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Future Challenges for Community Transport

Melanies Jeffs (pictured)October 2008

It's now over 40 years since community transport, as we now know it, was born. Volunteer car schemes had begun to exist many years before this but it wasn't until minibus regulations were relaxed in the 1960s that bigger initiatives started to appear - the first being Community Transport Birmingham in 1966. Further schemes grew from communities around the country, all with innovative ways of tackling transport problems and filling gaps in transport provision. The North West has a thriving sector with schemes serving rural areas (such as North Cumbria Community Transport) and urban estates (including the myriad of services in Greater Manchester and Merseyside).

Community transport takes many forms and proves difficult to categorise. It's generally considered that its key defining features are that the services are:

• non-profit making,
• operated by and for the community which it serves,
• as a response to an identified unmet need.

To put it quite simply, community transport has been at the forefront of providing inclusive transport services and tackling social exclusion for more than four decades.

Community transport contributes to reducing social exclusion on many different fronts. The Social Exclusion Unit report Making the Connections: Transport and Social Exclusion (2003) concluded that, amongst other things:

• Two out of five job seekers see lack of transport as a barrier to employment, while one in four job seekers say that the cost of transport is a barrier to attending interviewers;
• Over a 12 month period, 1.4 million people missed appointments or chose not to seek medical help because of lack of transport;
• 16% of people without cars find access to supermarkets difficult;
• 18% of non-car owners find seeing friends and family difficult because of transport problems and are twice as likely to have difficulty accessing leisure centres and libraries as people who do own cars.

Services such as the Merseyside's 'Scooter Commuter', the Greater Manchester volunteer car scheme 'Transport for Sick Children' and the 'Shopping Link' services in Oldham and Rochdale, help to break down these barriers and make a huge difference to people's lives. There is also the added benefit of the involvement of the local community in providing the service itself - the skills developed by volunteers that may enable them to find work further down the line, for example.

These kinds of services don't always come cheap - particularly where communities are dispersed and where accessible vehicles are a necessity. Funding has traditionally been provided by one of three main sources:

• grants or contracts from local authorities, PTEs (Passenger Transport Executives) and other statutory bodies,
• other funders such as the National Lottery,
• and user charges - fares, hire charges.

Some operators also operate other services and carry out fundraising to boost their overall income. Many operators are very small and heavily reliant on volunteers to keep their services running.

So, the history of community transport is all about developing innovative, accessible transport solutions for local communities (on very limited budgets) but what challenges does the future hold?

Firstly, as most people will acknowledge, bus deregulation has completely changed the nature of local bus services and, some might say, has stretched the term 'public transport' beyond all recognition. Bus use across the country has fallen since deregulation; with services being cut and fares increasing (declining bus use creates a downward spiral as falling patronage means that fewer services are commercially viable). Of course this is not the fault of the bus companies - they are simply taking advantage of a system that puts profits before people - but this leaves more and more gaps in the public transport network and ultimately more communities reliant on the car to get around. Local authorities and PTEs have a limited budget to fill these gaps and once funding has been used to subsidise bus services (and in some cases fund their own flexible transport services) there is often little in the pot left to fund community transport.

funders refuse to fund community transport, and even those that do may be happy to fund vehicles but not the ongoing core costs associated with maintaining the service. At the same time, the move towards a contracting culture means that tendering is fast becoming the key way of continuing to fund services. Community transport operators need to be savvy to the opportunities, and risks, that this brings.

One such risk could perhaps be best illustrated by quoting the African proverb: "If you have your hand in another man's pocket, you must move when he moves" (Edwards and Hulme 1996). The contract culture points towards a shift in the design of services. Where once upon a time, community transport was at the forefront of innovating services to meet the needs of the local community (who would be represented as trustees and volunteers of the service), services which go out to tender are likely be drawn up by local authority transport planners and the way in which local communities are actively involved in this is not always clear. Planning services is not straightforward. For example, there are restrictions on services 'competing' with commercial bus services and those that operate under Section 19 permits require local people to register before travelling - another potential barrier to the growth of a service. A key challenge for community transport operators is in retaining their independence and their client-focus. Transport planners and community transport operators need to form positive partnerships to best serve their communities.

A second challenge for community transport is the changing demographic profile of the UK. More people are living longer - and living independently - which will undoubtedly creating a bigger demand for the services that community transport operators provide. This is a huge opportunity for the sector but in order to respond to this challenge, greater investment is needed to develop the capacity of individual operators to manage this demand. If the concessionary fares subsidy, which allows private bus operators to provide free travel for older people, could be extended to community transport organisations this would have the dual benefit of incentivising operators to provide more services and would remove the current inequality that means that older people who don't live near a bus service still have to pay for their travel.

There are signs that community transport is responding well to these challenges but also some signs that organisations could become victims of their own success. Community transport operators which are well placed to win contracts may become attractive to private bus companies, looking to expand their own operations. For example, Derby Community Transport, which holds several council contracts, has just been taken over by the commercial operator Trent Barton. No longer having charitable status (or community ownership), the long term future for the organisation and its customers is unclear but one might speculate that it will begin a gradual shift towards mainstream services, moving away from community transport's traditional roots in tackling disadvantage.

Community transport operators in the North West are working together to prepare for the challenges and opportunities that the future brings. The Merseyside Community Transport Operators' Forum gives local operators a collective voice and a forum to learn from each other's experiences. The Greater Manchester Community Transport Operators' Forum has just undertaken a training programme for member organisations and has built up a body of evidence of the impact that community transport is having in the sub-region - work which was funded by GMPTE. Headline figures include the provision of over half a million trips to Greater Manchester residents during 2007/08 and 140 jobs created or maintained for local people.

The future offers a lot of opportunities for community transport to grow and develop, as transport policy focuses on getting more people out of their cars and tackling the 'transport poverty' that some communities face. Community transport has a role to play in providing bespoke service for people who cannot walk, cycle or use conventional public transport, for whatever reason. The new Local Transport Bill is likely to increase the scope of community transport services by relaxing the rules on paid drivers and increasing the range of vehicles that can be used to provide certain services.

Most people want simply want to be able to get to where they need to go, when they need to go there, and at a reasonable price. Generally they don't care about who provides this service, as long as it is accessible to them and meets their needs. Perhaps the biggest challenge for community transport operators over the next few years is to continue to find ways to provide bespoke services, retain its ethos and client-focus, and stay solvent at the same time.