It’s one of those political facts that everyone parrots without really knowing whether it’s true: Andy Burnham has, in his own words, ‘transformed’ Greater Manchester’s bus service. Burnham’s publicly-controlled double-deckers are Exhibit A in the claim that his ‘Manchesterism’ amounts to more than a catchphrase. Real voters, including in Makerfield, bring it up spontaneously. And even the SW1 classes, while often dismissing Our Next Prime Minister as a weathervane and lightweight, usually mention the buses.
What’s the point of being in power if you’re never willing to use your political capital to do anything serious?
I’m a bus lover, a regular bus user and broadly a supporter of Burnham’s ‘Bee Network’, a London-style system operated by private contractors but with timetables, routes, fares and branding controlled and subsidised by the mayor. And I too claim some paternity. As Boris Johnson’s No. 10 transport adviser, I fought off heavy lobbying by one of the big bus companies which wanted us to stop it. As Burnham always forgets to mention, it was the last Tory government which gave him the legal powers, and the large sums of money, that made the scheme possible. Under Johnson we created a ‘bus service improvement’ fund, £95 million of which went to Burnham, and a fund for capital spending on new buses, bus stations, trams and tramlines – from which Burnham got £1 billion in the first tranche alone.
