Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh visits Peterborough to announce plans to overhaul bus services and ensure they are what the community wants.
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00:00Well we're delighted to be here in Peterborough today to announce plans to extend powers to
00:05every area of England to allow them to take back control of their buses. For too long we've sat
00:10back and allowed private operators to pick and choose whatever routes they want and it's left
00:14communities with absolutely no control over where those routes are served. So what we are announcing
00:21today is that every area of England will have those powers and we're publishing a consultation
00:25in order to speed up the process so Peterborough and Cambridgeshire will be able to get there
00:30a lot quicker. Greater Manchester took six years to bring a single bus under public control and
00:34we want to speed that up so residents of Peterborough can get those better bus services
00:38much quicker. But what changes, what difference will people in Peterborough notice because the
00:42bus service that Stagecoach provides for instance isn't that bad. So I've just been talking to some
00:47student nurses here at the university and they were telling me that often the timetable isn't
00:51right to fit around their shifts, that there aren't the connections that they need to where
00:55they want to go and when we've got proper control over the network it means that communities can
01:00design those networks themselves and actually connect to the places where they want to go
01:04rather than simply sitting back and allowing private operators to do whatever makes commercial
01:08sense. If you allow those commercial routes to cross-subsidise less popular routes then we can
01:12build a public transport network that people can really rely on. But doesn't the combined
01:16authority already have quite a lot of powers come public transport, do they need any more?
01:21So what we're announcing today will allow Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to move much
01:26faster to that franchised system and speed it up so residents of Peterborough can get that better
01:31bus service a lot quicker. Will there be any more money coming our way? Well that will be determined
01:36for the budget but the powers, the plans that we set out through the better buses bill that will
01:40come a little bit later in the session will start to combine and devolve much more funding to local
01:45authorities so that they have proper control and flexibility over their bus funding. You've been
01:50talking to the mayor etc today, have they told you where people of Peterborough would like to
01:56see buses improved? Well that will be all through the consultation programme so it's really really
02:00important that residents of Peterborough properly engage in that.