Rhyw i'n gwybod y buslaynau, rhaid i'r cyflogol yma yw alwch, a oes i'r busmerau? Diolch i'r cyflogol sydd wedi'i gilydd arweithio, a ydych chi'n mynd i'r cyflogol, ac rwy'w ddod yn gwybod, a'i gwybod i'r busmerau i'r byd mwy fwy o'r busmerau, Mr Rowley. Diolch i'r busmerau i'r busmerau i'r byd mwyoedd. I move the motion in my name. On the face of it my motion for debate today is a motion about bus services, about route cancellations, about inflation, bus and fare increases, about a lack of investment, about a failure of leadership. At its heart it is a motion about people, people who rely on public transport system to get them to where they need to go. People stranded on routes cancelled in the interest of shareholders. People being failed by flawed approaches to bus services that hands public money and control to private interests. In writing this motion my intention was to instigate a balanced debate, something that I hoped members across this chamber could get behind regardless of their party affiliation, which is why I am so disappointed by the amendment put forward by the Government. An amendment that serves only as an example of the blinkered approach that has led to the sorry state of bus services across this country. Let us have a look at the motion and what the Government has removed in its amendment. The amendment will get passed today with the Greens. Let us have the discussion about who is interested in the environment, who is interested in getting people out of cars on to the buses, because it is certainly not the Green Party in this place. The motion in my name basically says that there are not recent bus fares increases across the country that are hitting during the cost of loving crisis. You would have to say to the Government the fact that they want that removed are they in denial or do they acknowledge that there has been a major increase in bus fares across the country and do they accept that that is a barrier for many people who are on low incomes trying to use buses. Further notes that on the back of route cancellations we are seeing across much of Scotland that are isolating communities. Is the Government seriously saying that there has not been route cancellations? In every community across Scotland, I am sure on the SNP and Green benches in your communities, just as much in our communities, we have seen bus cancellation after bus cancellation putting people off. Indeed, last week in West Lothian we saw two young people explaining how they would have to both spend £40 on a Sunday to get a taxi because of the bus route cancellations that are taking place. We saw young people telling us about taxis at £20 because the first bus in the morning had been put off and they would not get to their work. Is the Government denying that there has been routes that have been cut? They certainly seem to be doing so. Let us look at the amendment and what the amendment says. Notes recent to the end supports the vision outlined in a policy prospectus equality, opportunity, community for public transport system that is more accessible. It is not more accessible. The people who are suffering the most are the poorest because the amendment goes on to talk about the under-22s and talks about the free travel for the over-60s. However, there is a group in the middle, people who are generally on much lower incomes—that is why they are not in their cars—and those are the people who are being denied access to those buses because of the costs. You really could not make this up, Presiding Officer, in terms of the Government being in denial. It is not just that the SNP Government is in denial. It is that they have no idea what to do to build a transport system that will deliver for all the people of Scotland. One of their members said at the weekend that the SNP is in office but not in power. I would go further and say that they have no vision, a clueless Government, high on rhetoric with no idea how to meet the big challenges facing Scotland at this time, with record numbers of buses arched during their time in office, a number of routes being arched on their eyes. It is clear that the SNP's broken system is failing thousands upon thousands of public transport users in Scotland, and they have no plan to fix it. Indeed, Presiding Officer, I repeat that they do not have a clue how to even begin to fix the problems that we have in Scotland. Scottish Labour will launch the biggest reform of buses in a generation in the SNP's broken system, in hand power and control of routes, fares and services, back to the local communities and back to people who depend on those services. That is the direction of travel in which we need to go. The member is just winding up. Mr Rowley, you do need to conclude at six minutes. You can take the intervention but you then will need to conclude. I apologise to the green member for not being able to take the intervention, but maybe he and others can start to examine their conscience and ask themselves, why would you deny that people are being excluded from buses because it is too expensive to use the buses? Why would you deny that many people are being excluded from buses because there are no buses running in their area? What is the point of a free bus pass if there are no buses to actually get on so that the Greens and the SNP Government have no vision, no clue and will fail the people of Scotland when it comes to transport time and time again? I move the motion. Thank you Mr Rowley. Just to advise the chamber, as I am sure you will have already gathered, there is no time in hand therefore speeches will have to stick to the time limit with that. I invite the minister to speak to and move amendment 8954.3, up to five minutes. Thank you very much, and I welcome debating this motion today. Mr Rowley said that he wanted a consensual debate, but his opening remarks