This requires planning, often long-term. You can plan for good times and bad times, but the nightmare is trying to make plans when you have no idea what to expect. That is the world we live in now.
It is why I predict we are about to see an incredible role reversal in the debate about bus regulation, with traditional opponents moving round the table to argue against the very positions they have each adopted for the past 35 years.
Within a year, the bus industry will be crying out for regulation, while the public sector backs away from it as fast as it can. The seeds were being sown well before the pandemic.
Just a few years ago, one was not welcome in the cosy gentlemen’s clubs that the industry’s trade bodies had become unless one accepted that deregulation was king. But that has started to soften, helped by several factors.
Famous names are retiring
First, a new generation of industry leaders is walking the corridors of power. The famous names that steered it through the great reforms of the mid-1980s are gradually retiring. For them, the principles of a deregulated free market approach are a sincere and deeply held ideology, informed by their practical experiences of the shortcomings of the late National Bus Company era.
