Is the Government missing its last bus?

Buses. Not terribly glamorous, their use was seen by Margaret Thatcher as a sign of failure in life. And yet, there were more than four billion local bus passenger journeys in the year to 31 March 2020, or around sixty journeys for every person in this country. A lot of people use buses, a lot of people who have votes.

And so it was quite astute of the Prime Minister to announce a £3 billion fund to “Bus Back Better”. More reliable, more frequent bus services, using more energy efficient, less polluting vehicles, what isn’t there to like? Unfortunately, it looks as though it was just another deception, if reports from the media are to be believed.

The Treasury may very well have grounds for their apparent decision to interfere, or it might have been that the £3 billion figure was plucked out of the air by a man whose relationship with truth is accidental at best, but it sends out a message that, far from wanting to level up trailing parts of our nation, the aim is to fool enough of the people for enough of the time.

Here in Suffolk, the intention was to use some of the proposed funds towards the following goals;

• Lower fares for the under-25s
• Service frequency review, especially on “key corridors”
• Daily fare caps and Oyster card-style ticketing
• Bus decarbonisation 
• Integration of school bus routes with the regular network
• Improved bus priority measures

There isn’t necessarily much in this for me, but there are plenty who might benefit from such enhancements. Unfortunately, with bids expected to total £9 billion, reducing the available pot from £3 billion to £1.4 billion will mean that most bidders can expect to be disappointed. And, as Suffolk is not exactly heaving with marginal Parliamentary seats, we’re probably going to fall within the “disappointed” category (again).

On a wider note, that disappointment will ripple outwards as just another instance of a Government announcement that heightens expectations only to dash them a little while later. You can get away with that when you’re popular but it’s not so easy when you aren’t - we’re reminded of past failures.

It’s also a pity, as the money invested in buses supports so much of this Government’s alleged agenda - reducing congestion and air pollution, tackling climate change and rural isolation, levelling up disadvantaged communities and supporting the working poor. Sadly, it demonstrates the paucity of actual ideas behind the levelling up slogan, and the lack of will to change that.

Government is more than catchy three word slogans, it’s about delivery of things that improve lives for the maximum number of people, especially those whose lives are most in need of improvement. And this Government, focussed on “red meat” and culture wars, seems particularly ill-equipped to make promises it can keep or find ways to improve society.

A Rural Bus Ride in the Time of COVID-19...

We’ve heard a lot about the problems of public transport operators since the pandemic set in - very few passengers, restrictions on those who do use it, and the financial crisis that an absence of fare revenue has wrought. Out here in rural Suffolk, there aren’t that many trains, and the notion of commercial bus services is quaint, to put it mildly. Most services outside of the major towns require a subsidy from the County Council, and with local government finances ever more tightly squeezed, their future is shaky.

Ros was chairing the ALDC Annual Conference today, and suggested that I might like to go out somewhere. Trains were out, as the High Output Track Renewal was at work south of Stowmarket, so I was reliant on buses.

With COVID-19 reducing discretionary travel to negligible numbers, our already sparse network was virtually skeletal, but as we’re all being encouraged back to work, they’re all being reinstated, and so I could catch a 114 bus from Little Stonham to Eye, as long as Ros was willing to drop me at the stop - it is nearly five miles away. At Eye, for contractual reasons, it would be transformed into a route 112 bus for the short dash to Diss.

And so, bright and early, Ros dropped me at a remote bus stop (in fairness, she did make sure that the bus came), and I was off in my own elongated taxi, there being no other passenger. Stonham Aspal, Mickfield and even Debenham, a relative metropolis, came and went without sight or sound of company. Rishangles and Thornham were a blur and then, at Occold, that staple of rural buses, a little old lady with a shopping basket got on. By the time we left Eye, there were four of us. Luckily, the bus seats 49...

I didn’t have long in Diss, which wasn’t a wholly bad thing to my mind, because I had a bus to catch for Norwich. There are four or five buses a day on the direct route up the A140, but I had in mind something different.

Norfolk County Council had, pre-pandemic, decided to try an experiment, introducing a Saturday service from Diss to Norwich via East Harling, the intention being to enable the villagers living in the wedge between the A11 and the A140 to go for a day’s shopping in Norwich and leave the car at home. You get about three hours in the city, enough for some shopping and a bite of lunch. There’s only one bus in each direction, but we’re used to that out here in the sticks.

Route 37A starts off by heading west out of Diss, passing through Roydon and Bressingham before veering off through the Lophams and then on to East Harling. You’ve now travelled ten miles and are now further from Norwich than you were when the bus left Diss. You are now heading in the right direction, at least.

I was, not entirely unexpectedly, the only passenger as we left Diss, but a rather enthusiastic woman got on in Roydon, and told me how wonderful the new service was, and how she was encouraging people to use it. She was going to East Harling to meet her sister and so, when we arrived, she got off. It was just me and the driver now...

