On: ‘Did Westminster just ignore buses?’ Burnham aims to shake up UK transport

July 5, 2026

They are debating who should run the buses. Committees, consultations, pilot schemes. The Bee Network in Manchester shows it can be done - public control, integrated routes, the whole system working as one thing instead of a dozen private pieces fighting each other. And still Westminster sits with its papers and its working groups.

I know something about moving people. You do not move people by debating who owns the carriage. You move them by making sure the carriage runs, the route is known, the schedule holds, and the person who needs to get on can get on. That is the whole of it. Everything else is noise.

The private operators treat the bus like a toll road. They run the profitable routes, leave the rest to nothing. They call it the market. I call it leaving people stranded. When you are responsible for getting someone from where they are to where they need to be, you do not get to choose only the easy trips. You run the hard ones too. That is what a network is.

Burnham understands this. The Bee Network is not a theory. It is a route map that actually works. The question is not whether Westminster can do it. The question is whether they will stop pretending that private profit and public need are the same thing. They are not. They never were.

I never lost a passenger because I treated the journey as something that belonged to the passenger, not to me. Public transport is the same. It belongs to the people who ride it. The sooner Westminster remembers that, the sooner people will actually get where they are going.