TRANSPORT unions and campaigners called for a publicly owned, integrated transport system at a packed fringe meeting today.

The Scottish TUC’s The Next Stop: The Case for Publicly Owned Buses in Scotland report noted that public subsidies have risen since the pandemic — amounting to £439 million, or 58 per cent of all Scottish bus operators’ revenue, in 2023-24 — while the number and frequency of services has continued to decline.

“Using private operators to operate public services doesn’t work and is a recipe for disaster, as we can see from passenger services’ decline year on year,” Dougie Maguire of Unite told the meeting.

Susan Galloway of Get Glasgow Moving spoke of the thousands-strong campaign’s success in winning powers through the Scottish Parliament to allow establishment of regional publicly owned bus companies on the model of Edinburgh’s Lothian buses, and argued that franchising powers could be used to award contracts to municipally owned companies. 

Speakers from Unite, RMT and Aslef however called for opposition to franchising and a campaign for transfer of services to municipal ownership directly.