation motor bus service, which was launched in 1924 specifically to coincide with the introduction of the landmark Wheatley housing act by the first Labour Government. Ensuring that the new suburbs of municipal housing that were being developed were fully connected to the rest of the city showed a level of joined-up, integrated municipal socialist policy that we rarely see in Scotland today.
The member made a point about greater Glasgow. Being from Renfrewshire, I point out that, while it is important to have connectivity into our cities, it is also important that our identities in neighbouring sisterhoods and brotherhoods are protected, too, so that we do not lose out by default because of the need for intercity links. Does the member agree?
I absolutely agree. The greater Glasgow city region’s development of those policies and its attempts to improve interregional connectivity are welcome. That presents a huge opportunity to grow the whole city region economy. We have certainly seen such examples elsewhere in the UK.
It is important to recognise that public transport should be a system run entirely for the common good, as it was a century ago. It was so efficient and well managed that the surplus that was generated from the public transport network did not disappear into the offshore bank accounts of private operators; it was reinvested directly into the city economy by the Glasgow Corporation to fund other essential public services.
Our city understood at that time that public transport is a vital and fundamental civic asset—and it should be again. The loss of that civic inheritance, driven by the chaotic, ideologically driven deregulation of bus services 40 years ago, has been a disaster for our communities. We need only look along the M8 to see what Strathclyde lost. We must give immense credit to the leaders of the former Lothian Region, who had the foresight and the political courage to resist the deregulation that was pushed by the Tory Scottish Office and to keep their bus network in public hands. The initial management and employee buyout of Strathclyde Buses culminated in a takeover by First 30 years ago. Today, Lothian Buses remains a shining example of what a publicly owned, integrated municipal transport company can achieve.
While Edinburgh protected its public bus network, other cities are now fighting to win theirs back. At the weekend I was in Greater Manchester, and what I saw there was an inspiration. Through the Bee network, Greater Manchester has taken back control of its buses; it is delivering franchising, integrating fares and putting passengers first. Why is it succeeding where we are stalling? It is because its legislative framework actually works.
Contrast Greater Manchester’s rapid progress with the sluggish, agonising pace in greater Glasgow. The Scottish Government routinely praises the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019, but the reality is that the legislation is needlessly complex and riddled with hurdles, and it has left regional transport partnerships bogged down in bureaucratic regulation. While Manchester accelerates ahead, Glasgow is being left behind.
That is why Labour’s amendment is so critical. We cannot accept more warm words about future legislation. We need the Scottish Government to take active steps now to make bus franchising a reality. That means providing the necessary funding and structural support for Strathclyde Partnership for Transport to exercise its powers rapidly. Crucially, it means advancing public control of fare-box revenue, so that the wealth that is generated by our transport network is reinvested in fostering new routes and keeping fares permanently low, just as was done a century ago.
It is time to unwind the damage of deregulation, to reclaim civic ambition and to build an integrated, world-class public transport network for our future needs. I urge members to back passengers over profit and support the Labour amendment.
The penultimate closing speech is from David Kirkwood.
16:52
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I hope that you and the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism and Transport will accept my congratulations on your appointments.
As this is my first speech here, I have some people to thank. First, I thank the people of South Scotland for placing sufficient trust in our party to allow me to take up a place here. I will do my best to ensure that that trust is not misplaced. Secondly, I thank all the staff here, in Holyrood, who have made my introduction to a fairly unique working environment as painless as possible. Thirdly, I thank the other members here, who have, by and large, been welcoming of an interloper in their midst. Lastly and most importantly, I thank my own family, who have had to put up with a lot over the five and a half years since Reform UK Scotland was founded. It has sometimes seemed a lot longer.
Now, the customary brief travelogue. South Scotland, like all other constituencies and regions, is the most beautiful part of Scotland. It has been my home for nearly all of my life. It is composed mainly of gently rolling and fertile land. It has long coastlines, but it reaches up to the two highest villages in all of Scotland. Although it has been inhabited for 14,000 years, the people are spread quite thinly over the land. We are relatively few but very friendly. Please do come and see us.
