Improving the bus pedigree?

摘要

Deputy prime minister John Prescott would seem to have achieved the impossible in his bus policy statement From Workhorse to Thoroughbred, apparently satisfying both local government representatives and the bus industry. A so-called 'daughter' of last July's Integrated Transport White Paper, the document is the most significant in the bus policy arena since Conservative Transport Minister Nicholas Ridley's Buses White Paper 15 years ago. But, whereas the 1985 Transport Act that followed brought wholesale changes in the form of privatisation and deregulation of service provision, the Deputy Prime Minister's new policy statement instead seeks to persuade.