roach and Bus News
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Ridley's fresh look
TRANSPORT SECRETARY Nicholas road service licence liberalisation, members last week.
Speaking at the BCC's annual dinner he said deregulation of express coach services had shown that a complete break can be made with "the dreary pattern of regulation and subsidy."
Mr Ridley said the Government believes that regulation should be kept to a minimum and that local or central government should only intervene when it has to.
Nothing, he said, is as good a stimulus to efficiency as competition. He said that whatever surrogates for competition are placed in the public sector, they are only surrogates and can only be second best.
He did acknowledge though that people are provided with vital local bus services through regulation and subsidy and that there are many reasons why that has happened.
He said he was looking for constructive change. He wanted to question, to examine and be sure that arrangements were in the best interest of those who want to travel.
With support for the bus industry at over £1bn — a figure the industry disputes — he said the point had been reached where the industry cannot carry on down the same road. The resources are just not available. Levels of subsidy, who pays it, who directs it and who benefits from it are among the first questions he will address.
He told BCC members that he distrusted regulation and needed to be convinced that the full panoply of road service licensing is what the industry needs. Where subsidy and regulation dominated in the provision of local bus services the right of consumers to vote with their feet was missing.
But he did assure the industry that there is no intention of lessening or demolishing the present framework of quality control.
To illustrate the doubts still in his mind, Mr Ridley said that where a single operator provides a planned network there is no feedback mechanism for the service to respond to consumer demand and no external stimulus for the operator to improve his services or his efficiency.
On the other hand, totally unregulated services could result in destructive and dangerous competition. Socially desirable services may be lost and a large operator might to compete to kill off his competition and subsequently exploit his monopoly.
Mr Ridley is looking at the middle ground of deregulation, and hinted that route allocation by price, as in the Hereford and Worcester trial area was a possibility. So there could be franchiseswhich might be sold on profitable routes and the revenue used tosubsidiseunprofitable ones.