Taking Back West Yorkshire’s Buses
Buoyed by a string of recent victories across the country, campaigners in West Yorkshire are calling for an end to their rip-off privatised bus service – and fighting for a public bus system that works for everyone.
On a cold October night last year, Linsey, a disabled bus user from Bradford, logged onto a public meeting about buses. He was there to tell five West Yorkshire council leaders – and one hundred attendees – what it was like to be at the mercy of a privatised bus service.
He described the pain he suffers from his Parkinson’s while waiting for a bus he knows will turn up late. ‘I’m not asking for pity,’ he said, ‘I’m asking for your help.’
He was demanding these council leaders took action. They had the power to do something about the problems he and thousands of others had to face while living with a broken bus system – they could take West Yorkshire’s buses back into public control.
The moment was deeply emotional, but that’s not how the big bus companies saw it. After our mass public meeting closed, one company representative reaction on Twitter was how ‘utterly disrespectful’ it was of Linsey to talk like this, ‘after all the hard work of the teams and bus operators this year.’
We know the coronavirus pandemic has hit public transport hard. The government has been paying bus operators directly to run nearly empty services to ensure that key workers can get to the front lines of the pandemic.
But even before private companies were given public cash to run empty services, the system was failing. Since privatisation in 1986, passenger journeys in Yorkshire have fallen by half a billion. In 2019, £37.2 million of public money was spent to keep Yorkshire’s bus network on the road – but bus fares are at their highest levels ever, and prices have tripled outside of London since 1995.
With statistics like these, no wonder bus companies are hostile to any challenges, which are growing in a more organised fashion by the day. But Yorkshire’s trade union movement has had enough of private bus companies failing our members, so we’re organising to end their corporate grip on our public services.
As the TUC, we’ve brought key workers, bus drivers, passengers, trades and tenant unions together with climate campaigners to build a campaign coalition that touches every part of our community. We won’t win just by asking nicely – people in power will hear our demands. With a new mayor on the cards, we are going to use all our power to take our buses back.
Building Against the Problem
In 2019, during the great climate strikes, we kicked off our mission to take Yorkshire’s buses back. Initially, many people – including our own members – didn’t understand why this was a trade union issue.
We argued for people to connect the dots: bad bus systems affect workers. They impact communities. They render job opportunities inaccessible. They leave nightshift workers vulnerable. They punish people who can’t rely on regular shifts.
Under a bad bus system, your work life is disrupted and your leisure time lost. Going the football, seeing family, enjoying a meal in town are activities restricted to many people reliant on English buses.
Plenty of people across our county were at their wits’ end and began planning a campaign for something better. At least, we thought it was a campaign: in reality, a press release and some statistics are not enough. This sort of advocacy is a trade union comfort zone, but with little impact beyond a Yorkshire Post headline, we needed a rethink.
Only a large-scale movement of working people could answer that challenge. If this truly was a workplace issue, and a whole community issue, then we needed to turn to real organising to win our demands. In the depots and stations, Unite and RMT members began speaking to their colleagues, while the TUC connected with the Leeds branch of ACORN to discuss how their unparalleled strength in community organising could support this campaign.
We decided on a petition, deciding on focusing on speaking to bus users about the issue at stations across Yorkshire, while organisations like Unite Community, Clean Air Leeds, and Our Future Leeds mobilised their members to write to their local councillors. At the same time, ACORN Sheffield led a similarly energetic campaign in South Yorkshire.
At first, we went unnoticed by the bus companies. Our campaigning issue was obscure, so we were not a threat. But soon after the first of our mass public rallies, we started to get comments littering our online presences, such as: ‘disrespectful doesn’t even begin to describe such an outrageous and irresponsible stance during unprecedented times for the industry.’
Furthermore, our demands and solutions are simple and convincing: politicians must use the powers in the 2017 Bus Services Act to reregulate the buses. This resonated with passengers and communities, which scared the bus companies. And with the onslaught of the pandemic, we refocused on winning bus services in South Yorkshire to avert disaster with the return to schools. It was a demand to keep bus workers safe, but also an act of solidarity with teachers and students.
Put Them Under Pressure
But we knew if we were to have a real chance of taking our buses back, advocacy would not get us the goods. We connected our campaigning to the struggle to prevent local hospital closures, such as the Hands Off HRI campaign in Huddersfield, arguing that bus routes to places such as hospitals were necessary to the community, and their existence must be enshrined – something that current bus operators, many of whom are financially struggling, cannot guarantee.
It mattered to us that this campaign reached across the community, and that is why the campaign matters to local people. That commitment to a local, winnable issue that is making the next stage of our campaign a force to be reckoned with. We engaged with council leaders, demanding they turn up to public meetings to hear from bus users. We took a bet that they’d be forced to say yes, as they hadn’t experienced pressure on an issue like this before.
In the end, we were right. Over 1000 emails were sent to council leaders, and it only took two days to receive RSVPs from all our targeted politicians. At the same time, we printed posters for local activists to put up on their daily walks, bringing the campaign from the laptop screen right into the heart of council leaders’ wards.
To our decision makers, it was clear their communities were watching. They knew how important this issue was. In that October meeting where Linsey spoke, we had seven people ready to tell their story. Elinor, an NHS worker, spoke about how she relied on the bus to get her to hospital shifts. Joe, a fast-food worker, spoke eloquently of how his pay is docked if the bus makes him late.
This structure test showed us that we had a campaign that could win. This popularity has given us confidence to turn up the pressure on local politicians, and we don’t intend to give the new mayor any breathing space once they are elected in May. As they settle in, we plan to ask local people to run meetings in their area, pressuring local councillors to commit, getting motions moved in Council, and inching us closer to 10,000 signatures on our petition.
That is what makes the bus companies afraid. In the words of one operator last year, ‘this doesn’t feel like the time for such a debate.’
For capitalists, there is never a right time to discuss taking what should rightfully be public services out of their hands. But for ordinary people, there is no other option. After last week’s announcement that Greater Manchester is moving to bring back buses under public control, we in West Yorkshire will follow, and we will win a better bus service together.