More than 130 bus operators outside London will begin capping single adult fares at £2 next month as part of a government-funded scheme to help people save money.

www.bbc.co.uk

National Express and Stagecoach will be among those to introduce the cap in England from 1 January to 31 March.

Single local bus fares in England cost £2.80 on average but can exceed £5 in rural areas, the government says.

Labour has said it was a “half measure” after “years of soaring fares”.

The cities of Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire – all of which have Labour mayors – have already introduced £2 caps as part of longer-term schemes.

The Department for Transport, which originally announced the scheme in September, said buses were the most popular form of public transport in England, making up half of all journeys.

It said the government was spending £60m on the cap to “help families, students and commuters” while taking “two million car journeys off the road”.

According to latest official figures, the number of people travelling by bus has been rising but remains well below pre-Covid levels.

At the same time local bus fares in England were up 4.2% in the three months to 30 June when compared with the same period last year.

The government says the scheme will help the bus industry’s recovery, while also enabling passengers to save.

It also said the cap was “an important step” in ensuring passengers got a fair deal.

The Campaign for Better Transport, a charity, welcomed the cap but said it should be extended.

Spokesman Norman Baker said: “Capping bus fares will help struggling households, cut traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and inject new life into dwindling bus services.

“It’s such a win-win that it shouldn’t be restricted to three months, but should be extended indefinitely, for the sake of our pockets, our economy and our environment.”

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Billion pound gap as government spends less on cutting UK emissions than it raises in carbon tax

The New Economics Foundation says this decision is at odds with the 2021 Environment Act which commits the government to the principle that ‘the polluter pays’

Saphora Smith www.independent.co.uk

The government is spending a billion pounds less on cutting domestic emissions than it is expected to raise through carbon taxes over the next 12 months, contradicting its own principle that “the polluter pays”, according to analysis.

The UK emissions trading scheme – which charges certain businesses for emitting greenhouse gases – is expected to raise £6.5bn this year, more than six times the £1bn it raised in 2021-2022, according to a study of carbon credit auction prices by the New Economics Foundation and Oxfam.

But despite the significant projected windfall, the government has only allocated £5.5bn to cutting carbon emissions domestically this year.

Alex Chapman, a senior researcher from NEF who conducted the analysis, says the gap is at odds with the 2021 Environment Act which commits the government to the notion that “the polluter pays”.

“We’re set to raise over £20bn over the next four years from our most polluting businesses but we’re not putting it to good use,” he said.

“This government has the opportunity to reinvest this money to cut our dangerous carbon emissions and repair some of the damage caused by the climate crisis,” he added.

Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, said the analysis showed that the government “isn’t even capable of following its own legislation”.

“Instead of polluters paying for their climate-wrecking emissions, the public is being forced to pay up instead,” she told The Independent.

“Ministers must urgently plug the gap in climate spending if their own Environment Act is worth the paper it’s written on.”

The UK government is spending the £5.5bn on a range of policies to cut emissions ranging from transport to energy efficiency, hydrogen, and offshore wind.

But the emissions trading scheme is not designed to pay for all of our climate action, and the Climate Change Committee has said that next year over £12bn of capital investment is needed to help decarbonise the buildings and surface transport sectors alone.

The scheme applies to energy-intensive industries, such as the power generation sector and aviation.

The industries are allocated a certain number of credits for free, but have to buy the majority through the scheme, in which the number of credits is capped.

The aim is to control the volume of emissions that can be emitted by the regulated sectors to ensure the UK meets its target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The reduction in the number of credits available – as well as a drop in free credits – has pushed up the price of the credit in recent years.

Over the past two years the average price of a tonne of carbon in the scheme has trebled from around £28 to around £80, according to NEF.

And yet this dramatic increase is not being reflected in this year’s core net zero budget to cut emissions from transport, buildings and the energy sector among others.

“Once again the Conservative government has shown they are not committed to climate action,” said Liberal Democrats climate change spokesperson, Wera Hobhouse.

Mike Childs, head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said the analysis underscored “just how significantly the government is still underinvesting in the vital measures that will cut the UK’s carbon emissions.”

“With the energy crisis biting and millions of people shivering in their homes, there couldn’t be a more pressing need for the government to prioritise investment in a street-by-street insulation programme, starting with the most in-need neighbourhoods,” he said.