Kenninghall, Banham (for the zoo), Buckenhams Old and New, passed by without a pause, let alone a passenger, then a detour through Carleton Rode and Bunwell before reaching Tacolneston. Still nobody to share our ride. Ashwellthorpe, Wreningham and Bracon Ash were left behind us before we pulled into Mulbarton. Surely we’d pick up someone there - it’s a growing community with a decent non-league football team and a supermarket? But no, we were left to carry on in glorious isolation all the way to Norwich, where I thanked the driver for the entertainment and got off.

Yes, it had taken three and a half hours to get to Norwich, compared to the usual half hour or so on the train, but the countryside’s lovely at this time of year, and I wasn’t in a hurry. Besides, if nobody uses these services, there soon won’t be services to lose...

@BaronessRos in the Lords: Buses

Alright, not perhaps the most glamorous subject in the world, but for those of us who rely on public transport, buses are absolutely core to our options. Ros wanted to remind the Minister that, for rural communities, buses provide a much needed connection to local services...

I thank my noble friend Lord Bradshaw for tabling today’s debate and for being so effective in keeping the woes of the bus industry on the agenda because buses tend to get overtaken by railways.

Like the noble Earl, I shall use my time to speak about rural bus services in England, where there is a particularly intractable set of problems. Last year, when the Bus Services Bill was going through this House, rural issues were raised quite a number of times. The Minister, to his credit, was forced to admit that not enough attention had been paid to the potential benefits that could come from the Bus Services Act if it was implemented in the right way. I know we are not so far on, but it would be very interesting to hear from the Minister what work is going on in the department to make sure that rural areas are not forgotten. During the passage of the Bill, we talked about the way in which the commissioning process could use the Public Services (Social Value) Act criteria to level the playing field with social and community providers of transport. That was something the Minister was quite responsive to, so I would like to hear a little more about that.

I shall make two points which at one level are rather obvious, but which are not always well understood. First, there are different sorts of rural areas. The village I live in in Suffolk is tiny. There are about 200 people in the parish, and it has never had a regular bus service. People stay there only if they have access to a car, and community transport plays an important part for a very small number of people with particular needs. A mile away is a village 10 times the size, which is a completely different kettle of fish. It has always had a very good bus service. People moved there ​knowing that they had access to the nearby market town and then onwards to Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds. The service has undergone successive contractions and it is now getting harder and harder for people to use the bus to get into work, or to hospitals and other places. These are both rural communities but they have very different expectations and needs.

The second point is that it is convenient to think about rural and urban areas separately, but of course they are inextricably linked. The overall health of the bus industry, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Bradshaw, is very bad, and if it is bad overall, it is dire in rural areas. We have to understand that they are linked. Also, there is the congestion problem: given that most rural journeys might originate in a rural area but are going to an urban area, they are also impacted.

The CPRE has recorded that supported mileage by local authorities has fallen by 24%. It is using the term, “the Beeching of the buses”. Many of them are in rural areas. It is quite illuminating that the Campaign for Better Transport worked out that the total of those lost grants is £225 million in England. That is a lot of money for local authorities, but in government terms, it is the cost of a single bypass. It represents 17% of bus journeys but the ones that are the most socially necessary for some groups.

In 2016, this House published a report on the way in which the Equality Act is being delivered. There was a particular strand of evidence from users about the way in which local authorities fail to do proper impact assessments when they are making decisions about bus provision. As a consequence, a number of groups now face very real problems, which are bad enough if you are in an urban area—in a rural area, it is hopeless. Many older people are unable to drive and depend on public transport. Reimbursement of the bus pass is not keeping up with the costs and, in any case, in many places there are no services on which to use a concessionary pass. In some areas, including my own, a switch to community transport schemes is all very well, but the local authority has used the licensing regime of the buses used to deny passengers the use of their concessionary fares pass.

We know that younger people are taking fewer journeys. In an urban area, that is probably quite a good thing, but in rural areas the only practical way for younger people to look for work or attend higher education—or even have some sort of social life—is running a car. I was talking to providers running the Government’s flagship National Citizen Service; they told me that rural transport is a real barrier to participation for many young people and—because the NCS is provided on a county basis—there was a ridiculous situation where students on the Cambridgeshire border were expected to get to Ipswich, which was just impossible by public transport, but could not go to Cambridge, where there is a bus. The delivery of some of these other services really needs looking at.

For jobseekers without access to a car, just getting to job centres is a real problem. There is the iniquity of people being sanctioned when the system lets them down. Then, of course, there are people on low incomes, who are very dependent on buses. In rural areas, ​because there are no buses, it is more likely that people who really cannot afford to do so are having to run one or even two cars just to get to work and so on. The irony of all this is that collectively we are actually spending quite a lot of money on buses. Between the bus operators grant, concessionary fares, home-to- school transport, the voluntary sector and health and social providers, there is a lot—but it has never been joined up.

