There’s more than a hint of nostalgia about the new ‘People’s Network’, but those in charge of delivering it are not wearing rose-tinted spectacles
The ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ brand
South Yorkshire’s decision to name its new unified, publicly-controlled public transport network the ‘South Yorkshire People’s Network’ will have raised eyebrows in some quarters.
The unashamedly muncipal bright orange brand clearly alludes to the ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’, a nickname that was applied to the region under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s. It was used by both detractors and supporters of the region’s leadership, who championed policies like cheap and plentiful public transport.
Supporters of bus deregulation keep a much lower profile these days, but they have warned always against the ideological excesses of leaders who want control of public transport but don’t want to face up to financial realities.
South Yorkshire was exactly the kind of location that Stagecoach co-founder Sir Brian Souter had in mind in 2006 when he described the old Passenger Transport Executives as dinosaurs. He said: “This creature single handedly has supervised, accelerated and acted a catalyst for the terminal decline of bus passenger usage in our cities … It feeds on large amounts of public funding.”
However, there is a steely pragmatism in the tone of Matt Goggins, who has been director of bus reform at SYMCA since 2024 following periods at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and private sector National Express. He warns that bus franchising is not a silver bullet for the region’s transport challenges, and says difficult decisions will need to be made.
Speaking at last week’s Transport Ticketing Global event in London, Goggins said concerns about patronage trends and network viability were the reason why bus franchising was being pursued in South Yorkshire.
“We were seeing patronage and ridership decline, and actual viability concerns with the network, with the public sector having to put in increasing amounts of subsidy just to keep the lights on, with very little influence over that at the end of the day,” he said. “Therefore, we are inheriting a system that has those issues baked into it.
We have to take deliberate steps and sensible choices and make sure that we don’t over-promise at the beginning
“We have to be really careful about how we do franchising, whether we can afford it, and whether we have something that is viable, and that’s going to take some challenging policy choices to achieve – and the politicians in places like Sheffield have already taken them [to some extent], with things like Clean Air Zones, things like bus lanes and making sure that we tackle congestion, they are going to be really important features of that. We just need to be really careful how we do it.
“We have to take deliberate steps and sensible choices and make sure that we don’t over-promise at the beginning, but that we make something that feels better and looks better and that is going to start to attract people to the system, so that we can start to generate more revenue and start to sustain what we want to do in the future.”
Goggins says that one of the things that has been observed in Greater Manchester, the first place to use franchising powers to take buses back under public control, is that elected members now have “skin in the game” when it comes to the performance of the bus network.
He explained: “In a franchised world, all decisions about the bus network itself and the infrastructure on which buses run are ultimately taken by elected members. So there’s skin in the game in the way that there isn’t in a deregulated market. The decisions that an elected member can make, influence, or support around bus prioritisation don’t change; they are the same decisions that exist in a deregulated or franchised market, but the incentive behind how those decisions are made is very different.”
Reflecting on the challenges of introducing bus franchising, Goggins said: “For us, it’s the scale of the change that’s the biggest challenge. It’s not one thing. It’s the fact that you’ve got to do everything. And for public sector organisations that haven’t run buses in 40 years, they’ve lost off of that institutional knowledge about how to do things, about how to make decisions, about the lessons that have been learnt from the past. So we’re looking to Greater Manchester and to Liverpool, who are ahead of us, to make sure we can capture as best as we can the lessons that have been learnt.
“We’ve got to buy depots, we’ve got to run three miles of cables to electricity substations, we’ve got to buy hundreds of buses, we’ve got to design a ticketing system, we’ve got to design a brand … It’s the scale of all of those things joined together. That makes it quite a challenge and quite a risk. If anyone tells you it’s not risky, they’re fibbing to you; it is, but that’s what makes it exciting and interesting to work on.
He added: “There’s a lot for the public sector to learn, perhaps about thinking commercially and understanding commercially, and they are things we’ve had to learn again from scratch.”
In the coming months, people will begin to see the new brand across bus stops, shelters and interchanges, on frontline tram staff uniforms and on a new South Yorkshire People’s Network website, replacing Travel South Yorkshire by the end of the year.
From next year, the brand will appear on the buses that come under South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) control, on bus driver uniforms, across the tram network, the mayor’s South Yorkshire-wide E-bike subscription programme, and Sheffield City Council’s E-bike hire scheme.
And over the next five years, people will see the brand on 25 new trams and across the network and wayfinding signs.
Goggins says the immediate focus is on young people: “That’s a policy choice that has been taken, and there are lots of good reasons why that’s happened. When we introduced it in Barnsley, we saw a massive uptick in young people using buses; we’ve seen an increase in attendance rates for education, and the biggest growth in bus use has been in the three most deprived wards in Barnsley. Ultimately, those people are the people we hopefully keep on the bus when they’ve got jobs and paying to use the service.”
This article appears in the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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