Wiltshire Barred From DfT Superbus Funding For Being Too Affluent

[whole diary]

[Lee]

Recently, I have been helping grahame with research backup for his Melksham Public Transport Vision, with particular regard to bus services. One of the first schemes I looked at was the recently announced DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) Superbus Networks funding stream, which looked a potential fit to what grahame is trying to achieve - see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-better-deal-for-bus-users/a-better-deal-for-bus-users

The government will fund a 4 year pilot in Cornwall to bring down fares to be introduced from May 2020. This work will build on Cornwall’s existing One Public Transport project, which aims to provide integrated public transport by joining up the bus and rail networks and demonstrate whether and how such an approach works in a rural area.

We are also exploring whether a further pilot could be developed to decrease fares and improve frequencies in an urban area through the local authority and bus operators entering into a partnership to deliver a superbus network. The local authority would provide capital investment in bus lanes and other bus priority measures, in exchange for the bus operators delivering high frequency services.

The Superbus Expression of Interest document can be found here. However, it soon became apparent that it would not be appropriate for Melksham, as the eligibility criteria states that the urban area must focus on a town or city with a population greater than 75,000, while Melksham has 25.000 at present, looking to rise to between 30,000 and 40,000 in 15 years.

In fact, no town or city under Wiltshire Council control currently meets the population criteria. While that is disappointing from the perspective of not being able to therefore access the funding stream, it is no great surprise given the impact that the Superbus Network scheme is aiming to achieve, and 75,000 is a reasonable level to set in my view.

If that were the only eligibility criteria, then I would probably leave it there, chalk it up to experience, and move on. However, there is a further eligibility criteria for Superbus Network funding, one that would see Wiltshire Council barred from bidding regardless of whether or not it had a qualifying town or city.

Deprivation

There is a proven correlation between access to bus services and levels of social
deprivation. To assess deprivation the MHCLG Indices of Multiple Deprivation
(2019) has been used. This is the official measure of relative deprivation in England,
based on 39 separate indicators. It represents the overall measure of multiple
deprivation experienced by people living in an area.

Only the top 75% most deprived local transport authorities are eligible to bid for
funding.

Based on these criteria, a list of local transport authorities eligible to bid for the
Superbus pilot is included in Annex B. Each local transport authority listed
may only submit a single bid. This is to limit the number of bids to a workable
number for assessment purposes and ensures that those with more than one BUA
focus on the one where they believe Superbus can be most effective

Wiltshire Council is not among the top 75% most deprived local transport authorities, and is therefore not eligible to bid for Superbus Network funding.

Now, I'm the first to admit that Wiltshire has more than its fair share of affluent areas. However, I also know from my time working for Wiltshire Council as a leader of a team trying to promote greater public transport use in TransWilts corridor towns such as Chippenham, Melksham, Trowbridge and Salisbury - as well being as a longtime TransWilts Rail campaigner - and also having worked for the service that reviews fostering and adoption cases in Wiltshire that there are areas of real deprivation in all of these towns and elsewhere in the county as well. Also, during our work on the original Option 24/7 Wiltshire Bus Proposals, grahame uncovered many, many cases of difficulty accessing bus services right across the county, a situation that only gets worse the more they are cut, and which both the original and more recent Option 24/7 proposals, along with grahame's Melksham Vision, were specifically designed to tackle.

My main concern here is that, under the currently fashionable political banner of "levelling up", applying this kind of Deprivation Eligibility Criteria becomes the norm. If it does, and does so in tandem with new funding added to public transport being matched by an equal and opposite reduction to that budget by the removal of other discretionary funding as grahame has expressed a fear of in his Melksham Vision piece, then it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the level of bus services we have now, let alone introduce the innovative proposals for improvements that many of us feel are desperately needed.

My hope therefore is that Wiltshire's MPs^▸ (Member of Parliament), all of whom are currently Conservative and should in theory at least get a reasonable hearing, make it their business to impress upon the DfT how damaging this would be, and that we as passengers and campaigners alike do all we can to make sure it doesnt come to pass.

[grahame]

Good morning, Lee.  I'm off to TravelWatch SouthWest today with an integrated transport theme. 

Yes, disappointed that there are elements of current bid opportunities which we can't go for, and others where I fear money being added at the headline end, but that pushing existing discressionary funding off the other side.  I'm noting that most new schemes need the support of the MP^▸ (Member of Parliament) in who's constituency they're based which on one hand helps ensure local support and on the other hand supports the MP's street cred. Also noting that the upcoming new stations scheme require ("a realistic chance of"?) completion by May 2024.  Next election due by December 2024.

There are, though, a couple of opportunities.  In amongst the spray of schemes council means tested to seemingly skew them towards new Conservative MPs, there are others that offer some crumbs if not the cake; I do think that what I learn today and perhaps motivation that comes from it has the potential to be usefully positive.  More later in the day.

"Levelling up" is not always a bad idea.   I would love a levelling up of reliability on TransWilts train services which suffered a 12.5% cancellation rate on Saturday and a 28.6% cancellation rate yesterday.   It won't delay people's journeys very much (provides you still have capacity) if you reduce the Central line from 30 trains per hour to 21, but if you leave a gap in services to Swindon from 15:10 to 20:32, and return gap from 15:46 to 21:10, you're going to put people off using the train.  If we could get this levelled up so that cancellation rate didn't exceed 2% (a generously easy target) we would be very happy.

[CyclingSid]

The

Deprivation Eligibility Criteria

as you call it has been in use for about 20 years. The first Index of Multiple Deprivation I have note of is 2000. It has been used for either bid criteria or bid assessment in multiple fields. It is routinely used, and abused, within public health planning and funding.

[Lee]

The

Deprivation Eligibility Criteria

as you call it has been in use for about 20 years. The first Index of Multiple Deprivation I have note of is 2000. It has been used for either bid criteria or bid assessment in multiple fields. It is routinely used, and abused, within public health planning and funding.

I dont dispute that. However, having been involved for a long time in searching out funding for TransWilts-related transport projects, I can truthfully say this is the first time I have come across a bar on Wiltshire Council applying for DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) transport funding on Deprivation Eligibility Criteria.

To give you a comparator, back in the bad old mid to late 2000s Save The Train days of 2 useless TransWilts Rail services per day where we tried in vain to get the then Labour Government to notice our case, we often came across examples of "their" areas seemingly being favoured over our part of the world. However, Wiltshire Council were never barred from applying for transport funding on such criteria, and were sometimes successful, notably when being granted Kickstart funding that created bus services that are still very much alive and well today.

[Bmblbzzz]

Applying deprivation indices at county or even town level is always going to result in some deprived areas missing out because they go unnoticed in the overall average. OTOH^▸ (On The Other Hand) apply it with great granularity and you're likely to lose the overall picture. Any transport link by definition involves multiple places, quite often connecting poorer areas to richer ones.

[CyclingSid]

IMD is really designed to be used at sub-ward level (Lower Super Output Area - LSOA).

As Bmblzzz says you lose out as you "aggregate" up to larger areas, something known as MAUP (Modifiable Areal Unit Property).

Looking at Wiltshire: the latest 2019 IMD ranks it as 133 out of about 350 local authorities, 2015 version 132 out of about 350 local authorities, and 2004 ranks it as 138 out of about 350 local authorities. Reading is about 90 out of about 350 local authorities and is in the allowable list. The higher geography rankings change little between version, so it comes down to where the line is drawn to apply.