Chamber and committees

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 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.

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

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.

Will the member take an intervention?

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

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.

[Made a request to intervene.]

Collectively.

I wonder whether Anas Sarwar applies the same principle—if people have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear—to our argument that, if there is to be an independent process, it needs to apply to all political parties, so that it can look into, for example, his old friend Peter Mandelson’s murky financial ties to the super-rich and criminals around the world and the way in which many United Kingdom Labour ministers expressed their thanks to him for his help in their ascension to ministerial office.