Westminster forgets that buses go to universities

It’s comprehensive legislation – 42 sections covering everything from zero-emission vehicles to floating bus stops, from crime prevention training to disability access requirements.

What it doesn’t cover, anywhere, is ensuring buses actually serve the places where people study.

For a government committed to an “opportunity mission” and breaking down barriers to education, it’s an odd omission.

If this all sounds a bit peripheral, do have a look at this research from Dublin. It found a relationship between commute time and wellbeing, particularly for female students. For those with one-way commutes of 45 minutes or more, wellbeing was lower by 1.37 points on the WHO-5 scale.

The probability of experiencing poor wellbeing increased by 13.6 percentage points compared to students with commutes of less than 10 minutes.

The Act requires enhanced partnerships to identify “socially necessary local services” – defined as those enabling access to “essential goods and services, economic opportunities (including employment), or social activities”.

Maybe universities fit in there somewhere, maybe not.

The closest the Act gets to education is section 33’s safeguarding requirements for school transport drivers. There’s nothing requiring authorities to consider whether their networks actually connect to universities, colleges, or training providers when designing franchised services.

Wales does the homework

Meanwhile Tuesday’s Stage 3 debate on the Bus Services (Wales) Bill showed what joined-up thinking looks like. After what minister Ken Skates admitted was a last-minute realisation that “the first draft of the Bill failed to make any explicit provision for learner travel”, the Welsh Government tabled amendments 7 and 8.

Amendment 7 adds a new objective requiring Welsh Ministers to “have regard to” facilitating access to places where “education, training, health services or social care services are provided”. Amendment 8 then adds the crucial clarification: “‘education’ includes higher education.”

As Skates explained:

Amendment 8 puts beyond doubt that access to higher education is included in this objective. This is needed as some existing statutory definitions of education specifically exclude higher education.

For Wales, it creates a statutory hook. When designing the network plan, when sharing data, when setting service standards, Transport for Wales and local authorities must now consider whether services help people reach universities.

It’s not a guarantee of better services – “have regard to” is doing heavy lifting here – but it’s a formal recognition that students exist and need transport.

The amendments place universities alongside hospitals and care homes as destinations the network should serve. That’s significant when authorities are making choices about routes, timetables, and service patterns.

A service that doesn’t run to where students are living or stops before evening lectures might now face questions about whether proper regard was given to facilitating access to education.

For England, the contrast is instructive. Local transport authorities franchising their networks have no explicit duty to consider educational access beyond schools. Universities will have to make their case as employers, as economic anchors, as trip generators – anything except as places of education that people need to reach.

The irony of publishing an opportunity mission while passing transport legislation that forgets educational access seems to have escaped Westminster. Cardiff Bay, after some prompting, at least remembered to do its homework.