I promised (in this post) a more detailed response to this document. That’s proving more difficult than I thought.

The Improvement Plan had to be prepared by October 2021. It was intended to be the vehicle for additional government funding from the appallingly named ‘Bus Back Better’ programme. Wiltshire Council submitted the agreed BSIP in November 2021. In the end, only 31 of the 79 submissions received funding, in total just over £1bn, which did not include Wiltshire.

In April 2022, the Department for Transport (DfT) said submissions which succeeded did so “because of their ambition to repeat the success achieved in London.” It added: “As the government stated in last year’s national bus strategy, Bus Back Better, areas not showing sufficient ambition, including for improvements to bus priority, would not be funded.”

I’m afraid ‘lack of ambition’ is the least of it in the case of Wiltshire’s BSIP submission. Bluntly, it lacks any coherent strategic vision. There may be one, but it isn’t clearly stated, and what is included seems generally to be ‘a bit more of the same.’ It is difficult to find the proposals because a) they are distributed through the document and b) there is no table of contents, so in order to find anything you have to read from cover to cover. It has lots of nice pictures of buses, though.

By contrast, the Northumberland and North Tyne BSIP submission received £143m. It covers much the same ground as Wiltshire’s with very similar proposals, but has a table of contents, and has proposals with numbers, not vague aspirations. It also has lots of nice pictures…

The Wiltshire BSIP refers constantly to an unpublished document, the ‘Wiltshire Bus Service Improvement Plan Baseline Note.’ I requested a copy of this document on 27th June. It arrived as I was writing this post on 29th June. Such data as the plan contains seems to be drawn from that and is in text form, not tabulated in any systematic way. If anything significant emerges, I’ll post separately.

Terms like ‘Superbus’ are used without definition until halfway through. There are no costs given for any of the proposals. Many of the proposals are vague in any case, using terms like ‘work with’ or ‘aim to develop.’ Others seem to represent good practice, which raises the immediate question, why are they not in place already?

Overall, it is sloppily written. I found a couple of paragraphs which seem to have been cut and paste from elsewhere, the most egregious example being a reference which commits Wiltshire Council to work with Local Planning Authorities in the area to coordinate policy. Wiltshire Council is the Planning Authority. There are no others. Other sections seem to lose their way, as if editing has been abandoned halfway through.

Wiltshire Council and bus operators recognise the importance that the bus has great potential to cater for more of our journeys in Wiltshire, for work, leisure, education and social journeys.

Wiltshire Bus Service Improvement Plan 2022, para 4.1

Throughout the document, it refers to a network hierarchy. There is no explanation of where that comes from, its justification, or the data underpinning it. To make matters worse, having based all the proposals on that hierarchy, in Section 4 (p36) it seems to state as a proposal ‘Identify and agree a bus network hierarchy for investment’ then moves on to describe as already agreed, the same network hierarchy. To be fair, I think this is poor draughting, since the statement ‘identify and agree…’ is, I think, a task set by Government for the BSIP. However, other aspects of this section seem to refer to different things, so it remains confusing.

I was originally intending to prepare a more detailed analysis, but quite honestly I don’t think it is worth the effort. We must hope that by the next time an invitation to bid for funds comes around, that the Council is organised enough to actually say how much they want…