The fact that a boy from a single end in New Stevenston can find himself here, among the intellectual elite of Scotland, is a tribute to three main factors: a loving, hard-working family in which my mum was a nurse and my dad was a toolmaker—[Laughter.]—that is absolutely true; a traditional Scottish education gained in small-town schools and in Glaswegian colleges and universities; and the social and professional mobility gained as a result of that education. I want other kids to have the same advantages I had. I cannot do anything about their families, but I can help to ensure that the affordable, high-quality further and higher education that helped me is available to them.
For an engineer, handling a shadow portfolio that combines innovation, technology and education is rather like a dozen Christmases arriving at once. The fact that that is happening in Scotland—a tiny wee country on the edge of Europe that has dominated global innovation for well over two centuries—just makes it more exciting. It may seem as though Scotland is an unlikely nation to hold the title of global innovator, but, considering that a Scottish monk invented the electric motor in 1740, a mining engineer from the second-highest village in Scotland built the world’s first practical steamboat and a native of our wet and chilly country invented refrigeration, you realise that we do unlikely things. Scots seem to have a knack for imagining things that others do not and to have the smeddum to make them happen. That is an enormous asset for our nation and it must be nourished.
Innovation is not only about making new things. Sometimes, it is about making new ways of thinking. Among other things, the concepts of human rights, economics, modern philosophy, geology, environmentalism and even humour were first described by Scots. We need to move away from the prescriptive type of teaching that many of our students experience in our schools, colleges and universities and help them to understand how to think, not what to think.
Our university sector has a long and distinguished history, and, for many years, Scotland had four universities while England had only two. However, we need to review the purpose of our tertiary education institutions. My old college, where I gained a Scottish higher national diploma in engineering, is now a university. Is it serving Scotland any better? Tony Blair’s insistence that an arbitrary 50 per cent of all young people should go to university has led to more than a generation of students with life-limiting student loans, many of which funded degrees of dubious worth. The 50 per cent target must be abandoned, and technical and vocational education and training need to come out of the shadow of academic tuition. Instead of the much-vaunted STEM education, I want Scotland to go full STEAM ahead—that is, science, technology, engineering, arts and maths. A grounding in visual, musical or performing arts produces a more rounded education and encourages diverse modes of thinking and greater creativity.
My personal aims in this parliamentary session include using my own technical capabilities to bring some engineering rigour to the sometimes fanciful and imprecise outputs of the Parliament. That includes scrapping the nonsensical and disruptive net zero targets, encouraging more people into good technical careers at all levels, extending vocational training into the secondary school sphere and fostering the technical and philosophical innovations that will shape our society in the next few decades. I expect to introduce some innovations of my own, including a scheme to alleviate the problems of access to cash in rural areas and a way to allow all Scots to see exactly where their tax money goes. I want to help to maximise the creativity of Scotland, which is the best part of the best country in the world, and I look forward to working with members of all parties to do that.
In my experience in the Parliament, this has been the most collegiate debate, with the highest degree of unanimity—and I am not gonnae spoil that now. A healthy economy is characterised by activity and movement. People, goods and money move around quickly and efficiently, and creating wealth is the goal. When anything hinders that movement, the economy suffers and, by extension, so do the people. In our rural areas, that activity has been hindered by two main factors: a lack of money in people’s pockets for bus fares and a lack of frequent and reliable buses. Wages in countryside areas are often lower than those in urban areas, and journeys are longer, with higher fares.
The commercial bus operators have a problem when passenger numbers drop. They may need to reduce frequencies to maintain profitability. However, that can lead to a further drop in numbers, further reducing profitability and spiralling down into a total service collapse. In such a situation, there may be a good case for a temporary external stimulus to restore passenger numbers to viability. That would lead to local economic growth and a self-sustaining route. When people can reliably and affordably travel to work—or to shop, or for leisure—they will do so. A cheap fare and a reliable bus will permit that.
On reliability, I note that, in the next few weeks, the entire X74 fleet will be replaced with rather more reliable buses.