did not sound very consensual at all, I have to say. Where I agree with Mr Rowley is that reliable, accessible and affordable public transport is a lifeline service for many across Scotland. That is the vision that is set out in the new equality, opportunity and community policy prospectus that was set out by the First Minister last month. Bus services play a vital role in supporting the delivery of the three missions set out in the prospectus. The Scottish Government took significant action to ensure that bus services were protected during the pandemic, providing £223 million between June 2020 and March 2022. We continued the network support grant plus until March 2023 to freeze fares and help people with the cost of travel over the winter. Our support continues in 2023-24, with a broad package of investment in bus with £421.8 million allocated, including the network support grant and concessionary schemes. I was also pleased to launch the second phase of our co-funded marketing campaign with the confederation of passenger transport and bus operators in Galashios last week to encourage people to choose the bus. Our support for bus services takes a number of different forms. In particular, our national free bus travel schemes for young people and for older and disabled people are the most generous in the UK. Those schemes cover a larger percentage of the population than anywhere else in the UK, with up to 2.6 million people eligible for free bus travel in Scotland. That is encouraging more people to choose the bus and is helping us to meet our net zero targets by encouraging a shift away from cars. That is a transformational policy. We now have more than two thirds of young people enjoying free bus travel, representing a new card holder every minute since the scheme launched in January 2022. While I recognise members' arguments to cap fares, I hope that, in turn, they will acknowledge just how widespread and significant our free fares support has become. I will give way to Mr Kerr, because he came first. Just on the under-22s bus scheme, does the minister know exactly where the concentration of people taking up that scheme is located? I will provide members with the details of where uptake has occurred. I do not have off the top of my head the numbers for each local authority area, but we will provide that information as I did to Ms Dowie in a question earlier on this week. The pandemic was not only a period of huge challenge for public transport, its impact continues to be felt in patterns of demand. Although the Scottish Government continues to provide significant financial support for bus services, it needs to evolve to make sure that it remains fit for purpose and is sustainable long-term. I have committed to a review of bus subsidy this year to ensure that funding can best contribute to meeting the needs of local communities. We are also progressing with the fairs fares review, which will develop and assess options to make our public transport system more accessible, available and affordable, with the cost of transport more fairly shared across government, business and society. I have a lot to go through, so I will not take the intervention. Improving bus journey times and reliability will contribute to high-quality bus services and shorter journey times, encouraging motorists out of their cars and onto buses. That is why we are investing in bus priority infrastructure through our bus partnership fund. £26 million of bus priority funding has already been awarded to 11 partnerships covering 28 local authorities. It is not just the way that buses run that are changing with the powers that local authorities now have under the Transport Act, with further secondary legislation to enable bus franchising and partnership working, which will be introduced later this year. It is not just about how they are run, but about what is changing to the buses themselves. Removing carbon emissions from our transport sector is critical to meeting Scotland's ambitious climate targets. Since December 2020, we have directly supported the acquisition of 548 new zero-emission buses and supporting charging infrastructure across Scotland. I launched phase 2 of the Scottish Zero-Emission Bus Challenge this week, which will transform the market to deliver a zero-emission future for buses. I recognise just how important a modern, affordable and accessible bus system is for all of Scotland, and I am impressed by the appetite that is shown by everyone involved in bus services to innovate and respond to changing needs. You need to conclude, Minister, in which case I will move the amendment in my name. I have asked members who are intending to speak in the debate who have not already done so to press the request-to-speak buttons. I invite Graham Simpson to speak to amendment 8954.2. I thank the Labour Party for bringing this debate to the chamber, and I move the amendment in my name. I am a fan of buses. I have been, ever since my dad, worked for a bus company in the 1970s. I would be even more of a fan if I had a decent bus service where I live that I could use, but, like many people, I do not. I tend out necessity to take the car, most places, all walk or cycle. I do not want it to be that way. Too many people live in public transport deserts or places like shops where the bus service is patchy and, on a Sunday, virtually non-existent. I will not. Pre-pandemic, £373 million, journeys a year were made by bus in Scotland, the most of any form of public transport. Journey figures have rebounded, but not to pre-pandemic levels. Buses can hold the key if the Government is serious about hitting their own target of reducing car miles by 20 per cent by 2030, but they have presented no ideas on how to achieve that. Buses need to be there for people, and they need to offer something better than the car. The Scottish