Students of the much loved TV series “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” will be familiar with many of the techniques employed by both politicians and civil servants in order to manage public opinion and to look after their own interests, if necessary at the expense of others – including their own colleagues, businesses and the taxpayers.

The original episodes are now between 25 and 30 years old, and meanwhile satire on government has moved on into the fast-moving world of “The Thick of It”. But the earlier works retain their relevance – witness the huge success of the “Yes, Prime Minister” stage play by Sir Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn which opened this spring in Chichester and is shortly to transfer into the West End.

Meanwhile, Government transport policy has long been a rich source of amusement to “Yes, Minister” fans, not least during the events that surrounded the resignation of the then Transport Secretary Stephen Byers in 2002, and the subsequent rail review in 2005, when the empire-building SRA chief’s attempts to outmanoeuvre DfT through his tennis-playing friendship with Tony Blair were hit out of court by civil servants at the Treasury and DfT. Classic stuff, and you can hear the authentic voice of Sir Humphrey Appleby throughout.

The “Yes Minister” tendency is also on display once more in the ongoing saga of the relationship between the DfT and the bus industry. For more than 20 years, the DfT shrugged off concerns about the post-privatisation performance of the bus industry, and disregarded the – largely unfounded – claims made throughout the 1990s that private sector bus operators were making too much money. Perhaps surprisingly, the new Government did not take the opportunity offered by the 1998 White Paper or the subsequent Transport Act to even look at bus profits, never mind make any fundamental change.

Concern about the future surfaced once again in 2007 – even though by then reported industry profit levels had halved from those achieved in the run up to the 2000 Act. New regulatory legislation was proposed, which caused the industry few significant problems, until the last possible moment when a large number of amendments are rammed through Parliament. These changed the thrust of the resulting Act very significantly – much to the irritation of many in the industry who felt that they had been bounced by an interventionist Government prepared to promise anything – especially to its paymasters in the trade union movement – to stay in office.

Then in 2009 came the new Office of Fair Trading inquiry and the referral to the Competition Commission. The referral was on the basis of a spurious and deeply flawed analysis of the industry, and the result is a hugely expensive, time-consuming and largely pointless exercise. In the middle of all this, rather to everybody’s surprise, up pops the DfT again, commissioning another hugely expensive analysis of bus industry costs and profits which largely duplicated work done earlier in the decade and already being done by the Competition Commission.

What, you may ask, has prompted all this flurry of activity?  The answer comes in two words: public spending. Broadly speaking, public spending on the bus industry in total has doubled in real terms since 1997. This has happened for five reasons – most of which, interestingly, have resulted from government decisions rather than operator led appeals for subsidy:

• the introduction of free concessionary travel (a G Brown decision, not a DfT one)
• the commitment to peg Bus Service Operators’ Grant at 80% of fuel duty (again, a G Brown decision)
• increased central government spending on industry micro-management through challenge schemes and the like (“Something must be done: we signed up with the Treasury [oh, G Brown again] to PSA targets to increase bus patronage – how the hell are we going to do it?”)
• increases in local authority spending thanks to rising industry costs and cutbacks in commercial networks.
• The growing cost of bus service provision in London (largely driven by Mayor Livingstone)

Significantly, this has returned spending in real terms to the levels last seen in the early 1980s – the factor that triggered last major industry shake-up in 1985.

There is a wonderfully naïve belief in the UK that legal reform and reorganisation can be the solution to all problems. Pass a few laws, change some job titles, create a new Quango and everything will be fine; the civil servants will move on, job done, boxes on the annual assessment ticked. A Minister who steers his legislation successfully through Parliament is considered a success and gets promoted.

As a result, by the time the problems emerge (or, more accurately, re-emerge), there’s a whole new civil service and ministerial team. “Something must be done”, says the Minister, and the cycle begins again: committees, studies, reviews, agendas and progress reports; green papers, white papers, pre-legislative scrutiny and then a new Parliamentary Bill; what Sir Humphrey called “much fruitful activity”.