I know that the Government have created some pilots under the Total Transport scheme, covering 37 local authority areas. It would be really useful to know a bit about the outcome of the pilots and what lessons were learned. On a linked point, the Campaign for Better Transport and the Passenger Transport Group are keen to see a connectivity fund, which would bring together this expenditure. I look forward to the Minister’s answer and I hope that she understands the very real concerns that are being expressed today about the overall state of the bus industry, particularly in rural areas.

Catch the bus, if you can...

As a recently returned member of the Liberal Democrat Voice editorial team, I have the good fortune to receipt a copy of every press release issued by the Party. Well, I say good fortune but, most of the time, I simply delete them as being of little personal use. That isn’t a criticism of our Press team, but is a reflection of the fact that I’m only really an amateur journalist one day per week.

Sometimes though, one of them catches my attention, as it did on Thursday.

Local bus routes slashed by 14% in areas outside London 

read the headline. Given that I live outside London, and rely on buses to get out and about in the absence of both a car and the ability to drive one, I wanted to find out more.

It seems that the number of miles travelled by supported bus routes, which are subsidised by local authorities, fell to 125 million in 2016/17 in areas of England outside London. This is a fall of 20 million miles, or 13.8%, compared to the previous year.

In truth, this comes as no great surprise. My village lost its last scheduled bus service a few years ago, but given that it ran once a week (on Market day) and was so obscure that even my then fellow Parish councillors didn’t know of its existence, its failure to survive was inevitable.

The service was replaced by Demand Responsive Transport, funded by the County Council. I could ring the contact number, talk to Margaret or Francesca, and we would agree pickup and drop off times, based on the needs of other users. It was surprisingly reasonable in cost and very efficient, helpful given that it was my only connection to the outside world apart from a long walk across the fields to either Stowmarket, Needham Market or Stowupland.

Suffolk County Council’s Conservative administration is inordinately proud of its record of freezing Council Tax, and of increasing reserves each year in excess of inflation. The down side of that is increasing pressure on what are seen as non-core services, and rural buses fall into that category, with subsidies reduced year on year.

My bus service was put out to tender as part of that programme of cuts, and the new operator was tasked with reducing the required subsidy to nil over five years. What that meant was a sizeable rise in fares - the cheap return was replaced by two singles (my fare went up by 54% as a result) but, worst of all, the County Council had, by design or by accident, excluded the Mid Suffolk service from the concessionary fare scheme for the elderly. That was hardly likely to help make the service viable, but nonetheless, it was done anyway.

It was noticed that the equivalent services in Waveney, Babergh, St Edmundsbury, Forest Heath and Suffolk Coastal all retained a right to use the concessionary fares scheme, and even in Ipswich, there were plenty of regular buses on which the scheme applied.

But, it was, and is, all about the money. The County Council continue to make cuts, rural bus routes shrivel up and die, and the villages become that little bit harder to get to and from. Once a bus runs on a less than hourly basis, the chances are that more and more people will simply switch to private vehicles. And if you make the schedule unpredictable, you’d better believe that you have problems.i

A death spiral ensues - less people ride the bus, so higher subsidies are required, which the County Council can’t, or won’t countenance. Thus, more cuts, less buses, further passenger switching to private vehicles. I can’t object to the apparently inexorable logic, but there comes a point when rural isolation becomes more of a problem than the cost of the subsidy.

It is no consolation that rural bus services are under threat across the country, as the Save Our Buses campaign notes in its briefings, but at least someone is banging the drum for even a vestigial rural transport. It would be nicer if someone on power was actually listening...

@BaronessRos in the Lords: Bus Services Bill, Committee Stage (2)

It isn't just about enabling rural communities to get about, because buses are also a means of getting to the countryside, as Ros noted yesterday evening...

Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment with great pleasure. I have no particular interest to declare with regard to national parks except as someone who visits them and loves them, and I want to make sure that everyone else has those same opportunities as far as possible. I was thinking on the way here about the Peak District National Park, which has, within an hour’s travelling time, very many millions of people who live close to it and for whom access to it is an important part of their lives. I would hate to think about that being an opportunity that is available only to people with cars. That would be a great inequality issue. If we are sensible about this, we should remember that there are people who live in cities who would rather not have a car, so it helps cities too. It would be ridiculous to punish people by not providing access to a treasure that is on their doorstep.

In particular, we have to remember that national parks are not museums. They are areas of the countryside where people live and work, and there is a really interesting tension for the national park authorities themselves between wanting to encourage visitors and managing the impacts of that, such as congestion; we have all seen problems where people park and cause damage and so on. There is a very difficult balancing act for national park authorities. On the whole, they do it extremely well and they act as very good brokers between the people who live there and the people who want to visit. It could only make their job more difficult if they were to be ignored and not consulted when some of these important decisions about local transport are made. They know their area best.

The other point about national parks is that they do not entirely conform to the same rules as some other areas. Bus services on Sundays, for example, are often seen as unimportant, whereas in a national park Sunday is the most important day that you need to provide transport for.

