The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon.
“You can’t get a bus to Birmingham today, it’s impossible. It is really just up the road, our big regional centre but there are no buses. How ridiculous is that?” said Philip Adams.
Adams, who has lived in Ludlow for many years, remembers the bygone days of the poppy red buses of the Midland Red company toing and froing to Birmingham, until the publicly owned business was broken up in 1981 and sold off under Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation and privatisation agenda.
Today, Midland Red buses can only be found in transport museums, and the route from Ludlow to Birmingham is most often done by car.
Over the years since privatisation, bus companies in Shropshire have folded, risen and folded again, and the public service has collapsed.
According to data from the thinktank Common Wealth, the county has suffered one of the biggest reductions in bus routes in the UK over the past six years, with a 60% reduction in kilometres travelled by bus.
A survey of passenger experiences of Ludlow’s bus routes, conducted by the town’s sustainable transport group, revealed how people, particularly elderly residents, were suffering from this devastation of public transport.
Confusing timetabling, long gaps of up to four hours between buses, and irregular service were all highlighted. “The accessibility of a regular town bus has practically been destroyed,” said one member of the public.
According to Common Wealth’s research, the same picture is repeated across the country. Since privatisation, services have collapsed but bus and train ticket prices have risen above inflation every year since 1987.
More than £16bn has been paid in dividends to the owners of bus and train companies: £14.2bn since 1996 to the shareholders of the privatised train companies and £1.82bn for the shareholders of bus companies since 2007, according to Common Wealth.
Since 2020 alone, at least £143m has been distributed to the shareholders of bus firms while the companies oversaw pre-tax losses of £53m.
Taxpayers are shovelling money into the system to shore it up, with £2bn of additional public funding paid to bus operators in the past five years.
Train companies are also receiving public money while handing out dividends. According to the Office of Road and Rail, the public paid £12.5bn in 2023-24 to subsidise rail companies – £4.1bn in net payments directly to operating companies and £8.3bn paid to Network Rail, which in turn further subsidises the operating companies indirectly.
Direct and indirect subsidies to train companies enabled the operating companies and the rolling stock companies to run post-tax profits of £449m annually since the year ending March 2017.
But much of these profits, Common Wealth says, were paid out in dividends rather than reinvested in services.
Today getting a train from Ludlow to Birmingham is almost as difficult as spotting a bus on the route. It requires a detour 30 miles north to Shrewsbury, or 24 miles south to Hereford, to change trains for the Birmingham service.
For passengers who use the CrossCountry trains from the south-west to Birmingham and beyond, the pain is evident. The company was ranked the worst in Britain this summer by Transport Focus, the independent watchdog for passengers, and only 41% of its services run on time.
Ownership of the rail and bus sectors faces a shakeup by the Labour government. Train operating companies across the UK are being renationalised under the 2024 Passenger Railway Services Act, with Welsh and Scottish rail operators back in public ownership in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
But Mathew Lawrence, the director of Common Wealth, said the rolling stock companies also needed to be returned to public ownership to ensure renationalisation led to a coherent and well-planned system.
The bus sector is also facing an overhaul, with new legislation permitting the creation of local authority-owned bus companies once again and bringing fares, routes, timetables and connections back into public control.
Public ownership of public transport is overwhelmingly popular. In 2024, YouGov found that 76% of the electorate backed public ownership of rail and 66% backed public ownership of bus services.
“Passengers pay the price for privatisation through higher fares and cut-back services,” said Lawrence.
“Public transport should be genuinely public. Money should be reinvested, not leak out the system. Vital services should be provided based on need not profit. And the fragmentation that leads to higher costs should be replaced by a coherent, public-oriented system.”
As a member of Ludlow 21, a sustainable transport group in Shropshire, Adams agrees. “Privatisation has been a complete disaster for bus services. It just doesn’t work.”
