I have been giving considerable thought recently to the growing pressures on local authority funding of marginal and rural bus services, and how we might develop a  way of empowering local communities to help retain their own bus services. This would require a combination of local authorities, commercial operators and the voluntary sector intermediate agency to be developed – but there are strong historical precedents.
 
Those of a certain age may recall that the original Community Buses were developed in East Anglia and Sussex during the mid-1970s by local National Bus Company (NBC) subsidiaries, following their major review of bus networks, known as MAP (the Market Analysis Project).

At that point, NBC felt a social responsibility towards the communities affected by cuts in rural services, but recognised that they could not sustain the cross-subsidy required to maintain the services, whilst local authority revenue support budgets were under huge pressure from inflation and government spending cuts.

NBC’s answer was to acquire some minibuses, paint them in corporate livery and recruit local volunteer drivers. The critical thing is that responsibility was retained by the NBC subsidiary: they handled the timetable, relating to the Traffic Commissioner, publicity and marketing, ticket machines, fare collection, etc. All the volunteers had to do was drive – and, because they needed PSV licences at that time, NBC even trained them as well. The first Welsh Community Bus (Uwchaled) followed this model, and bore the Crosville NBC logo.
 
It was not until later that the link with the incumbent local bus company disappeared: with the break up and sale of National Bus coupled with deregulation in 1986, the reasonable assumption was that it would be impossible to maintain the model. We also by then had the example of the Cotswold Villager and other successful independent Community Buses, which seemed to suggest that communities could happily do everything themselves. However, the evidence now suggests otherwise, especially in areas such as mid-Wales, where such services are badly needed.

When the Dutch had problems with maintaining their networks in the late 1970s, they actually came over to East Anglia and studied our Community Bus model and took it back home. They developed their own system called Buurtbuses, which involve eight-seater minibuses (due to volunteer driver licence limitations in Holland).

Their system is, from my viewpoint, significantly more successful than ours is. I have some old Buurtbus timetables which show volunteers driving half-hourly services throughout the day, six days a week. The point is that their services were pretty much integrated into the main bus network. The regions organised the vehicles, livery, tickets, and so forth, while the volunteers just drove.
 
I’ve often wondered how they managed this level of service. I had assumed that the fact that it was a publicly owned operator was important and that this would be crucial to the ability to organise volunteer drivers. However, the Dutch have now franchised their bus operations out to some names you will be familiar with, like Arriva, Veolia and Transdev – and lo and behold, the Buurtbuses are still there, running in the relevant liveries.

See, for example:
http://www.bba.nl/tmpl/ExtensionPage.aspx?id=16981&epslanguage=ML  for Veolia
 
http://www.arriva.nl/page.php?id=1590  for Arriva
 
The Arriva URL has links to some of the individual Buurtbus sites, such as http://www.buurtbusdehunze.nl/  You will see that impressive timetables are still being delivered. I’m particularly impressed with the one that starts at 06.30 to make a feeder link to a 07.14 train – see http://members.home.nl/kramer.e/dienstr.htm.

You will also see that there are local organisations with some responsibility for the Buurtbus.

My Dutch is not too hot, but I do know that vrijwilligers = volunteers and I can guess at ‘enthousiasme’. I see that One Euro fares, use of Strippenkartes, student and OAP concessionary passes are all deployed. My guess is that the local groups’ responsibilities are limited to volunteer recruitment and allocation, local publicity and liaising with the bus company. I don’t think they take on any financial risk. I strongly suspect this is one of the critical explanations for why Community Buses have not succeeded in GB.
 
So, by now you will have worked out what I am suggesting is that somebody ought to study the feasibility of repatriating the model from Holland and reapplying it here, but in a form that is integrated with the conventional bus service. This may or may not involve acting as a feeder to existing services. It would however require an operator that would be prepared to take it on, and a local authority that could procure creatively and partner with the operator and a voluntary sector support agency to make it happen.

Veolia, Arriva and Transdev have the experience of this model in Holland and are known to be able to take a longer term view of what they are doing with public services than most other operators. Surely, with managers sympathetic to community transport and local authorities with a vision about how to provide bus services to rural communities, there is some potential to make it happen.
 
Obviously, I’m not suggesting that there is necessarily a need for a half-hourly service in some of our remoter rural areas: the frequency and routes would need to be considered the local authorities and the operators, who would also need to take on the task of recruiting the local organiser and the volunteers.
 
Nevertheless, this does seem to me an idea that ought to strike a chord with devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland wrestling with the problems of serving remote rural communities – and it could suit a good few English shire counties as well. 
 
I’d be tempted to say that this is my great new idea… except that it involves going back 30 years!