Finally, there is the question of jobs. The briefing that I received said that something like 68,000 jobs are dependent on tourism to national parks. We want ​people to have access to the jobs as well, and if people without cars want to have access to them, we need to manage public transport too. I hope the Minister will look favourably on this, because I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, that it is much more powerful to have something like this in the Bill rather than in guidance.

@BaronessRos in the Lords: Bus Services Bill

Ros has, over the years, been quite critical of Government efforts to interfere with the way buses and bus services are regulated. However, the current proposals offer some cause for optimism.

She wasn't going to let slip an opportunity to condemn what Suffolk Conservatives are doing to a service which has hitherto been pretty successful...

Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD): My Lords, it is 16 years almost to the day since I made my maiden speech in this House. At the time I was chair of the Local Government Association transport executive, so it was quite natural to make my debut in the Second Reading debate of the Transport Bill 2000. Nowadays, I am that rare being in your Lordships’ House, a vice-president of the LGA. I declare that interest.

The 2000 Act was a wide-ranging piece of legislation and contained an extensive section on the bus industry that was based on a big piece of work, From Workhorse to Thoroughbred: A Better Role for Bus Travel. It was intended to be a major advance for the bus industry. Sadly, it is now available only on the National Archives website. Clearly, it failed in its ambitions because, as we have heard, the bus industry as a whole is in some trouble.

The 2000 Act created a quality partnerships and contract framework which, if we are honest, was not fit for purpose. It omitted the two single most important things for passengers: the fares they pay and the frequency of the buses. My noble friend Lord Bradshaw and I argued at the time that what was needed was a franchising model more on the lines of London, which gave local authorities all the powers that they needed, including enforcement. It is worth reflecting on some work done by the campaign group Greener Journeys, which highlights that average traffic speeds in our cities have now fallen below 10 mph. This of course creates a vicious circle: as the buses slow down, people stop using them and get into cars, which then makes the problem worse.

The point about London that we made then, and which still applies now, is that it is expensive; it costs money to run a franchising scheme like that. My big fear is that by bringing forward this scheme now, when local authorities are in such trouble financially, may doom it to fail because there simply is not the money to do it. Yet, when you look at the figures in London, passenger journeys have increased by 227% since the mid-1980s. If we were able to somehow monetise that in terms of the savings in time, congestion, air quality and so on, it would probably prove to have been good value for money—but that is not the world that we live in.

The Urban Transport Group made the point that the previous legislation, the 2000 Act, was so complex as to be virtually undeliverable—a point also made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. It was inevitable that deregulation would result in an emphasis on profit-making routes at the expense of low-income or non-income generating routes. Bus operators are businesses after all and we need them to be successful. It fell to local authorities to subsidise routes where they felt that there was a social value. These routes are now being lost in very large numbers as local authorities become ever more strapped for cash. According to the Campaign for Better Transport, a total of £22.2 million has been cut from supported bus funding in the current year. One in five supported bus services has been cut back since 2010; that is a picture that we recognise right across the country.

Living in rural Suffolk, I see at first hand all the problems that have been highlighted by the Campaign for Better Transport and the Campaign to Protect Rural England and in an excellent report produced by Age UK that has powerful testimony on the impacts of transport poverty. Older people are more dependent on public transport for access to medical appointments, shopping and even the simple human activity of keeping in touch with friends and family. Younger people, too, are struggling with access to transport to look for work or to get to appointments at job centres. There are even instances of people being sanctioned when they have not kept appointments because the transport does not exist. Low-income groups are more reliant on public transport: nationally they make three times as many journeys by bus as those in the highest income groups. As we have also heard, 60% of people with a disability have no car in their household. The situation is bad for anyone in these groups, but for people in these groups living in rural areas, the situation is dire. I would like to hear whether any rural-proofing has been done on these proposals.

I understand that we have to be realistic about financial realities. Indeed, after I was first elected to Suffolk County Council in 1993, we carried out a review of sponsored bus services and found a surprising number where the per-passenger subsidy was significantly higher than a taxi fare would have been—well, you cannot go on like that. When my now-husband first came to visit me in my tiny Suffolk village nine years ago, he assumed, as a Londoner, that he would just get a bus from the station. I had to explain that in my village, real-time passenger information says “Thursday”. We do not even have that nowadays, and I can understand why.

What we do have is a rather good demand-responsive community transport system called Suffolk Links, which has recently been used in a case study published by Passenger Focus. But even that is now being seriously impacted by budget cuts and the situation has deteriorated in the short time between the report being produced and published. Suffolk County Council announced a new contract just two weeks ago which has removed the ability of pensioners to use their concessionary passes because it has reduced the vehicle size to a nine-seater, which takes it outside the scope of the concessionary fare scheme. What a shoddy trick to pull on pensioners, and I really hope that the Minister will undertake to have a look at those regulations so that we can bring them back into scope.

