Flybe’s collapse is a real test of the government’s promise to help “left behind” communities. For regional communities in the UK, Flybe was a lifeline: the airline was the only carrier chartered to and from Anglesey, off the north west coast of Wales, and operated 80% of the flights from Belfast’s City airport.
But pouring money into a defunct company – or subsidising airlines to make up Flybe’s shortfall – would be chasing bad money with good. Rather than resurrect the Flybe model, the UK government should confront the problems of rural disinvestment and an ailing transport network. The collapse of Flybe offers an opportunity to think through what a genuine regional transport policy would look like.
Before the deregulation of air transport in 1986, the government subsidised domestic flights that provided vital links for remote communities. Flybe began its life in this subsidised market (it was founded as Jersey European Airways in 1979). Few airlines now benefit from such government support. The Scottish government still subsidises roughly a dozen routes to and from Scottish islands, where there is genuinely little alternative to flying.
But neither Conservative nor Labour governments have shown much appetite in recent years for resurrecting the airline subsidy model. The Tories’ 2018 aviation strategy document noted that the results of government intervention in regional flights have been “mixed” – and have often been poor value for money due to low demand. There’s no good justification for funding a form of transport that is both environmentally damaging and only used by a small minority of the population.
The reason that some have chosen to fly across the UK is because of the inadequacies and high costs of our rail network, placing many communities at the mercy of a commercial airline. CrossCountry, the rail franchise that runs many of the services between towns and cities also connected by Flybe, has long been a Cinderella service with poor punctuality and massive overcrowding on several major routes. Improving these CrossCountry routes should be a priority for the government, which is currently reviewing the structure of the railways in its long overdue Williams review.
In the longer term, a more radical approach is needed. Take the example of Switzerland, where every community is guaranteed a service to the nearest major town, with a frequency determined by its size. A large suburb may get a transport connection every 10 minutes, irrespective of whether it is a bus, tram or train, while a distant village might just get an hourly service.
The collapse of Flybe should be an opportunity to reflect upon the failures of the UK’s transport system, and start thinking about an alternative. Currently, Labour supports HS2 and has called for reversing the 1965 Beeching cuts, which drastically cut railway lines across the country. This is a patchwork approach that may benefit a few lucky communities but does little for the majority of people living outside of major cities.
The government should instead establish a regional transport fund, to which towns with poor connections could apply. This could be used to provide extra train services on existing lines for major cities, improve bus services and create better connectivity within and between communities. It could also be used to rebuild local railway lines and reconnect regional areas.
What the country needs isn’t another Flybe or a random scattering of subsidies for the sake of political expediency, but a strategy oriented towards genuine local transport needs, the environment and the economy.
• Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster specialising in transport
