This little known body, run by Transport Scotland wound up business in March 2013 – read also abolished. PVS with its catchy strapline “bridging the gap”, was a committee of the great and the good advising Scottish Ministers about passenger perspectives on public transport. Its record on the face of it seems somewhat unexceptional, however one thing it did do and will be continued is the work of the PVS sub-committee “Bus Passenger Platform”, a sort of bus ombudsman for Scotland, but less grand. If you ever had a complaint about a company that could not resolved by the company, that wasn’t to do with bus registration or compliance (that’s the the Transport Commissioners or VOSA), you could escalate the complaint to the BPP sub committee, provided you had any idea it even existed. The sub committee handled just over 500 complaints in the year ending March 2013 only double the number it started off with 5 years earlier. Almost 300 of the complaints were classified as out of scope for various technical reasons. The rest were mostly resolved after initial correspondence, so not much left to arbitrate.
So what is the backstory, as this seems to have gone unnoticed in the press. PVS, despite its limited record, was quietly lobbying for passenger improvements for at least 5 years and responded to various UK and Scottish consultations. It influenced policy, participated in reviews, carried out some limited research. I guess it thought it was doing a reasonable job (or perhaps no one had bothered to tell them otherwise, probably because they had not heard of them?) Interestingly no one had bothered to tell them that they were in line for the chop. A FoI request made to whatdotheyknow.com has so far yielded little about the machinations. Scottish Ministers, as they do with clockwork regularity, had initiated one of their quinquennial reviews. They ummed and they ahed (Ed. How on earth do you spell that?), but neglected to tell the PVS members until rather late in the financial year ending March 2013 exactly what they were thinking (or just didn’t go to the same clubs). Perhaps we will never know the reasons for its demise, but it would be interesting if someone would pick up on the PVS functions that are being discontinued.
The good news is that Bus Users Scotland, the northern branch of Bus Users UK, has officially opened for business and will be handling the bus complaints and monitoring bus services that VOSA, was apparently unwilling to do. The information available publicly glosses over exactly as to how a body that represents and advocates passenger interests (ergo has a built in passenger bias) can be completely dispassionate in resolving complaints about companies – this will surely come out in the wash. We imagine that this will be a cheaper operation than the old BPP operation using the TS secretariat, though this outsourcing could still turn out to be more expensive in the long run.
We also expect that communications with the bus travelling public will be greatly enhanced as it is fair to say that the old committee didn’t really try hard enough to reach out to the travelling public.
We’ll do our bit and create a new page to publicise the good work that BUS will be doing and look forward to a fruitful co-operation on matters of mutual interest.
