Public buses before profit

Banton is a small village in North Lanarkshire.

Like many places in Scotland, people there rely on local buses to get to work, to school, to college, to see friends and family, and to get to the shops.

Earlier this year – and with little warning – that vital lifeline was cut by the private bus company First Group, who said it wasn’t making a profit.

When Unite Community was made aware of the cuts by local Unite members, we helped launch the Haud the Bus campaign. “Haud the bus” — or “hold the bus” — is a Scottish way of saying “hold on a minute.”

More than 150 people attended our first public meeting and we started talking to people in other towns and villages along the affected bus routes. We quickly got over 500 likes on our Haud the Bus Facebook page.

Residents got involved in organising petitions, sending letters to local politicians, and putting Haud the Bus posters in their windows.

Local children came along to paint banners and posters.

And together we secured a partial victory.

A new six-month trial service has been put in place on a “use it or lose it” basis — so while this battle has been won, the war is not yet over.

During our campaign, it became clear that this is an issue affecting communities all across Scotland. Bus companies have the power to pull out of “non-profitable” routes without giving any reason and with just six weeks’ notice to the traffic commissioner.

If a local transport authority wants to keep a service in place, they have to start negotiations.

Stretched thin

Unite Community believes that, in practice, this often means bus companies can hold councils to ransom, squeezing more money out of budgets that have already been stretched thin by unfair austerity cuts.

Bus travel is falling 10 times faster in Scotland than in Britain as a whole amid soaring fares and cuts to routes.

It’s clear that public transport in Scotland is being mismanaged in the hands of private companies.

But there is an alternative. This summer, First Group announced that it was going to completely pull out of the entire county of East Lothian, with the closure of two bus depots.

Local people were left in shock. But thankfully, one of the few remaining publicly owned bus companies in the UK, Lothian Buses, has stepped in to safeguard jobs and protect local community services.

This shows that good public transport needs to put people before profit.

We now aim to roll out the Haud the Bus campaign across Scotland. We will highlight cases where local people are being badly served by the private bus companies, and help them campaign for improvements and to safeguard their lifeline services.

And we will help people take the call for re-regulation and public ownership of bus transport direct to members of the Scottish Parliament.

The Scottish government wants Scotland to become a greener country, and getting more people onto public transport should be a big part of that.

Holyrood has the power to re-regulate bus transport in Scotland, but does it have the political will? We will see.

It’s time to act, to put people before profit, and to turn bus companies into bus services once again.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star, August 23