Like a number of other noble Lords, I am less than clear about the powers that will go to non-mayoral areas as a result of the Bill. I had understood that franchising powers would automatically go to mayoral areas and that the others would have to go through some sort of application process. But there seems to be some confusion about that so I would appreciate clarity. It is absolutely essential that the regulations are clear and well understood so that local authorities do not embark on a process of expensive work that is doomed to fail from the start because they will not meet the criteria.

I would like to raise a new issue which I do not think anyone has mentioned yet: home-to-school transport. Cuts to school bus services are now generating 100 million extra car journeys every year, according to the Campaign for Better Transport, which also says that 300,000 children outside London have lost their school transport since 2008. Obviously, this is a major access issue in rural areas, but it also impacts on the viability of bus operators because many of them rely on school contracts and use the normal service buses for short periods of time every day during term time.

The provisions in the Bill that relate to passenger information are significant and very welcome. If you want to travel from somewhere to Needham Market—you would, would you not? It is a wonderful place—it is not at all easy to find out how to do that. The rail industry has nailed that. It is still rubbish on tickets and clarity of pricing but at least you can find out how to get from one place to another. It is key for passengers to have this information so that they can use public transport with confidence. It is also essential at a more technical level, if franchising is going to work properly for both the operators and local authorities, to really understand the data about how bus services are being used and how they make money.

When I was heavily involved in transport matters, we had a major problem with the competition authorities. I would like confirmation from the Minister that the department is confident that this issue has been sorted. Basically, the competition authorities stopped public transport operators talking to each other. When I was dealing with this in Suffolk, I could not get local bus operators together in the same room because they were so paranoid that they were going to fall foul of anti-competition laws. Clearly, if the sharing of data and so on is going to work, operators have to be confident that they can do it.

The future for bus services across large parts of England is pretty bleak unless we do something fairly dramatic. The Department for Transport’s own figures predict that by 2040 bus journeys will have dropped faster than journeys by any other form of transport. This could severely impact England’s rural and vulnerable populations, and increase congestion and CO2. It is an enormous task to halt this decline. Whether or not the Bill can do it remains to be seen, but it is a step in the right direction. I congratulate the Government on bringing it forward. It is absolutely right that it has started its life in this House because there are things that we can do to improve it.

"Connecting Communities" - a better service at a lower cost, says our Conservative County Councillor...

At last month's meeting of Creeting St Peter Parish Council, I raised an issue under 'Any Other Business', having been newly co-opted (and I'm really pleased to be back), i.e. the new demand responsive transport service for Mid Suffolk, which comes into effect on Monday week.

The new contract is a worry, for a range of reasons. Funding for the service is to be cut each year for the next five years, and one of the side effects of the change to smaller vehicles is that bus passes will not be valid - a real blow for the rural elderly who face potential isolation. Fares have also gone up due to the withdrawal of return fares - my daily return journey will rise in cost from £2.60 to £4.00. We are also yet to see what effect the combination of three free-standing services into one combined one will have on vehicle availability.

I merely noted that the impact of the new contract would need to be monitored, when our County Councillor, Gary Green came up with the line that is the title of this post. It was a familiar line, in that it was the line spoken by the County Council's Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport when the new package was announced. He is, as ever, on message.

I did wonder at the time of that announcement how you could cut the costs of the contract so dramatically without there being some impact on passengers, and now we know. The service providers now provide their own vehicles - they previously used vehicles supplied by the County Council - so the risks are now placed solely upon the contractor. The existing staff have had their contractual hours reduced, which implies that there will be less cover for sickness and holidays. And, as noted above, the elderly will use the right to use their bus passes.

My fear is that, if the elderly abandon the service, or use it less, it will become less and less viable, to the point where the County Council can walk away from providing such a service all together, a fierce blow to the small villages dotted across Mid Suffolk.

For me, the increase in the fare will be a hit to the pocket, but one that I, at least, can afford. I'm not sure that most of my fellow passengers will be able to be quite so sanguine...

"Speed, bonnie bus, like a bird on the wing"...

It still wasn't very nice as I left Inverness (again). At least it wasn't raining as hard as it had been for the most epic part of my rail adventure, involving two trains, a ferry and two buses, one of which might not actually exist.

The railway line to Kyle of Lochalsh is another of those well-known railways to nowhere, passing through a whole lot of nothing on the way to a ferry port which lost its raison d'etre when the bridge to Skye was built. Admittedly, the 'whole lot of nothing' is insanely scenic, but you do wonder how such a line survives even now. I'm not convinced that the number of fare-paying passengers really justifies keeping it, but as the sort of person who can think of little finer than gazing out of the window of a moving train, accompanied perhaps by a nice cup of tea, I am grateful to the powers that be for funding it.

The train rolled into Kyle of Lochalsh at 11.30, leaving me less than five hours to get to Mallaig, the furthest extent of the West Highland Line. The obvious route was via the Armadale-Mallaig ferry, but how to reach Armadale?