Other European countries are better at reinvesting revenue from their emissions trading schemes into climate action, according to the analysis. Germany, France, Portugal and Greece all invest between 90 and 100 per cent of emissions trading scheme revenues into reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it said.

The analysis comes as a new report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published on Friday found that increased investment to reach net zero is an “economic, environmental and political necessity” that could boost GDP by 2 per cent by 2030 and 3 per cent by 2050.

The government has repeatedly said it remains committed to reaching net zero by 2050, and that between 1990 and 2019 the economy grew by 76 per cent while the UK cut emissions by some 44 per cent, decarbonising faster than any other G7 nation.

Last month, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced an extra £6bn to improve energy efficiency from 2025 to cut demand for expensive energy.

But the foundation recommends that the government invests an additional £8.75bn this parliament to insulate draughty homes, plus an extra £3.6bn to kick-start an emergency basic insulation programme this winter.

It also calls on the government to contribute to loss and damage funding to compensate vulnerable countries for damage caused by climate-fuelled extreme weather and slow onsets like rising sea levels.

The Independent approached the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for comment.

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Avanti West Coast handed millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded bonuses

Avanti West Coast was handed millions of pounds of taxpayer-funded bonuses for a period in which it was Britain’s worst train operator for delays, Labour Party analysis shows.

Joseph Connor www.thelondoneconomic.com

Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh called the payments a “scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money” and a “symptom of a broken rail system”.

Labour analysis of Department for Transport (DfT) figures published on Thursday found Avanti West Coast was awarded the highest possible rating for “operational performance” and “customer satisfaction” between April 1 and September 18 last year.

That contributed to a bonus payout of £4.1 million.

This is despite Office of Rail and Road (ORR) figures showing just 60.1% of stops at stations by Avanti West Coast trains were within a minute of the schedule between April and June 2021 – the worst figure for all operators.

Separate ORR data also revealed that the company had a higher rate of complaints per passenger than every operator except Caledonian Sleeper during that period.

Ms Haigh said: “Ministers have rewarded abject failure, handing over millions of pounds in performance bonuses and fees to this failing operator.

“Rather than hold operators to account for shambolic performance, ministers are doling out taxpayer-funded bonuses.

“This is a symptom of a broken rail system where passengers come last.

“The next Labour Government will bring our railways back into public ownership as contracts expire, ending the Tories’ failing system, and putting passengers back at the heart of our rail network.”

Ministers came under fire last month for renewing Avanti West Coast’s contract despite it slashing services in August to reduce short-notice cancellations.

A new timetable introduced earlier this month featured a 40% uplift in services, according to the company, which is a joint venture between FirstGroup (70%) and Italian state operator Trenitalia (30%).

A DfT spokesperson said: “This performance fee is based on data from before the current period of disruption. Avanti need to improve services on their network to ensure passengers can get the reliable, timely service that they deserve.

“We have put Avanti on a short term, six-month contract, as they roll out vital improvements and service upgrades and continue to monitor the situation closely.”

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The strikes are a baleful legacy of a 12-year obsession with tax cuts and a small state

David Cameron first took aim at public sector workers in 2010. Continued Conservative policies have brought them to their knees.

“Contemporary Tory governments are singularly bad and unsympathetic employers”

Will Hutton www.theguardian.com

The anger, despair, hardship and sense of being trapped that drove last week’s nurses’ strike, the first in the history of the Royal College of Nursing, with ambulance workers and other large parts of the NHS joining them this Wednesday, did not come out of a clear blue sky. They have been years in the making, as has the industrial action blighting rail, the tube and the post office and those planned in schools and the civil service early in the new year.

For contemporary Tory governments are singularly bad and unsympathetic employers. Although Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been dispatched, their libertarian hostility to the state, to taxes and to the very concept of public endeavour is shared, if less moronically, by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt.

In their terms, the public sector workforce is an unfortunate evil, whose claim on the public purse is a residual one once prior ambitions to lower taxes and debt have been met – a far nobler and more moral aim for them than strong public services operated by motivated and reasonably paid staff. So it was in 2010, when David Cameron assumed office. It is the case today, too, but the capacity to run an undeclared pay policy that keeps public sector wages under continuous downward pressure has come apart with inflation running above 10%. The nurses are castigated for striking for an inflation increase plus 5%, which is seen as ”unreasonable”. But were it offered, their starting salaries in real terms would still be lower than they were in 2010. It is a similar story across the public sector.

