: Thank you,
Presiding Officer. Deputy Minister, you'll be aware that First Bus
has withdrawn its X10 bus service between Cardiff and Swansea.
One of the reasons given by First Bus
for this service withdrawal is that, and I quote,
'It carries a disproportionate amount of concessions customers,
and not commercial customers, which makes it impossible to
sustain the costs.'
Senior citizens and people with disabilities who were able to use
a bus pass to travel between Cardiff and Swansea with ease have
now suffered a blow to their independence and their ability to
live their life to the fullest. What representations have you
made to First Bus
about the withdrawal of this service? And do you agree that your
policy of getting people out of their cars and onto public
transport for the daily commute will be adversely impacted by
this? Thank you.
(Deputy Minister for Climate Change): I've
recently met both with First and with the trade
unions to discuss the range of pressures that the bus industry is
facing at the moment. The specific issue that Natasha Asghar
raises, I'm afraid, is a direct consequence of the privatisation
of the bus industry back in the mid 1980s by the Conservative
Government, and we're still living with the consequences. The way
that the companies are incentivised in order to run routes that
maximise their revenues and not invest in socially necessary
routes remains a perennial problem for us. It's one of the
reasons why we are developing our bus strategy this year, with
legislation coming before the Senedd, because we do need to
regulate the bus industry through franchising. We can't allow
commercial operators simply to be cherry-pick those routes that
they wish to. So, I'm afraid, this is the result of the free
market economics that the Conservatives insist we follow. This
shows that it's failing to help people to make the necessary
transition from cars to public transport, and until we fix that
we won't be able to do it.
