Celebrate the Bus! Help Keep the Bus Pass

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Conference
2018 National Retired Members Conference
Date
11 June 2018
Decision
Carried

“Conference congratulates the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Midlands Region Pensioners’ Network on its ‘bus tour’ of the Midlands between 7th and 21st April this year to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme.

Working with a range of local partners who included retired members of at least thirteen UNISON branches in the Midlands, campaigners visited 23 places where they collected over 1700 signatures on postcards addressed to ninety of the Midlands’ 107 Members of Parliament. The postcards called on them to:

1) Keep the national pass and ensure levels of reimbursement are high enough to support services;

2) Invest and expand bus services; and,

3) Ensure bus workers are respected, listened to and their concerns addressed.

Conference is glad to note that, upon receiving a report of the campaign, the TUC Pensioners’ Committee agreed to investigate how to sustain it and to win the support of unions in the bus industry and of organised bus passengers, including pensioners.

Conference believes that the core of such a campaign must be to promote buses as an essential but neglected public service upon which many older people depend and that affects both town and country dwellers. Buses must form a crucial part of an integrated transport strategy and of our country’s infrastructure.

Further to last year’s resolution (Motion 12) Conference instructs the National Retired Members’ Committee to:

a) Raise it again with the National Executive Council, the Water, Environment and Transport Service Group Executive and the National Disabled Members’ Committee with a view to sustaining the broadest possible support within UNISON;

b) Publicise it to Branch Retired Members’ Sections and Regional Retired Members’ Committees in England by all appropriate means, including the electronic replacement for Interactive;

c) Support initiatives at the TUC Pensioners’ Committee to develop the campaign; and,

d) Approach the Regional Retired Members’ Committees in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Cymru/Wales with a view to extending the initiative to those regions and/or supporting them to take initiatives of their own, having regard to the specific sensitivities that may apply in these regions.”