I’ve been saying, both on this blog and whenever someone’s asked me, that Phil Smart is someone who is dedicated to public transport and who really cares about that issue.  The problem that I have with him, and another councillor, is that they see Bridge as a platform and not an end in itself.  It’s very easy when you don’t live there.

Consider this, from the council agenda for Wednesday:

To consider the following motion moved by Councillor P Smart:

This Council notes with concern the decision of Suffolk County Council to close Bury Road Park and Ride and calls on the Executive of Ipswich Borough Council to work with local bus operators and others to establish a replacement service from this site.”

This will involve quite a considerable amount of money being spent on Norwich Road bus routes.  This may be a perfectly good thing for a councillor who represents the Norwich Road area to be doing, but this is money that Suffolk or Ipswich will not have to help Wherstead Road, which has a far more pressing issue with the buses.  The most frustrating thing about this is that Wherstead Road would need very little extra money, instead needing  co-ordination with the bus companies to space out their services.  Something that stupid EU regulations insist that  councillors need to be involved in.

Park and Ride is very nice, but shouldn’t there be some focus closer to home?  Or failing that, closer to your ward?

Related articles

• Suffolk: Bus routes face the axe (eadt.co.uk)
• Council to ‘outsource everything’ (bbc.co.uk)

… well not literally.

This is from a written question tabled by Ben Gummer:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will take steps to assist competing bus companies to reach cooperative agreements to provide regular services on (a) Wherstead Road in Ipswich constituency and (b) other routes with an identified need.

And here’s the answer from Norman Baker, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Regional and Local Transport:

The regulatory framework for buses permits co-operative agreements between bus operators as long as certain conditions are met. We have seen good results in places where local authorities and operators work effectively in partnership to improve bus services-such as in Brighton, York and Cambridge.

While it is the role of Government to set this framework and encourage more of this type of activity for the benefit of bus passengers in Ipswich and elsewhere it is up to local authorities and communities to make it happen. This might be a local authority making a statutory quality bus partnership scheme, as in Nottingham, or instead endorsing a qualifying agreement between two operators, as in Oxford.

Ultimately, however, it is for commercial operators to decide whether to run services such as the route 66 bus in Ipswich, and at what frequency. If a service is not considered commercially viable, a local authority can decide it wishes to tender for and support a replacement service, or discuss with the local community alternative forms of transport provision.

Of course it is for commercial operators to decide what routes they should operate, and the irony here is that First actually created a demand where it had previously been limited.  However if the current services were better spaced out (which would involve some collusion) then there would be a more reliable service, without the need for a subsidy.  European anti-competitive rules are really hampering us here.

Come on Suffolk, get your act together!

After moaning about the buses, something seems to have come out of it,

I’ve been told that there will be six new and second hand double decker buses ordered by Ipswich Buses, which will mean that most of the services to One College will be running with double decker buses.

Sometimes it feels like you are banging your head against the wall when doing this stuff, so any victory is welcome.

But most of all, well done to Ipswich Buses.

I am hearing quite a few complaints about the bus services to the One College, and the fact that they are simply inadequate at the moment, particularly from the Maidenhall Estate. It doesn’t appear to be a problem with the frequency so much as the peak capacity.  Double decker buses would appear to be a good idea at this time.

Ipswich Buses has a deserved reputation for responding to customer demand around Ipswich, so I hope that we will hear get something on this.

Dame Bryony Rudkin (it’s a matter of time, mark my words, so we better start using the title now) has been blessing us with her representative skills at the council and asked about the Wherstead Road route.

On a serious note we should not simply be asking why the route shut down, Suffolk will say it’s revenue and First said on Monday – I was there - that it was revenue AND punctuality.  The latter makes it harder to entice them back as they are getting crucified on punctuality at the moment.

Most people are quite aware that as long as the country is effectively bankrupt we won’t get any subsidy for the route.  What we need is collaboration to evenly space out the routes, which will mean that the residents of Wherstead Road will have a reasonably spaced bus service and the companies will have profitable routes.  Sadly the European Commission has (surprise, surprise) totally inappropriate competition rules – and so this will need Suffolk County Council to act as an honest broker to see if we can get a simlar result as Oxford had.  This is the issue

When I was looking for a new house I looked at some on Wherstead Road.  I would not have a bus from the station for two hours during the evening rush hour.

European Competition policy on the buses is another round of bus regulation.  It would be uncontroversial to deregulate this on the Wherstead Road.