There is a bus from Kyle of Lochalsh to Broadford, on Skye, which conveniently leaves the slipway, near the station, at 11.50 a.m., and so I headed there to catch it. I found it easily enough, a little thirty-seater operated by Stagecoach, and sure enough, it made its way over the bridge and onto Skye. Soon, I was in Broadford, which is the second largest community on Skye, after Portree. This is not saying an awful lot, but it has all of the key things that you might need, including a bus stop. It even has the Isle of Skye Candle Company, which offered an opportunity to do some minor gift shopping.

According to Traveline, there was a bus to Armadale Pier, run by Maclean's Coaches. There was, however, no mention of it on the bus stop, and the company website indicated that there was no summer timetable. I could, however, ring them for information, so I did, only to get a voicemail message which indicated that I could leave a message, which I did. It also indicated that the bus stop was half a mile away.

And so, I trudged through the rain, suitcase trailing behind me, until I found the designated spot. I was not optimistic but, at almost exactly the appointed time, a slightly stretched pale blue minibus hove into view, which I flagged down, somewhat to the surprise of the driver. It was the mysterious number 601 bus to Armadale Pier.

I stopped for fish and chips (don't tell anyone) at a rather cute little cafe next to the port office for Caledonian MacBrayne, who run most of the ferry services in the West of Scotland, and did a little more shopping, before buying my very reasonable ticket to Mallaig.

Mallaig was wet (just for consistency's sake) but, having stopped for tea as an alternative to being rained on, I was fortunate to board the train just before the heavens opened with particular ferocity - not a good omen for the train journey ahead. However, I wasn't to be disappointed, for the journey to Glasgow is a sensational one. My personal high spot was, just as we left Rannoch, a stag decided to display himself close to the track, immediately followed by a rainbow.

The last part of the journey is a bit of an anti-climax (if you choose to do the journey, do it in the other direction, is my advice), but I did get to my hotel in Glasgow early enough to have a truly marvelous steak and Gruyere baguette, possibly a marker for the culinary treat to follow the next evening. For I was heading south...

#busride - "take the last bus to Cambridge and I'll meet you at the station..."

The Monkees might not have sung that, although given the number of Clarksvilles in the United States, it might have been easier had they done so. And, one must admit, buses have never been as glamorous as trains. The Orient Express rail replacement bus, as an example, doesn't really cut it. So, fair enough, "Last Train to Clarksville" it must be.

The last direct bus to Cambridge leaves Market Street, Ely at 6.15 p.m. on a Saturday evening. Forget a late night out if you don't live near the station. Admittedly, late night excitement is a bit thin on the ground in rural England, but we still have young people who enjoy that sort of thing. And so, I wanted to be on it. I didn't have a lot of company.

The only sizeable community between Ely and Cambridge is Waterbeach, and the bus rather by-passes that, so it didn't take long to get to Cambridge. A short connecting ride later, and I was at the railway station for the last leg of my journey, a slightly anticlimactic train ride to Stowmarket.

So, a day exploring the bus network of East Anglia, and what have I learned?...

#busride - every adventure begins with a little planning...

In London, planning a bus journey that involves connections is, for the most part, very easy. Buses run very frequently, and there are lots of them, heading in every direction. so, all you do is go out to the nearest bus stop and wait. You might plan your route, but you probably wouldn't think too much about timings. And, even if you are aiming to be at a certain place at a certain time, the Transport for London website is very good at that.

When planning trips, I am known to struggle with choice. So many options, so hard to choose. Luckily, or not, as the case may be, there aren't many choices as to where one might go from Creeting St Peter on a Saturday morning. In fact, in terms of scheduled bus services, there aren't any. Ever. Which makes the whole choice thing rather easier, I guess. I can get to Stowmarket, using the Suffolk Links Demand Responsive Transport service, however - I use it to get to the station every day as part of my commute.

So, where can you go from Stowmarket by bus?

So, it's Diss, Bury St Edmunds, Hadleigh or Ipswich (note the lack of buses in an eastwards direction). Unfortunately, the Hadleigh services amount to one bus a day, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays only. There is a bus to Diss, except that it leaves Stowmarket at 7.55 a.m. And, it's the only one.

That leaves Ipswich, where I work, and Bury St Edmunds, which is a good jumping off point for West Suffolk. The service to Ipswich, via Needham Market, is half-hourly - it's a main artery and serves some decently-sized communities. Alternatively, there is a roughly hourly service to Bury St Edmunds, but I rode the route via Woolpit earlier in the summer.

There is no alternative, I'll have to take a train to Diss and connect with a bus from there to Bury St Edmunds. Route 304, sponsored by the County Council, leaves Diss at 10.30 a.m., arriving at the bus station in Bury St Edmunds at 11.48 a.m., and travels through a part of Mid Suffolk that I don't know well - Botesdale and Rickinghall, to name but two villages.

So, where from Bury St Edmunds? Sudbury is pretty, but from there, your only real options are Colchester and Ipswich, and Thetford is a bit grim. That leaves Cambridge, Haverhill, Mildenhall and Newmarket. It's a long connect (forty-two minutes) for Mildenhall, which rules that out. The Cambridge bus passes through Newmarket, but Haverhill sounds interesting. The connection isn't perfect (twenty-seven minutes) but that gives me the time to pick up a snack and something to drink, so Haverhill it is.

