Dr Susan Kenyon argues that local authorities need to bring back accessibility planning for transport to better understand how accessible their services are and to ensure all young people can travel to school safely.

This week, the BBC reported that school children in Gloucester are not only unable to get to school because buses were full, but are being put at risk of harm by being left on verges at the side of the road. The response of two Gloucestershire County Council councillors has raised eyebrows. 

Cllr Tipper declared that it is “common sense” that “people who need to get to work or school, they should live on a bus route”.  Furthermore, “if you can’t get to work because you are living in a certain area you shouldn’t have moved there in the first place”. 

Cllr Patel continued: “Parents also have a responsibility. When you choose the secondary school you want to send your children to, you have a choice. When you make that choice one of the things you have to consider is the transport arrangements.”

Some may have sympathy for their approach. After all, the links between transport and social exclusion are well known.  Put simply, if you can’t get to places, you can’t take part in activities and the activities that you can’t take part in are important, for example, employment, healthcare, leisure, seeing friends and family, going food shopping… and education.  And the immediate causes are well known too: a lack of acceptable, accessible, affordable transport, that is available where we live and where we want to go.  Perhaps there is a duty to consider the practicality of where we choose to live, which public services we choose, where we choose to work. 

But this argument is fundamentally flawed, in two important ways. 

The first is around the concept of choice.  ‘Choice’, for many, is a myth. Where we live, the school we attend, where we work, these decisions are often out of our hands; determined by cultural, demographic and structural factors, over which most have no control. Parental choice in education might be enshrined in policy in the UK, but the notion that parents are actually free to choose their child’s school, making a perfect, rational choice based on complete information, equal opportunity and the existence of a range of good schools in accessible locations, is an illusion.

Government policies, both local and national, have determined the built environment, including the location of housing, education, employment, healthcare, transport services. These have been developed within a culture that values mobility, that both assumes and promotes car ownership.  It is disingenuous to suggest that accessible choices exist, in a car-based environment where accessibility, measured in distance and travel time to key services, has continuously decreased. 

The second is around governments’ responsibilities regarding transport. I have long argued that transport is a social policy, that it is a ‘Government policy that responds to social need and which aims to improve human welfare.’  In the present environment in the UK, there is a clear social need for transport to fulfil access to the opportunities, goods, services and social networks that are essential for personal and societal well-being.  And transport policy has a clear role in improving human welfare, by providing access to the same. 

On this basis, governments – local and national – have a duty to provide transport, just as they have a duty to provide education and other social welfare services; and that they have a duty to make sure that social policies take account of accessibility.

Reintroducing accessibility planning, with compulsory accessibility audits in local transport plans, is an essential first step in supporting local authorities and their members to understand the (in)accessibility of their services, to ensure that responses to concerns such as those raised by Cllr Thomas are informed by evidence, rather than ideology. 

Dr Susan Kenyon is a Principal Lecturer in Politics.