The fare cap is of greater benefit in the countryside than it is in the towns, where interurban fares are generally little higher than the £2 cap. Saving £5 or more per day on bus fares can make the difference when it comes to whether a job is worth while. The £2 cap trial in the Highland area seems to be successful, with passenger numbers having increased by 30 per cent or so. That makes the scheme economically sensible for the operators, who are more than compensated for the discounted fares that they receive from the Scottish Government. It will be interesting to see the report on the trial and the analysis of any economic benefit that it has brought to the area.
Franchising is another way of providing a public transport service, and it offers greater economic certainty and less administration cost over the period of the contract. However, the legislation surrounding franchising needs to be greatly simplified before it can become widespread. That may well allow the establishment of the community-led bus companies that Patrick Harvie talked about, which would not be a bad thing at all.
One way to simplify operations and thereby reduce costs is through the use of intermodal ticketing, but intermodal ticketing is still not universally available across all our transport systems, even though it has been around for a long time. I was involved in the first ITSO ferry ticket trial when I worked for CalMac Ferries, more than 10 years ago, and although the company has made a lot of progress, its current delivery plan still shows 2027 as the year when it will accept all ITSO tickets.
The simplest and most economical way of running a transport system is to have people with good jobs and money in their pockets paying their own way with their own money to buy their own services. At the moment, that is not possible, but a stimulus to the economy may make it so in the future, and we need to strive for that.
As long as rigorous cost benefit analysis of capped routes is done, trials are carefully monitored, trial budgets are capped and efforts are made to rationalise and simplify the legislation around franchising, I can see no reason why we will not support this effort.
I invite the cabinet secretary, Stephen Flynn, to respond to the debate.
17:01
I have spoken in two debates since I came north from Westminster and returned to this wonderful Parliament and, on both occasions, I appear to have found an ability to gain consensus across the chamber. It is a wonderful thing. [Interruption.]
Ms Baillie is shaking her head, but she missed the collegiate debate that we have had, in which everyone agreed that the Government is taking positive steps to ensure that people can deal with the cost of living crisis that is in front of them and that they have a Scottish Government that is delivering for them on their priorities. I will come back to that point. Mr Rennie looks less than impressed by my approach. That may well be how the Transport Committee looks in a few short months’ time, but I will try to push it as far as I can.
Important points were made about the availability of services. I understand the need for services to be available. I get it—we all do. Each and every one of us recognises the desire of our constituents to have access to bus services that meet their needs. Quite frankly, access to such services is not being delivered in Scotland in the way that any of us would want it to be delivered. However, in order for that to change, we cannot do as Mr Hoy seems to think that we should do, which is to continue doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that we will get a different outcome.
In response to the points that Mr Hoy made, I say to him that he seems to know the price of absolutely everything—and rightly so—but he does not know the value of anything, because he refuses to accept the benefit that the changes that we are seeking to introduce through the fare cap will bring for individuals and their families. Indeed, I am not even sure that he could bring himself to accept the benefits that have been brought by the bus pass as it stands. In one year alone, 113 million journeys were made by our older people and our disabled people. How many of those journeys would have been made without that bus pass being in place? How many of Mr Hoy’s constituents would have been socially isolated as a result of him being a curmudgeon? Far too many. We would do well to ignore Mr Hoy’s advances on the issue.
That point applies not only to older people and disabled people; it applies to young people, too. I was at Buchanan Street bus station today and heard directly from young people about the benefit to their lives that has been brought about by this Parliament’s decision to pass a budget that gave them free bus passes. It has changed their lives and has opened up a world of opportunities that we never had but which they now do. That is why, in the space of just four years, they have taken 300 million journeys.
Members ask me how sustainable that is in terms of finances. However, only some of them seem to want to commit to full discussions through the budget process to make sure that it is sustainable. We have a responsibility to balance our budget, and that is exactly what we have done and will continue to do when we deliver the £2 fare cap, as set out in our manifesto.
My constituents are keen to see the cap rolled out quickly. Will it be delivered by 16 August, as was indicated previously?
I am grateful to Mr Sweeney for reminding me of his comments in that regard, because I am not entirely sure that that date has been given by anyone on these benches, and I am not entirely sure where he got it from. What I have been very clear about is that we will stick to what we said in our manifesto in relation to the 100-day commitments, and will move the issue forward as quickly as we possibly can. I give him that commitment.
