26 Jul 2023
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
After 22 years of exemplary service to Glasgow’s hospitality industry, that Brian Maule has been forced to close his Chardon D’Or restaurant shows how incomplete the recovery of our city centre remains. Brian faced a complex web of challenges including rising food and energy costs, stubbornly high business rates (these really must come down soon), and the impact of the cost of living on customer demand. But in its closure announcement, the Chardon D’Or team specifically mentioned the decline in activity that post Covid habits have caused in the surrounding city centre business district. At the same time the city centre looks set to lose its night bus service, reinforcing the growing belief that it is difficult to find a way home at the end of a night out.
The political reaction to the First Bus notification that the night bus service is to come to an end is, on one level, encouraging. Both Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon signed a letter from city MSPs to First Bus asking for the company to reconsider and arguing that the loss of the service would be ‘a devastating blow to many of the constituents and businesses we represent’. No doubt the timing just after the June start of public enforcement of the city’s Low Emission Zone will not have been missed in the MSPs’ calculations. How do you defend restrictions on private vehicle use while public transport options are reducing especially late at night when the alternatives are already limited?
First Bus are inevitably being painted as the unaccountable private sector villains but they are making a rational decision. Post Brexit, they are struggling to find drivers and are looking to reallocate the drivers they have from a night bus service that is not well used to help expand other services that have greater demand. They are making this decision entirely in line with the system they are asked to operate within and followed all the required processes in doing so. The trouble is that there are other similar decisions being made that together are threatening to play havoc with Glasgow’s night-time economy.
ScotRail decides on train provision. SPT decides on the Subway and bus subsidies. The City Council decides on taxi provision, parking costs and the operation of the Low Emission Zone. Nowhere in the system is there a co-ordinating authority ensuring that all these decisions add up to a sensible end result. Right now it is the night-time economy that is at risk and it is doubtful if anyone fully understands what the impact of Covid and the cost of living crisis has been on customer demand for that particular economy. Bringing all the partners together to improve night-time transport is an urgent task.
In the longer term, rushing to conclusions that buses should be taken over by the city or that bus franchising should be introduced misses the point. Councillor Susan Aitken’s Connectivity Commission, on which I sat, vigorously endorsed the importance of bus services especially for the city region’s more disadvantaged communities. Their recommendation was perfectly clear. Give the existing system ‘one last chance to succeed’ before turning to fresh regulation. But that one last chance meant both challenging the bus companies to invest in the quality of their fleet and improve ticketing and customer information while at the same time government should be accelerating journey times through the ‘rapid roll-out of bus priority measures’.
It is certainly true that a Glasgow Bus Partnership has been working to access a £500m Scottish Government fund for bus improvement but the progress, four years on from the Connectivity Commission final report, is frustratingly slow. If bus priority measures were already in place the bus journey time savings would be freeing up drivers to support services like the night buses.
Injecting genuine urgency and tangible resources behind public transport improvements is just one of the essential actions needed to support our city centre and its night-time economy.
It is too late to help Brian Maule and Chardon’ D’Or. The sad loss of his business should be a red alert for us all.
This article was first published in The Herald on Wednesday 26 July 2023