It is a pay policy not openly acknowledged by ministers. Future public spending plans are set out in successive comprehensive spending reviews: public sector wages are budgeted to rise in cash terms for the next three years by never more than the assumed inflation rate. Varying parts of the public sector – there are eight pay review bodies, ranging from the NHS to education – may choose to offer more than the cash cap reflecting circumstances but, if so, the resources will have to be earned by “efficiency savings”. In the case of the NHS, those are assumed to be 2.2% a year.

In the immediate wake of the financial crisis, with economic activity depressed and inflation virtually nonexistent, public and private sector pay in real terms fell broadly in sync, but since 2015 the system has delivered an increasingly unfair and unbridgeable gap. In 2021, private sector pay finally climbed above its 2010 levels in real terms. Meanwhile, since 2015 public sector pay has risen a little, but not at the same pace – and from 2021 that widening has accelerated. In September, private sector pay in real terms (including bonuses) had grown cumulatively 5.5% since 2010, while in the public sector it had declined by 5.9%, with nearly half of that formidable 11.4% gulf opening up since January 2021. The government’s projected cash increases for wages have been eaten away by far higher than expected inflation. It’s been a hard time for everyone, but especially for those in the public sector. The core problem has been the productivity calamity, made worse in the public sector by even lower investment than in the resource-starved business sector. The figures are a disgrace. Since 2010, British capital spending on healthcare has consistently been the lowest of nine comparable European countries, plus the US and Canada; our stock of MRI and CT scanners per million people is the lowest, as are beds per 1,000 people. Worse, since Covid, one in seven of those hospital beds is occupied by a patient who could be discharged, but lack of care home capacity and social and community care has meant they are blocked in hospital. So despite more doctors, nurses and ambulance staff since 2019, the NHS is treating 12% fewer people from waiting lists and 14% fewer emergency admissions. These are not just barren statistics: accounts of patients needing emergency treatment but not receiving it because of system blockages are commonplace.

These are not acts of God. They are the results of policy choices. The coalition government took over an NHS in pretty good shape. But as the Institute of Government’s Giles Wilkes, sometime economic adviser to both Vince Cable and then Theresa May, candidly observed last week, its great error was not only to squeeze NHS spending too hard; it was obsessed with tax cuts – increasing personal allowances, cutting corporation tax, freezing fuel duties and capping council tax. As a result, he says, crucial “fiscal firepower for public services in future” was squandered. Then add Brexit, without which GDP would now be £120bn higher and tax revenues up some £50bn. Far from the £350m a week more for the NHS, we have £1bn a week less.

There is no honesty about any of this. Instead, the government twists and turns, making outlandish claims about the unaffordability of the pay claims and their contestable impact on inflation. It is one of the baleful results of post-Brexit Tory politics that Johnsonian half-truths and misrepresentation are now increasingly the currency of public life. The reality is that the government faces the consequences of the sins of its predecessors. Had successive generations of Tory ministers avoided stupid policies, there would have been the fiscal firepower to maintain public sector wages at levels that did not provoke strikes and by raising investment levels allow workers to do better jobs. Unions may need to accept that jobs and systems have to change to reflect technological change, but to work in public service should be properly rewarded.

In a sense, it is a civilisational battle. An NHS that cannot do its job properly means that more than half-a-million workers can’t enrol for work because they can’t get medical treatment. Worse gaps, delays, endemic shortages and bottlenecks are literally killing people. The vast majority of the electorate do not share the mania for state shrinking and tax cuts that animates the government. It wants properly resourced public services. The nurses are fighting to protect minimal living standards – but also for a stronger NHS, for better policy and, to an extent, for our civilisation itself. It is a cause we must support.

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More than 130 bus operators to offer £2 tickets

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Billion pound gap as government spends less on cutting UK emissions than it raises in carbon tax

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More on: How not to run a railway

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The strikes are a baleful legacy of a 12-year obsession with tax cuts and a small state

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