Labour pledges free bus travel for under 25s

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From ITV.com

Labour has pledged that young people under the age of 25 would have access to free bus travel under their government.

The incentive would apply in areas where local authorities introduce bus franchising or services under public ownership, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will say on Thursday.

Mr Corbyn will declare that "young people deserve a break" in new promise to help them "travel to work, to study and to visit friends".

Labour believes that the policy could save up to 13m young people as much as £1000 a year.

[Tim]

Whilst I would tend to support anything that gets people onto buses, I'd prefer bus and train fares to be affordable so that everyone could afford them without concessions and freebies.

If you want to get people out of their cars, then targeting older people of working age (who can more afford to run a car and who tend to drive in peak times) with better services might be better than throwing freebies at people who are probably using the bus already.

[TaplowGreen]

This has been costed at £1.4 billion. Has Corbyn announced how it's to be paid for or is it another windfall from the magic money tree?

[Trowres]

[rather provocatively...] it could be funded by reducing the subsidy to rail services?  ... or is there a real MMT for rail?

[grahame]

This has been costed at £1.4 billion. Has Corbyn announced how it's to be paid for or is it another windfall from the magic money tree?

[rather provocatively...] it could be funded by reducing the subsidy to rail services?  ... or is there a real MMT for rail?

I'm trying to work out MMT ...
Market Model Typology?  Modern Monetary Theory? Methadone Maintenance Treatment?
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/why-is-mmt-so-popular.html
https://www.fixtrading.org/mmt/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methadone_maintenance

That aside ... I noted The incentive would apply in areas where local authorities introduce bus franchising or services under public ownership  which presently limits in to London (effectively franchising) and 10 other authorities where (some of) the buses are still owned by the local authority - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_bus_company  . Newport, Cardiff and Reading in our area?

The Bus Service Act enables other mayoral areas that are passenger transport authorities to run bus franchises and adds Cornwall too, with others who can convince the secretary of state they could do so also allowed to join in.   It's not clear to me whether the costing covers just the current London franchise and the other 10 local authority areas, or whether that price would also cover the Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle ... greater areas? These are certainly greater areas which if they went solid red might lead to a change in government ...

And where would that leave us in the shires?    We already hear of the 'rural poor' - hard to afford housing, difficult transport, lack of jobs.  Would our young be further disadvantaged encouraging a move to the cities, or would we see a rush of the likes of Somerset and Dorset rushing to a franchise model, or lobbying for a legal change so that they could once again set up their own bus companies run by the local authority?

Public Transport may actually be something that's naturally socialist ... although the railways are privatised, so many elements are in fact owned by the nation or managed to such a degree by government that in all but fine detail they are government controlled.  So what would be the effect of a nationalised network of public transport as a whole - and going even beyond Jeremy Corbyn's suggestion of making it free at the point of use for all people under the age of 25 ... or 35 or 45.  And  making it free at the point of use whether the vehicles run on rubber or steel.    We run into that great nationalisation debate again - and rather like Brexit, I suspect there would be lots of ways of doing it, each of which offers incentives to various groups to support it as it is suggested and brought forward, but then the devil of how we do it reveals that the devil is in the detail, and it can't be done in such a way that it delivers everything that everyone thought they supported.  We could end up with a system that's "like the NHS" - we're all very proud of, we make use of,  we have wonderful people working in there, but yet it's a money sink, short of facilities and monolithic / hard to change.   We could end up with an organisation that we find very hard to engage, such as some of us find with Network Rail, where planned projects seem to slip and change with minimal feedback and influence from the passengers who will actually use them, and the system is so risk averse and complex that budgets go up ten fold, pricing things out, and that promised community meetings "in the next couple of months" don't even make it to diaries for years.

Technology changes.   In 20 years, we'll all be travelling around in autonomous vehicles that go door to door taking us to nearby interchange points for larger vehicles; the individually owned vehicle and driven, and the need to be fit well and rich enough to afford driving insurance will be gone.   How will that effect and be reflected in the metrics of "Oooz going to organise it". "Oooz gonna regulate it" and "Oooz gonna pay for it?"

[Kernow Otter]

This has been costed at £1.4 billion. Has Corbyn announced how it's to be paid for or is it another windfall from the magic money tree?

From the sale of bags of Unicorn Dung to allotment holders....

[grahame]

From The BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page)

Labour is pledging to spend £1.3bn a year to reverse cuts to 3,000 bus routes and fund the expansion of new services in England and Wales.

During a visit to Nottingham later, Jeremy Corbyn will say services have been "devastated" by austerity.

The Campaign for Better Transport said local authority bus budgets have been cut by 45% since 2010.

But ministers said they spent £250m a year directly on services, including some that otherwise wouldn't be viable.

I know the headline.  I hope the £1.3 billion would be spent I ensuring the bus network has the routes, connections and fares for the future and does not just put back 3,000 routes.   Works out at £430,000 per route.

[Chris from Nailsea]

Well, this didn't appear anywhere in Rachel Reeves' Budget announcement. 

[Clan Line]

Well, this didn't appear anywhere in Rachel Reeves' Budget announcement. 

Got "rammed" into the too-difficult box 

[TaplowGreen]

Well, this didn't appear anywhere in Rachel Reeves' Budget announcement. 

"Labour  pledges"........