At Haverhill, there is a bus to Saffron Walden, which is, apparently, pretty (I've never been there). The connection is apparently immediate, which doesn't leave a lot of room for error but, if all else fails, there are regular buses to Cambridge. Cambridgeshire is relatively easy, as Stagecoach dominate the cross-country services that radiate from Cambridge. So, Saffron Walden to Cambridge, Cambridge to Ely it is.

By the time I get to Ely (she'll be waiting), it will be getting late, so time to turn for home. There is a train, but there is also a bus from Ely to Newmarket, from where I can catch the hourly train service back to Stowmarket, as buses tend to stop running after 6 p.m. So, why not?

So, two trains, six buses and a Suffolk Links service in a lop-sided figure of eight taking in four counties in less than ten . What could possibly go wrong?

#busride - a little context before the serious work begins...

As a child, I bemused my parents, particularly my mother, by my almost obsessive fascination with buses. Not in a trainspotter-ish way, you understand, but as a user. Over a long monsoon in Mumbai as a five year old, I spent hours looking out of the bedroom window, counting buses and wondering where they went. And, as soon as I was allowed out on my own or, in Mumbai, with a doting grand uncle, I was riding buses further and further afield, visiting family or just exploring.

Growing up into a non-driver - I still haven't gone as far as even taking a driving lesson - buses, and public transport in general - became a part of my life, albeit generally in an urban setting. Luckily, as a Londoner, there was no shortage of buses and, no matter how far you went, you could always get home. And one should thank Ken Livingstone for that, to some extent. I even managed to get a holiday job as a result, admittedly for my father, locating poster sites and marking them against a scale of his devising. It was an enjoyable, and mildly lucrative, way of spending my summer.

It was only upon moving to Mid Suffolk that I began to realise that buses were not something to be taken for granted. Upon asking Ros when the buses to Creeting St Peter ran, her answer (Thursday) came as something of a surprise. And, since then, my bus rides have been restricted to an occasional treat. until yesterday, that was...

A transport of delight, Mumbai style...

Those of you who remember Flanders and Swann will doubtless recall one of their best-known songs, all about a scarlet-painted, diesel-engined, ninty-seven horsepower omnibus. But, whilst they may now be but a distant memory in London, not much has changed in Mumbai, with some glorious old boneshakers still dominating the streets.

Mostly single decker these days, they are utterly disabled unfriendly, with steep steps and narrow doorways (assuming that the bus actually stops) to be negotiated. The conductor operates predominantly with one hand on the cord operating the bell but, in fairness, they do have some kind of Oystercard system, so he now has a computerised ticket machine. The ride is uniformly awful, the seats uncomfortable (or am I getting old?) but the fare is cheap, despite today's exorbitant fare rises - I paid 13 rupees (about 14p) to get from Mahim to Santa Cruz today.

It is, in truth, a throwback to my childhood forty years ago, travelling the city from uncle to aunt and back again to Nana in Eagle's Nest.

Tomorrow, I'm heading into the Fort area, the old commercial hub of the city, with a little shopping in mind, and, whilst I could simply catch a train from Santa Cruz to Churchgate, that would be too easy, although almost as much of an adventure. I think that I've worked out the bus routes so, keep your fingers crossed...

"Rural bus services are crap,", says Labour shadow minister, "so we'll reallocate the blame to someone else..."

Michael Dugher has, somewhat belatedly, realised that subsidies for bus services have been cut, resulting in a loss of services, especially in rural areas, according to the Guardian. Well spotted, that man (apologies to anyone who doesn't really approve of sarcasm)!

Unlike Mr Dugher, the MP for Barnsley East, I am a non-driver living in a rural community. I actually experience the problems caused by the absence of public transport but also have an awareness of the costs of providing bus services that are sparsely used.

The bus from Stowupland
- subsequently axed for lack of subsidy

Firstly, bus services in rural areas have been relatively sparse for decades, compared to urban areas. And the problem is, because of that, people in rural areas buy cars. As more of them buy cars, there are less people to patronise the bus routes which, accordingly, become less profitable, until eventually, they only run with public subsidies. People who can't drive drift towards towns, and rider figures drop further.

As a local authority, you can increase the subsidy, but convenience will always determine the means by which an individual chooses to travel. Indeed, Ros noted from her time as Deputy Leader of Suffolk County Council that, on some routes, it was cheaper to pay passengers to take taxis than to pay for an infrequent bus to run. And, with local government budgets squeezed year on year, if you have a choice between cutting libraries or social care, and a bus service used regularly by a dozen or so people, which would you choose?

Mr Dugher's solution?

The bus market is clearly broken and the way local services are provided is not fit for purpose. Labour would change that and hand cities and county regions greater control over local bus services. We will ensure people get the local transport system they need.

