Manchester’s Labour council has a vision that by 2020 Greater Manchester will have pioneered a new model for sustainable economic growth, based around a more connected, talented and greener city region.

A key element of our strategy is to improve connectivity locally, nationally and internationally. At one level, this encompasses new, faster rail services across the north, linking cities, ports, airports and, of course, HS2, alongside major investment in better local rail services, an expanded tram network and new tram-train connections.

While big capital schemes are necessary to bring our aging transport infrastructure up to the standard and capacity needed, it is vital that we are able to get the local elements right.

Bus is at the centre of our transport system. It still accounts for four in every five local public transport journeys: taking people to work, to education, to the local town centre and connecting communities, families and friends.

Greater Manchester needs an effective and attractive local bus system to manage increases in local commuting and, crucially, ensure that all of our communities can share in the benefits of future economic and employment growth. Moreover, well-used buses have excellent low carbon, congestion-busting credentials and good bus networks can be flexible enough to respond to ever-changing cities – whether to reflect changing economic geographies or support the innovative ways that public services, such as health care, education or training are increasingly going to be delivered.

By 2020, Greater Manchester authorities will have invested heavily over 20 years in new bus infrastructure with a £400mn capital programme of bus priority and interchange developments. It is why we have continued to subsidise bus operators to provide a comprehensive network, albeit that reducing local government budgets are now hitting the network hard.

However, the results have not been good. While London bus travel has increased by more than a third in 10 years, patronage has declined by 7 per cent in northern cities. In Greater Manchester, our capital investment plus ongoing revenue support and our strong partnership with operators has been insufficient to deliver the patronage growth we would expect in a region that has seen its population increase significantly in the past decade.

Our initial analysis reveals a market model that prevents network coordination, stymies the development of simple, integrated ticketing, inhibits joint marketing and is basically immune from competitive discipline. Bus markets (outside London) have now largely ossified into territorial monopolies, with small and medium sized operators increasingly pushed to the margins. Putting our faith in a broken market model that failed to deliver growth in the good times is not going to work in an era of continuing austerity. Yet radically improved connectivity is an essential prerequisite for a healthy and productive wider economy in our city regions.

We need a new model to allow us to coordinate the local bus system to give us the confidence that it can attract new users, integrate with the wider transport network and really pull its weight in managing future commuting. Greater Manchester needs to be able to better hold the ring to draw bus services into a truly integrated offer; and we need to be able to do so in a way that offers best value for the public purse.

We want to design a new model of working in Greater Manchester that can best combine the strengths of the public and private sectors. To achieve this, we need the current legislative shortcomings to be fully addressed. This will allow a fragmented, static bus market to be transformed into a truly integrated public transport offer, that makes the best use of new technologies like smart ticketing and real time information, to benefit business, commuters and residents in city regions like Greater Manchester and beyond.

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Andrew Fender is a councillor in Manchester and chair of the Transport for Greater Manchester Committee

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Photo: Brianac37