This is going to be a bit of a ramble, so apologies in advance.
The difficulty with a national rollout of a TfL-style franchising operation is that it will require a national rollout of TfL-style funding. I’m far from convinced there is the political impetus in any of the reasonably-electable parties to commit to that level of long-term funding. I suggest it is even less likely, as the country moves from the initial emergency response to the pandemic and starts to face the accumulated costs. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a properly-funded, well-organised public transport system across the UK, I just don’t think the political pressure is there to deliver this.
The UN Rapporteur picked on deregulation as a “breach of human rights”. I find this disingenuously emotive. As chronicled by many posters in other topics, the decline in the bus industry can be traced back to the late 1950s/early 1960s for various reasons, including policy mistakes by governments of all colours, policy and strategic mistakes made by the bus industry itself, together with shifting cultural expectations. If access to bus services is to be regarded as a human right then repeated breaches have occurred over many years. Personally I think deregulation was a net benefit to the industry, making it having to stand on its own two feet, as it were; certainly the ending of cross-subsidy shone a bright light on routes that were utter basket cases, and only existed by draining more profitable services of cash that could have otherwise been used for re-investment and development.
Remember that in the mid-1980s, people had immediate experience of publicly-owned bus services and it was by no means perfect (I was there!). Especially as cultural and social norms became more car-oriented, encouraged by such planning decisions as building out-of-town shopping centres and business parks, housing developments including at least a driveway, often a single garage, sometimes a double garage to house the company car (a major cultural aspiration that developed during the 1970s) and the spouse’s runabout. Often these housing estates were built with roads not big enough to handle a conventional bus anyway, which led to some of the newly-deregulated, more entrepreneurial bus companies trying out minibuses, with mixed success. Nevertheless, buses were regarded as somewhat infra dig by a vast number of people; at least deregulation gave an opportunity for the more forward-thinking companies to try to innovate and turn around the prevailing public perception.
These days I am not convinced by efforts to bring bus services under closer public/local authority control. I don’t believe such bodies have the pool of experience or expertise to satisfactorily design worthwhile or sustainable services/networks, nor can they afford to employ such people. Aligned with the increased opportunity for political influence/interference, we could all too easily end up with routes that look like Gormenghast to Clochemerle via Twin Peaks! Routes that are of no practical use, but are seen to fulfil some lofty political consideration (or more prosaically, filling a perceived gap on a map somewhere), routes that no commercial operator would touch with a barge pole. Eventually the costs will out, and a hue and cry will ensue, with the associated scapegoat-hunting and backside-covering.
Sorry for the Kerouac-style stream of consciousness, if the above is tl:dr it all boils down to one word -
Funding!!!