Nowhere is this more true than in public transport, where legislation and reorganisation has happened at regular intervals, particularly since the Second World War. The longest period between Transport Acts or their equivalent since 1945 was the nine years between the 1953 and 1962 Acts, and even then there were internal reorganisations in between.

Britain’s railways were reorganised roughly every five years between 1948 and 1995 – a record which has continued broadly unchanged since privatisation and (if one reads the runes correctly) will be maintained by the new administration.  National Bus Company and Scottish Bus Group also perpetually tinkered with their organisational structures and some of the post-privatisation groups have been just as shuffle-prone.

In the 21st century, there are a number of major differences between the current position and the previous reorganisations of transport built on legislative and organisational reform. The first is (or should be) experience.

Experience has (or should) teach us that change that ignores the fundamentals of the market for transport is doomed to fail. This is the clear lesson from 1968, 1972 and 1985 (to name but three!).

Successful policymaking, like successful commercial actvitiy,  comes from a deep understanding of the issues, the people and the market, and developing and delivering products or policies that serve it well: this is what has driven industries such as telecommunications and IT over the last 20 years and it is what could yet deliver the same levels of innovation and growth in public transport provision – provided that government stops interfering and gets out of the way.

The second major difference is money. Ever since the war, the siren voices have always said, “Oh, if only we could have a bit more money, Minister, everything would be wonderful, Minister.” Generally speaking and after much wriggling and delay, some money has eventually been provided: never enough according to some, and usually too late according to others.

Well, this time really is different: there is no more money – and, what is more, what’s there today is going to get cut, and cut savagely, over the next five years. This tends to argue against further organisational change if it can be avoided, since upheaval almost always creates unforeseen cost increases, especially in the short term.

So, unable or unwilling to force organisational change in the bus industry, the DfT has resorted to the competition authorities to do it for them, and meanwhile is in the process of convincing itself that it is perfectly safe to abolish BSOG and reduce concessionary fares reimbursement by decreeing that profit levels are too high and should be reduced.

And this is where, in my view at least, the Department is being myopic. The LEK report published last week purports to show that profits are too high, but does so on the basis of highly questionable inflation numbers, some heroic assumptions about balance sheet construction, and a risk premium for lenders and shareholders which seeks to position the bus industry as a utility alongside water and electricity companies, which is totally inappropriate. None of this is remotely credible.

Fine, well this may enable the Buses and Taxis Division at the DfT to abolish BSOG and reduce concessionary fares reimbursement levels “with a clear conscience”. But it won’t deliver the cash that operators need to keep their investors happy at the actual levels of return they need to generate, nor therefore will it help the passengers who lose their service or find their fares increased as a result. Lastly, nor will it help the existing small entrepreneurs or encourage new entrants to the independent sector, who offer the Department its best hope of helping to maximise the size of a post BSOG bus network.

Worse still, this whole approach is also an absolute gift to all the nay-sayers and climate change deniers in local communities, and will make it even more difficult to persuade local authorities to take pro-bus measures or help make the bus more efficient when traffic congestion rises as the economy recovers. As a consequence, the industry risks becoming even less efficient, so driving up costs even more, giving yet another twist to the industry’s cycle of decline.

And, perhaps most short-sighted of all, nor will it help the major transport groups to step in and help the Department out of the latest financial mess it has got itself into in the rail industry. If, as Transport Secretary Philip Hammond quite clearly believes, the bill to the taxpayers can be cut if train operating companies take more risk in longer franchises and by assuming responsibility for more investment in the network, who is going to provide the money?  Why, the City, of course, through being persuaded to invest in precisely the same industry that the DfT’s Buses and Taxis division is now attacking.

This is not joined up Government; it’s not even joined up transport policymaking. But it is entirely consistent with the sort of approach to government that aficionados of “Yes, Minister” would expect.