I want to work closely with Mr Sweeney in relation to bus transport, because I know that he is passionate about it and he has done some tremendous work on it, which I have watched from afar. However, he has made some comments in relation to a £2 fare cap in England—I see him nodding his head. What he does not seem to take into account is that, if I recall correctly, as I was sitting in Westminster, Keir Starmer raised that cap by 50 per cent to £3. Further, what Mr Sweeney has also not taken into account is that, under the Labour Party, no young people in England get access to a free bus pass. Similarly, with regard to older and disabled people, a vast number of people have to wait until they are 67 to get a bus pass. The comparison that he seeks to draw is neither fair nor reasonable.
I thank the cabinet secretary for being generous with his interventions. It is one of the virtues of devolution that we can do things differently in Scotland. That is exactly what has happened—[Interruption.]
If I may complete the point, it is exactly what we did with regard to the concessionary travel scheme for over-60s, which was a Labour innovation in Scotland.
The point is that the cap policy has been devolved to city-region transport authorities in England. Therefore, for example, in Liverpool and Manchester, the £2 cap continues.
I was struggling to hear Mr Sweeney over other members, but I thought that I heard him say, correctly, that devolution allows us to do things better. I certainly agree with him in that regard.
On the £2 fare cap, we have a pilot that is under way in the Highlands and Islands, which was rightly mentioned by Ariane Burgess. To build on what she was saying, if I recall the numbers correctly, around 300,000 journeys have been taken using the price cap. What a change and transformation. That is exactly what we want to see and build on.
That goes to the heart of everything that we are seeking to do in Government. We are seeking to ensure that people have the opportunity to get on in life and to take part in society and in their communities. We know that there is no functioning, strong economy without a transport system that works. I hope that all of us can agree, as we did during the debate earlier, that the important and tough decisions that we have made are the right thing for the people who have elected us to represent them in the chamber during a cost of living crisis, when pressures far outwith the control of this Parliament—primarily driven, of course, by the decisions of Westminster—are impacting our constituents directly.
We are using the levers that we can to help people in their daily lives, and that is incredibly important to me.
[Made a request to intervene.]
[Made a request to intervene.]
I will give way to Daniel Johnson.
I am grateful to the minister for giving way and apologise to Mr Harvie. The cabinet secretary says that the Government will get on with it, yet we have seen very slow progress on bus franchising. Can he address why we have seen so little progress in six years, and say how he intends to accelerate that?
For members who were not in the chamber at the time, I say that Daniel Johnson made that point earlier and I had to remind him that SPT, which is the biggest player right now, is making progress in that regard. That is a positive thing. Daniel Johnson and the Government seem to be in agreement on a lot—we will, of course, support his amendment. However, in his opening remarks, he listed a whole host of projects that he wants to happen. If he wants those things to happen and progress to be made, he should engage with us and have discussions with us in the run-up to the budget. I am sure that the Deputy First Minister would be delighted to do that, so that we can have progress.
Will the member take an intervention?
I will make some progress, because I am conscious that my time is drawing to a close and I want to address an important point that was raised by Craig Hoy and, rightly, by Willie Rennie. I said that I would address the issue of antisocial behaviour.
None of us in the chamber can accept the treatment of any individual who works on our buses in the fashion that we have seen, including terrible instances that have occurred in parts of Scotland—in particular, the Moray constituency—with which we are all very familiar. Members from the previous parliamentary session will be conscious of the fact that, in March, a statutory instrument was passed that creates a framework for addressing antisocial behaviour, whether by a young person or an older person—I do not think that we should be explicit in that regard. We need to ensure that that code of conduct is put in place, and I expect that to come back across my desk in the coming months so that we can put the issue to bed and make sure that our bus drivers are safe at work.
In Glasgow today, I met a wonderful bus driver—a chap called Tahir—who is very proud of the work that he does. On this day of all days, given that there has been a bit of interest in my travel plans, it is right for me to take part in this debate, to move the motion in my name and to thank Tahir and all his colleagues for the work that they do every day in serving the people of Scotland.
That concludes the debate on affordable bus fares.
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