Chamber and committees

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?

[Made a request to intervene.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am happy to give way to Craig Hoy, although I think that I will not agree with him.

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

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?

[Made a request to intervene.]