Look, control is not the problem, money is the problem, and you can provide more bus services if they are financially viable or if someone is willing and able to pay for them. You could allow cross-subsidy again, but, to be honest, who wants to run loss-making services? Of course, the classic Labour solution of compulsion hovers nervously in the background.

The solution is to spend what money there is more efficiently, not to make meaningless promises on the basis of an apparent lack of awareness as to what it is like to live in a rural community. Demand responsive transport, for example, would make a huge difference to those affected by rural isolation.

I look forward to my Labour candidate turning up here in April to tell me how he or she is going to ensure that I get the local transport system I need. I live in a fairly isolated village, three miles from a town with buses and trains. That's three miles across country, on roads that wind around without pavements, or across public footpaths that are ankle-deep in mud in winter. Perhaps they could offer to drive me to the station every morning...

The 87 bus is saved, but only in part...

As part of the Conservative-run County Council's slash and burn approach to bus subsidies, the subsidised evening and Sunday service on routes 87 and 88 will cease on 2 April. However, for some at least, there is some good news.

Galloways have announced that they will be running a revised Sunday service on the route, between Stowmarket and Ipswich via Needham Market six times a day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., using one bus. My only confusion is that the timetable is labelled 'Mendlesham - Stowmarket - Claydon - Ipswich', yet there is no indication that buses stop at Mendlesham or any intermediate point between there and Stowmarket.

I'll be in touch with Galloways to see if there's something I've missed, and report back later...

Stowupland loses its Sunday and evening bus services

I've been waiting for the promised consultation on local bus services for some time now. It would appear that, like an 87A bus on a Sunday, it will never come, as the announcement of what survives the 53% cut in subsidy has been made via the Suffolk Onboard website. From a personal perspective, the announcement falls into two parts, the effect on my own village, and that on the village next door.

In Creeting St Peter, we've lost our market day bus, route 453, which connected the Creetings with Stowmarket on a Thursday. To be honest, very few people even seemed to know that it exists, and with the new Suffolk Links service, villagers are probably better connected than they were before. Overall, the changes benefit us, although bus ridership figures are probably very low - you wouldn't really choose to live in Creeting St Peter if you didn't already drive.

In Stowupland, on the other hand, losing all evening and Sunday services is a real blow. There are plenty of people, especially at the Reeds Way end of the village, for whom the bus service is important, connecting them to family in Stowupland or Needham Market, and who will now be dependent on expensive taxis. What I find mystifying is that the service connects Cedars Park to Stowmarket as well, and whilst the journey is walkable, it probably isn't with shopping, or children, or if you're elderly. Effectively, this decision removes the service from about 8,000 people in Stowupland and Cedars Park, and if you add on those people in Needham Market and Stowmarket, whose connection with Ipswich is lost, there are a lot of people affected by this decision.

It needn't have been like this. The Liberal Democrat Group on Suffolk County Council proposed changes to the budget that would have saved services to Stowupland for at least a year, giving time to see whether other arrangements could be made. Frankly, I could have accepted the loss of market day services given the expansion of the Suffolk Links services, reducing the cost of bus subsidy somewhat, but the principle of maintaining a network of buses remains a sound one. The Conservatives, however, chose to ignore the opportunity.

The lack of consultation bothers me too. Yes, we all accept that cuts have to be made, but the idea that you withdraw bus service from places where new houses are being built in large numbers (another 300 or so under construction in Cedars Park as I type), seems ludicrous. Add to the fact that there is a significant elderly population in Stowupland, and also a fair bit of social housing, likely to be inhabited by people who can't afford cars, and this looks like a poor decision taken by a portfolio holder who doesn't care.

I should declare an interest. I don't drive, and use the community bus that serves Creeting St Peter to go to work. I don't actually use route 87 or 87A, but if I lived in Stowupland, I would. What I do know is that, in a county that has a 'Greenest County' portfolio, cutting a main public transport artery like this sends out a clear signal that the Conservatives talk a good game but act like vandals.

The invisible bus stop of Creeting St Peter

There I am, displaying some enthusiasm for my new role, contacting Suffolk County Council in my quest to find out how we get a bus stop. Naturally, this being the supposedly incompetent public sector, I did expect to have to wait for a while. Two hours, as it turned out to be...

My new friend at Suffolk County Council, Paul, e-mailed me a map of the village, with the locations of the bus stops marked upon it. My first thought, "There are bus stops?". So I look at the map and read the e-mail, noting that Suffolk has a number of unmarked bus stops - like the ones in Creeting St Peter... You see, it is presumed that, because you live in the village, you know where the bus stops. Fiendish, eh? And, of course, if you don't live in the village, you'll not care. It's designed to confuse us city types.

The good news is that the County Council are undertaking a programme of signing and roadmarking of bus stops, and providing raised kerbs for ease of access in line with their responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act, and I appear to be the right person in the right place at the right time.

I've already worked out what I'd like next...