Transport User Voice June 2024 – Chief executive’s editorial: Our new Business Plan

31 May 2024

Priorities for the next three years

I was pleased to be able to launch our new Business Plan at my first public Board in Birmingham this month. I explained there were two reasons why the Business Plan was important to me and the organisation.

Firstly, transport matters in ways that other public services don’t. We rely on health services at the beginning and end of our lives and, to varying degrees, at points during it. Education is something we rely on one way or another until our late teenage years or early twenties, and a few of us come back to later on. Transport is different. It’s woven into the fabric of everyday lives. It sets the boundaries of where we can go and what we can do, from going to work or getting to a doctor’s appointment, to visiting friends and family.

Reliable, affordable and accessible public transport is for many people the difference between being able participate fully in society and being excluded from it. Transport needs to be run in the interest of the people who use it and it’s our job to make sure that it is.

Secondly, we’re a publicly funded organisation and we should be accountable for how efficiently and effectively we’re spending that money. I joined Transport Focus six months ago and found an organisation full of highly skilled and knowledgeable colleagues who were committed to doing the right thing by passengers. The challenge therefore wasn’t to fundamentally change what we do, but to sharpen and refocus our work so we could be confident we were making the most difference we possibly could.

The development of a new Business Plan was our response to these two challenges. We need to have an impact in ways that matter to people and be confident we’re doing that in a way that represents value for money.

It sets out our priorities for the next three years and includes four commitments to work with the people who run the country’s transport network to:

• Improve transport in ways that matters most to users.
• Make transport safe and accessible for everyone who uses it.
• Minimise the impact of disruption.
• Make sure all transport users are listened to.

Please do have a read. We don’t run any transport services – it is only by working with you all that we will be able to serve the people who rely on transport every day.

 

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