When the transport secretary set out a vision for a national, joined-up transport policy last year, it was encouraging to hear mentions of buses, trams, trains, cars and bikes. But one form of public transport was missing in action.
They might not always grab headlines, but they carry 450 million passengers every year, they are vital to the economy, education, tourism, and tackling the climate emergency. I’m talking about coaches — and it being National Coach Week, I want to get everyone else thinking about them too.
Coaches are central to Labour’s “missions” — they support growth and local businesses, contributing a whopping £6.4 billion to the economy. A well-functioning coach network strengthens local economies, supports employment, and enhances connectivity. 23 million UK tourists travel by coach each year to visit attractions, attend events, and explore regional destinations. Coaches play a key role in moving people for major cultural events, from music festivals to sporting fixtures, making large-scale events possible.
Recent research really underscores their economic impact. A coach-load of passengers makes a genuine difference to high streets, coffee shops and restaurants with a single coach arriving in a town each day adding up to £1 million to the local economy over the course of a year.
As a Labour government with a “mission” for opportunities, I would argue coaches matter there too. Coach drivers literally drive people to opportunities. They’re how 600,000 children get to school every day. There are also opportunities for good jobs within an industry which employs 54,000 people with another 27,000 jobs supported in the wider supply chains.
Plus on the path to net zero mission, coaches are vital again. If we are serious about achieving our really very ambitious net-zero targets (and I think we must be — I would say the climate emergency is a real and present danger), we must embrace and promote coaches as a practical, and immediate solution.
A single coach can remove up to 50 cars from the road, cutting congestion and emissions. Carbon emissions per passenger on the coach are 1.5 times lower than by train and six times lower than by car. If we’re serious about cutting emissions and cleaning up our air, coaches must be part of the solution.
Yet despite all this, coaches can be sidelined. Infrastructure is patchy, with many towns — even tourist hotspots — lacking basic pick-up and drop-off points or suitable parking. That’s short-sighted. The government’s excellent hands-on skills bootcamps do not currently cover training coach drivers for their specialist licenses. Coaches also don’t have access to bus lanes by default which is something the Confederation of Passenger Transport is campaigning hard to change. Given their strong sustainability credentials, we should be encouraging coach travel – not squeezing it out — and such ideas are welcome.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first scheduled long-distance coach journey — when a company called Greyhound Motors began shuttling passengers between Bristol and London. Today there are around 2,000 coach operators in the UK, most of them small and medium-sized firms. Four out of five are family-owned. They’re deeply rooted in their communities — often outside the big cities. The chancellor would be impressed to learn they receive no direct public subsidy and, remarkably, got through the pandemic without any dedicated national support. And thanks to them you can reach pretty much every corner of the country by coach — with a single ticket typically costing 80% less than an equivalent rail fare.
Despite consistently high passenger satisfaction among coach travellers, awareness of coach travel as a cost-effective, reliable, and convenient option remains too low. Misconceptions persist: studies show that one-third of people believe coaches are uncomfortable, outdated, and infrequent – even though modern services tell a very different story.
As we look to the future and the publication of the Department for Transport’s integrated transport policy, we need to ensure proper consideration to the role we want coaches to play across the nation. Millions of day trippers, schoolchildren, tourists and holidaymakers deserve to be counted in transport policy.
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