After decades of chaos, what Andy Burnham and campaigners have achieved could be a blueprint for the rest of the UK, says Cat Hobbs, founder of campaign group We Own It
After decades of chaos, what Andy Burnham and campaigners have achieved could be a blueprint for the rest of the UKFri 22 Sep 2023 16.00 CESTfter nearly 40 years of Thatcherite deregulation and privatisation, the buses in Manchester are back under public control. On Sunday, 50will take their first journey across Bolton, Wigan and parts of Salford and Bury, with the full rollout across Greater Manchester scheduled to be complete by January 2025.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, should be proud. He faced down his critics, and stood firm against the immense pressure of the private bus operators who challenged his decision but failed to overturn it in the courts. The role ofBetter Buses for Greater Manchester in this result must also be recognised; they clearly made the case for why public control would improve services and put pressure on Burnham to go through with his campaign promise.
, the service ferried passengers to and from Pendleton and Manchester. The city has seen public ownership and control before. From 1930, there was a patchwork of services across the city, with every council owning a different coloured bus fleet. In 1969 these were streamlined, with the creation of a new transport authority, Selnec, which covered the whole of Greater Manchester with its trademark orange buses.
Then along came Margaret Thatcher. Her 1985 Transport Act led to a mass sale of council-owned bus companies and the start of a free-for-all in how services ran in the city. The quality of vehicles dramatically declined. In the “bus wars” that followed, private companies fought for custom, even racing each other down the street to pick up passengers. One observer described it as “
”. Most travellers unsurprisingly simply got the first bus that came along, rather than picking and choosing their favourite bus company, which left competition authorities scratching their heads.for being expensive, unreliable and slow. The theory was that deregulation would lead to “new and better services”, but the opposite had happened. Buses became more expensive and more unreliable.