There’s an enigma in Labour’s stance on Ipswich Buses.  The Labour Party knows that if the buses remain in municipal hands without any help, then as the second smallest bus operator in the country they will be susceptible to a strike from First Group.  First Group could, as it has done to other small operators, run services three minutes ahead of Ipswich buses on the largest routes and offer all the Ipswich Buses staff a signing on bonus.  An Ipswich Labour administration could then be stuck with closing down Ipswich buses.  This would be a stick that the Tories would beat them with for years.

This nightmare scenario is perfectly plausible, because it’s been done already with other operators.  So that leaves some odd options.  Perhaps Labour are criminally short sighted, and this may be true at the Prime Ministerial level but I can’t believe that it’s true at a local level.  An alternative is that they’ve got a plan B that is not that different from what’s being done at the moment.  Essentially do the same deal with a group (not necessarily Go Ahead, but certainly not First) which is sell a minority stake and preemption rights in return for money, bulk buying power and management expertise as well as a virtual guarantee that Ipswich Buses will not go down.

The way they could differentiate it would be to say that instead of selling 49% they would sell 20% and in return retaina a greater degree of control.  Would it satisfy the activists?

Malcolm Robson, who is in charge of Ipswich Buses will be at the Maidenhall Residents Association (at the bowls hut on Halifax Road) at 7.00 to answer questions about the buses.

If you are not from the Maidenhall Estate please respect the fact that this will be primarily a committee meeting of the Residents Association.

A pioneering agreement in Oxford may be able to offer hope to people on Wherstead Road.  Wherstead Road is plagued by sporadic bus services, which would be far more tolerable if they were properly spaced out.  Under typically stupid European Union rules this cannot be changed because there are a number of different operators on the route they cannot get together to redraw the timetable to space out their bus times, the authorities prefering that they bunched up their services to make them “competitive”.  Why Europe needs to get involved in bus services that don’t even cross a county border, let alone an international border, is typically left unexplained.

This has meant that there is an almost two hour gap between buses in the evening on the route out of the town centre, and this starts almost exactly when the first commuter train comes in from London.  Thanks Brussels. 

Oxford has moved to stop their version of this needless, mandated competitive inefficiency by getting an agreement between the bus operating companies.  Hopefully we won’t have some European under-secretary for buses deciding that this won’t work.

In fact the minister who could decide on this would be Chris Mole.  I know that he doesn’t keep an eye on local media any more, but a couple of his tax paid staff do (even this humble site), so perhaps they can pass on the message that if he blocks the Oxford deal it will play badly on the Wherstead Road.  We’ll make sure of it.

The Council runs a bus service.  They want to sell it off.  There is a big local campaign led by the local (and under threat) Labour MP.  The government minister in charge says that while sympathetic, there’s nothing he wants to do, saying that it’s up to councils.

But it’s not Ipswich, it’s Plymouth.  And the minister who has the power to shut the whole thing down?  Chris Mole.

He could do the whole thing in Ipswich, his own patch.  He won’t.  Why?

Well if you look at the speech it gives a clue, lot’s of talk about how much he likes council owned bus services and no real action to keep them council owned.

He may not exercise his power to keep the buses council owned, but at least it will get the petitions signed and the vote out.  And in the end that’s all that counts in Labour’s once proud Fortress Ipswich.

The bus trade press have a rather dry piece on the sell off, without mentioning the crucial part played by Chris Mole.  Apart from that it is the same old stuff, John Carnell saying that Ipswich Buses is too small and David Ellesmere saying that Ipsiwch Buses should never be sold off and anyway its too soon.  I’ve harped on about Ipswich Labour’s three-faced view on the sell off but there seems to be another problem in that the Tory-Liberal view is simply that “There Is No Alternative”, and David Ellesmere is playing to this by his confused response.

Surely a case can be made for a small bus service.  Then the case can be made for it to be locally owned.  The “people own it” will not work, and Labour obviously know this – hence their policy-by-committee.

If you grew up in a left wing (or Guardian reading) household during the 1970s and 1980s you could sense the desperation as your parents knew that there was, actually, no plausible alternative.  The magic of Blair and Brown, at least at first was that they gave an alternative, and if you were a Tory activist in that time you could sense the relief as people who voted for you while hating you suddenly could indulge themselves by voting Labour.  Now Brown has bankrupted the country he’s also bankrupted Labour self confidence.

For the moment there is no alternative.  ”The people of Ipswich” are not the Council, they just pay for it.  A case needs to be made by Labour for a small, independent bus service, and for a potentially wasteful public authority that will (if Phil Smart gets in) give bus routes to its mates and cut off routes to the other bits.

In the short term Labour could stop bus privatisation dead by a phone call to the local MP and minister in charge of selling off bus services, both offices residing in Chris Mole.  However it will go through in some form in a couple of years, probably under worse terms unless someone makes a convincing case that small is beautiful.