Chamber and committees

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 constituents are keen to see the cap rolled out quickly. Will it be delivered by 16 August, as was indicated previously?

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.

The only consideration operationally in Scotland in relation to the bill would be the Dalzell steelworks in Motherwell, which is a critical industrial facility. Does the minister have an indication of whether the bill will have a direct impact on the operation of and efforts to restart the steelworks in Motherwell or of what the implications might be of the Parliament meeting extraordinarily to ensure that the facility is not affected?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1898, when the People’s Palace was opened, it was declared

“open to the people forever and ever”.

I am sad to say that it has been closed for two years now. However, I pay tribute to the friends of the People’s Palace, who have kept its spirit alive, particularly the pioneering curator, Dr Elspeth King, who passed away in November 2025.

We have been waiting two years. It was due to reopen next year, but a £12 million funding gap that the Scottish Government refused to fill has left the project stalled indefinitely. During the election, the SNP promised Glasgow all the funding that it needed to complete the restoration, but now that the votes have been counted, that promise seems to have shrunk to starting yet another partnership group, with no sign of the remaining £12 million in capital funding that Glasgow City Council needs to get the restoration project under way.

Will the minister guarantee that that group will not be just another talking shop that covers for more delays? Will he upgrade the “appropriate match funding” to a guarantee that all necessary capital funding will be found, and set a firm reopening date for this key Glasgow cultural institution, which has been largely closed to the public for nearly a decade?