Results of the Bus Franchising consultation have been published and will be debated by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee of the Combined Authority on Fri 24 Jan 2025
You can read the meeting papers here – which also cover East West Rail. The extended list of documents for item 7 include the equalities impact assessment and the draft legal notices.
“Splendid! Let’s get on with it!”
I agree!
Above – here’s how we voted according to the consultants
There are 48MB worth of documents which means some very heavy reports in the list/agenda here – in my experience file size with the letters MB after it indicates the item has diagrams in it (easier for me to understand) or is a very heavy report. The bigger the number that comes before it, the bigger the report is likely to be! The most important parts are in the covering paper at the top of item 7 where officers have filtered out all but the most important parts that the committee need in order to take an informed decision – though in my experience the most diligent of the committee members will have familiarised themselves with enough of the detail too. (There’s always a constituent who will have done the reading and will be there to ask those questions to keep them on their toes – it’s not just me!)
Appendix 3 is the Combined Authority’s response to the recommendations – all 127 pages of it. The report by the consultants – all 200 pages of it, is the independent report by the consultants WestCo. The idea being that the CPCA does not mark its own homework. The CPCA had to go through this level of detail because the previous government and Parliaments did not provide for a straight-forward means to get rid of the widely-discredited privatised system that Margaret Thatcher’s Government brought in under her reforms that had the effect of breaking the back of the trade union movement in the UK. With a significant amount of what some in the trade might call ‘collateral damage’ to communities across the country.
After the 2010 general election, we saw the impact that austerity had – the Department for Transport taking a huge hit, and with it its grants to transport authorities that covered bus subsidies. You can see in the graph below the fall in average annual bus journeys per head falling from just under 40 per head per year, to around 30 per head per year.
Above – Bus Consultation Officer’s briefing – item 7, p4
There are two CPCA Board meetings that follow in quick succession – one on 22 Jan 2024 for which papers have been published here, and another one 15 days later on 06 Feb 2025 for which papers will be published here. I’m assuming the latter one will formally approve the commencement of the bus franchising process unless Stagecoach throw a spoiler in the works in the form of a legal challenge.
For those of you interested in bus campaigning see:
- Cambridge Area Bus Users Group led by Richard Wood
- Cambridgeshire Sustainable Travel Alliance
- The Campaign for Better Transport (national)
- Buses Magazine (which I normally get from WHSmith and which reports on the new buses and policies the Combined Authorities including our one procure and produce)
In addition to all of that, see also Cambridgeshire County Council’s Highways and Transport Committee papers – that committee meets on 21 Jan 2025
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
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The Cambridge Town Owl 