FactCheck: Boris's bus black hole

Last Modified: 28 Mar 2008
By: Channel 4 News

Boris Johnson says he can bring back bus conductors in London for just £8m a year. Is he right?

The claim

"It's absolutely true that if you are going to bring back a Routemaster, or have a new Routemaster, you would need a conductor with them... it would cost £8million to have conductors on each of these buses per year."
Boris Johnson, Radio London, 27 February 2008

The background

The battle of the buses has hitched a ride at the forefront of the London mayoral election campaign.

One of Conservative candidate Boris Johnson's most notable pledges has been the end of the bendy bus, which run on 12 busy London routes.

Instead, he would bring back a "21st century Routemaster" - an as-yet-undesigned version of the recently retired double deckers with a hop-on, hop-off platform at the back.

The new bus would, he said, have full disabled access, clean fuel, and - unlike London's current buses - conductors.

And it's this last part of the promise over which a row has escalated, with Johnson claiming the new conductors would cost £8m a year.

Ken Livingstone's team, however, reckon Johnson has got his calculations way out - to the tune of over £100 million - and this week, the mayor called for Johnson to withdraw his "totally falsely costed" transport manifesto.

So who has added up their bus money wrong?

The analysis

Firstly, let's look at Johnson's calculations.

Routemasters still run on two "heritage" routes. According to information given to the London Assembly last year, these buses - which run between 9.30am and 6.30pm alongside modern buses - have 24 conductors.

These conductors cost £590,000 a year, or £24,583 each.

Today Johnson's spokesperson confirmed the team had costed the running of the new Routemaster at £8m. This is based on a per-conductor cost of £24,600, so would give 325 buses one conductor each.

So from this, can it be assumed that running a conductor bus in place of London's 399 bendy buses (not all of which operate at any one time) would simply cost an extra £24,600 a shot?

Not unless the conductor is a very occasional fixture. Firstly, bendy buses currently operate on some of London's busiest routes, putting in 20 hours a day rather than the nine served by the nostalgia trips.

To fully staff one of the bendy bus routes would mean three shifts a day, including weekends, plus cover for sickness, holidays and ongoing training and recruitment costs

Analysis by independent public transport consultants TAS reckons this works out as 2,040 conductors, which would, in fact, cost £58m a year.

Already, it looks like Johnson is £50m out, but a straight bendy for Routemaster comparison doesn't tell the whole story.

Bendy buses hold up to 149 passengers, compared to 90 in a standard double decker. So to properly replace the bendies' capacity at peak times, 217 more non-bendy buses would have to be put on to the roads.

The original Routemaster took 10 years to develop, and was twice the price of anything else available at the time, whereas bendy buses are already rolling around many European cities.

TAS puts the cost of these extra buses at £41m, which assumes they would only be necessary during the busiest parts of the transport day. Still, to operate them for 12 hours a day for 253 days a year (not counting weekends and bank holidays) would still tot up to an extra 540 conductors and 540 drivers. Labour costs currently account for the majority of bus operating costs - 65 to 70 per cent in London - but what about the actual cost of these new buses?

Johnson has admitted he doesn't yet know, because without a new Routemaster running on the roads, development costs have yet to be calculated.

His campaign does stress, however, that they would replace the bendies gradually over the course of his four-year term, rather than consigning them to the scrapheap straight away.

However, because the new Routemaster would be a relatively small order of a non-standard design, it's likely that it would cost more than an off-the-forecourt bus.

As Chris Cheek of TAS points out, the original Routemaster took 10 years to develop, and was twice the price of anything else available at the time, whereas bendy buses are already rolling around many European cities.

Therefore TAS adds a 10 per cent premium for the small manufacture of a non-standard design - which takes its total estimate of the cost of Johnson's plans to just under £114m.

Let's forget the Routemaster for a minute. What about just getting rid of the bendy buses and replacing them with a standard, conductor-less, double decker?

This would still cost around £27m, TAS told FactCheck, because of the 217 extra buses which would be needed to maintain capacity.

Finally, what about the unknown quantity of the new Routemaster? Let's get all Tomorrow's World for a moment - is it possible that the new Routemaster could be a monster holding the same number of people as the bendy?

Sadly for Boris, not unless it also bends. "The current double decker is about as long as it can be to get around the street," said Cheek. Without a third set of wheels in the middle, there's not much that can be done to make it bigger.

The verdict

Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.

Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson's plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson's estimate looks like pretty small change.

FactCheck rating: 4.5

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The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.

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The sources

Routemaster conductors will cost £8m says Boris
Mayor answers to London, question number 0996/2007, 23 May 2007
Ken demands Cameron officially repudiate Johnson's 'entirely wrong' Routemaster cost claims
Boris Johnson transport policy
Rivals clash over cost of Routemasters
TAS publications
Transport for London

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