MPTE Insight

Omnibuses NC* reports...

Merseytravel, the combined Merseyside integrated transport authority and passenger transport executive came out very well in the OFT report on the bus industry. Competition for tenders on Merseyside seems alive and well—better, perhaps, than at other PTEs. This, no doubt, reflects MPTE’s deliberate policy that ensures revenue accrues to itself and not the operator. Suppliers who know their costs and profit margins have no fear of revenue fluctuations and can price confidently. MPTE has a significant number of revenue protection officers and software systems to ensure it bags all its cash—and that operators aren’t caught with their fingers in the cash dispenser.

Bus services on Merseyside are nevertheless under scrutiny as, like any public sector organisation, it battles with budgets. Expect Job Link services to suffer most. Job Link started about seven years ago, on a demand responsive and fixed basis, aimed at getting people into employment. It was social inclusion engineering, par excellence. The problems with those sorts of projects always seems to be that once a passenger has been in a job long enough to afford a car he’ll, well, buy one. Job Link’ll have done its bit as he says “tara Wack” (with Scouse accent) to those long, awkward Job Link journeys. The entire DRT element’s already gone.

Budget pressures will also see a fundamental MPTE internal restructure, with 25 jobs going, though MPTE is at pains to point out that there will be no compulsory redundancies. MPTE is about to leave is old haunt of 24 Hatton Garden for new officers at Mann Island, not far from a former famous bus terminus and where, in a bygone age, coaches would cater for liner traffic. Cynics believe that there simply isn’t quite enough room at Mann Island for all the staff. As for Hatton Garden, it’s the old tram HQ and the committee rooms within are said to be much as they were at the building’s foundation.

The union claims that between 80-100 jobs will vanish. The union figure is based on a requested 10 per cent saving throughout the organisation. I’m no mathematician but if 100 is 10 per cent, then the number of staff working at MPTE is 1,000. Does this seem a lot? Well, over half of them work in the two Mersey tunnels. There, it’s a 24/7/365 operation, including the non-Crown tunnels police, independent of the Merseyside force, who enforce the bylaws and town unsuspecting motorists who have the misfortune to break down—for a fat fee.

There was a recent time—this century—when the PTE existed on just two directors. That’s the minimum required under the Transport Act 1968. That’s changed now, and there are five. Still a lot slimmer than neighbour GMPTE. No doubt it was one of the MPTE five who commented in the local newspaper about the restructure and redundancies, “We have been working in partnership to integrate all aspects our operations into one organisation to reduce duplication and increase efficiencies.” That’s an odd statement from an organisation that in 1986 fully integrated the former PTA (now ITA) with its PTE…

* Omnibuses NC = Northern Correspondent. We use NC, as Merseytravel’s chief executive and director general was once a director at Northern Counties