Al Gore never quite recovered from claiming, in 1999, that ‘I took the initiative in creating the internet.’ The former vice-president spent the rest of his life protesting he didn’t mean he’d actually created it, but never managed to escape the thousands of what were not then called memes showing him discovering penicillin, winning peace between the Israelis and the Arabs, and scoring the winning home run for the New York Yankees.
Bus policy is not in the same league, I know. But for someone committed to new, honest politics, Andy Burnham has a nasty habit of claiming credit for things which were not his doing, or where the credit truthfully belongs to other people as well as to him.
Andy Burnham has a nasty habit of claiming credit for things which were not his doing, or where the credit truthfully belongs to other people as well as to him
On Wednesday, for instance, when reporters put it to him that his new £2 fare was ‘bringing back Boris Johnson’s policy,’ he replied that it ‘was actually my policy originallyas mayor of Greater Manchester, but I worked with Boris to take it national.’ I was Boris Johnson’s No. 10 transport adviser at the time, and I can say that this statement, like many other statements Burnham has made about his buses, is untrue.
From early March 2022, in Downing Street, we started working up a set of cost-of-living measures to mitigate the rise in prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At my and the PM’s behest, they included a £2 flat bus fare. Part of my job was to hold civil servants to strict timelines for delivering policy and policy advice. Looking back at my appointment diary, where I recorded the dates promised and whether they were met, I can see that I received the first official advice on 8 April 2022. The ministerial meeting at which the policy was approved, a ‘bilat’ between the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Steve Barclay, took place in the week of 25 April 2022.
Once the decision had been made, we told officials for all the metro mayors. When Greater Manchester heard, they decided to pre-empt us, announcing on 16 June 2022 that they would introduce their own £2 cap from September that year. Because central government is so cumbersome, and the Treasury tried to hold things up, we couldn’t start the national version until January 2023, though we announced it publicly just before Burnham started his.
Standard operational practice for devolved authorities, of course – the amount of effort they devote to trying to undermine Westminster is ridiculous. But the more annoying thing was that Burnham was using our own money to usurp us. He’d talked vaguely about a fare cap for years, but he’d never had the funds to make it a policy commitment before. In April 2022, though, we’d publicly announced that Greater Manchester would be given £95 million for its ‘bus service improvement plan’ to subsidise fares and services, plus a further £1.07 billion for capital spending on new bus stations, tramlines and suchlike. Burnham had decided to use some of this money for a fares cap from August 2023 – until he heard we were going to introduce one of our own first. There had also been a further £260 million in funding to keep Greater Manchester’s bus and tram networks going during the passenger collapse in the pandemic, a further £35.7 million to Greater Manchester for electric buses and a further £13 million to Greater Manchester in bus service operators’ grant.
These enormous sums of national government money (plus much smaller amounts raised locally) are the basis not just of Burnham’s £2 fare cap, but of his entire ‘Bee Network’ which he never stops talking about. None of this ever stopped him from claiming all credit for his brilliant policies, while also somehow simultaneously accusing us of not giving him enough. It really is great being a metro mayor, and it really is hard sitting in Downing Street trying to get even a smidgen of credit for paying most of the bills, as Burnham is about to discover.
That was not even the full extent of our work to improve bus services in Manchester.
As transport adviser, I fought off heavy lobbying by one of the big bus companies which wanted us to stop Burnham’s bus plan. It was also the last Tory government which gave him not just the money but also the legal powers to do the Bee Network in the first place. And it was Boris Johnson who published the country’s first ever national bus strategy alongside all the dosh.
This did not stop Burnham from claiming a few months ago that ‘Westminster just ignore[d] buses for all of those years,’ possibly the most untruthful of the many untruthful things he has said on this subject.
Officially, the Manchester funding agreements did include an obligation for Burnham to credit Westminster. But once I left, this was quietly forgotten. Last year, and again last month, I sat in Bolton’s lovely Olympus fish-and-chip restaurant, which has a pianist on Saturdays and is also right by the bus station, counting how many of the new yellow buses had the ‘funded by HM Government’ logo on them, as they’re meant to. About 10 per cent, is the answer.
Burnham does deserve a substantial share of the credit too, of course. But the difficult truth is that the Bee Network, though enormously successful in PR terms, has been only a modest success in transport terms – because, unlike London under Ken Livingstone, Andy Burnham and the other Greater Manchester leaders never had the balls to do the politically difficult things which really transform a bus service, above all taking away road space from motorists for bus lanes.
As a result, bus use in Greater Manchester – though up, like it is up almost everywhere, since the slump of the pandemic – is up by less than in many other places, including a couple of other places in the North West. Bus use in Greater Manchester is still 12 per cent lower than when Burnham took office in 2017. And actual service levels have only improved slightly, by about 7.5 per cent, since the arrival of the Bee Network, according to the latest DfT figures.
In a narrow, political sense, you might say we were stupid to hand Burnham all this money for him to build a political win. Boris and I knew that he would take much of the credit for the bus improvements, of course, though we’d have been tougher on claiming our share if we were still in office. But in the end we just thought it was the right policy, which had succeeded in London, helped working people who needed our help and got vastly more folk in the capital travelling by bus.
Both of us were, and are, passionate about buses. They’re one of the most important things that Westminster, both metaphorically and literally, doesn’t get. They’re the heart of the public transport system, in desperate need of care and love, used by twice as many people as trains, but with a fraction of the political clout. They’re the easiest, cheapest and quickest way to improve transport and people’s life chances. They get teenagers to college. They connect people to jobs they couldn’t otherwise take. They sustain town centres, they strengthen communities and they help the planet. Building a new road or railway takes decades. Installing a new bus lane or route takes months.
So despite Burnham’s exaggerations, you should still be grateful to him for helping to bring buses into the spotlight they currently enjoy. And grateful to us, too, of course.
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