Council gorillas get on the buses

The cold war in Britain’s localities is warming up. Buried in the Telegraph and the Financial Times is the news that councils are cutting local bus services, and central government is being apportioned blame. An organisation called Better Transport has launched a campaign titled Save Our Buses. It claims that straitened councils have been forced to shed £34 million from the subsidised funding of local buses; 70 percent of routes have been affected so far.  

This is a prime example of local government conniving to avoid responsibility for spending contractions. With adroit calculation, councils bastardise vital services to inconvenience those they represent. Local bus routes are a necessity, particularly for pensioners, school children and those who live in rural areas. Rising fuel costs are exerting yet more pressure on strained public transport networks. Retrenchment will therefore hamper economic recovery; inequality and poverty deepen in consequence, or so the argument goes.

And, all the while, councils blame tight-fisted central government. Sir Robin Wales, the leader of Newham Council, complains that ‘his streets’ cannot withstand such stringency. In fact, the decline of local services is not ineluctable. Sir Robin bewails Newham’s supposed fate, but maintains a sepulchral silence about his council’s cultured taste in interior design. Likewise, executive pay continues to escape attention, as the Taxpayers’ Alliance recalled a fortnight ago. The proud indifference to efficiency and restraint persists.

Not that central government is model. MPs’ expenses and the excesses of the quangonocracy cast a pervasive shadow. There are also bureaucratic impediments. Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, who is leading a campaign to save Dover harbour from sale, has levelled an incisive critique of Whitehall’s over-attentive interference in local government, a pestilence decried by Richard Kemp of the Local Government Association. The march to decentralisation has become mired between Whitehall’s megalomania and councils’ monomania.