Government's decision to cut the network support grant plus in March was baffling. That did not happen anywhere else in Britain. Operator warnings that that could lead to a rise in fares and a reduction in services fell on deaf ears. Last year's savage cuts to local government spending were met with similar disdain, with COSLA's Councillor Gail MacGregor warning in January that councils would struggle to fund services. However, it is not just on funding where the SNP is failing. The Government's goal to remove the majority of the country's diesel bus fleet in favour of zero-emission models by the end of 2023 lies in tatters. Transform Scotland estimates that just 16 per cent will be converted by that time. The Scottish Government's £500 million fund will give way briefly. We are now at a stage where 15 per cent of our bus fleet are using decarbonised buses, which is much higher than south of the border, where Mr Simpson's party is in power. In fact, within the next three years, they hope to reach 12 per cent, is my understanding. We are going further and faster than the 12 per cent of the border. Thank you. The figure mentioned by the minister was 15 per cent. Transport Scotland said that it was 16 per cent, nowhere near the target. The £500 million bus partnership fund launched in 2019 to deliver bus priority measures on our roads has paid out just £25 million in that time. Little wonder that this Parliament's net zero committee recommended that the Government review the scheme to see why there has been such a poor take-up. Of course, fares can play a big part in getting people on to public transport. We await the introduction of a cross-modal travel card of the type given to delegates across COP26. We can only look south with envy at their £2 fare cap, which has just been extended until October, when it will go up for a year to £2.50. With a bit of promotion, this will be a massive success. Our failing bus service is having a detrimental impact on people's everyday lives. The Scottish Government cannot wait about any more. If we want to get people on to buses, we need comprehensive routes that need to be easy to use and fares need to be simple and cheap, and I have heard nothing of that from the minister. Thank you, Mr Simpson. I call Beatrice Wishart for up to four minutes. Had my amendment been chosen this afternoon, it would have called on the Scottish Government to extend the under-22s free bus entitlement to ferries, which in many island communities are used the same way as bus services. That would help in the aims of the policy to encourage more people to use public transport, creating a habit for the future. To reach our ambitious net zero targets, buses will need to play a significant role. Scrapping diesel fleets are a priority. More people on buses will help to lower emissions, reduce traffic and lower the need for road building. One double-decker can take 75 cars off our roads. However, bus services are failing communities across Scotland. Transport Scotland's 2021 household survey on transport and travel in Scotland admittedly a difficult year for public transport figures, which found that while 42 per cent of adults responding used a bus at least once a month in large urban areas, it was only 12 per cent in remote rural areas. Meanwhile, car access in our remote rural, accessible rural and small remote towns from findings in the same survey were among the highest likelihood to have access to a car. The Age of Scotland briefing highlights that two thirds of over 60s in remote and rural areas either do not have a bus pass or don't use it, while almost 60 per cent of single pensioner households don't have access to a car. So buses need to be as convenient as cars if it's to be successful in increasing usage. However, cars in rural and island locations are often a necessity because of geography and sparse populations. Scottish Liberal Democrats have been calling for a model similar to that of transport for London, re-regulating buses using local transport boards who would choose the routes and timings and bus companies can bid for them, allowing communities to decide where buses can go. Changes by a previous transport minister giving powers back to local authorities to run their own bus services were a move in the right direction, but a lack of funding for local authorities inhibits the full potential of this option. True reform needs appropriate funding to make it happen. When it comes to time to review services, so much changes in the interim years of a contract that once popular routes may have declined, while the need for a new route hasn't been detected, as potential users find other means to travel, confidence in the service subsequently goes down and the spiral continues. As the motion states, bus ticket rises in the middle of a cost of living crisis have hit commuters hard, route cancellations make it difficult for many shift workers, finding themselves hard pressed to find bus services that tie in with their work patterns. We need to look at how we can improve the provision of services outside of rush hours without running empty services. Before I conclude, with a general move to more people working from home, commuting is not the only infrastructure for us to consider. In rural and island areas, superfast broadband roll-out is still not complete despite the SNP commitment to do so by 2021, while mobile connectivity remains patchy. Digital exclusion prevents people from accessing everyday services, including travel apps or finding bus information. Finally, national infrastructure such as tunnels for island communities would help to reduce some of the greatest contributions to carbon emissions in the isles, ferry journeys. We now move to the open debate, a reminder that we are tight for time. The words in conclusion should be uttered before the four-minute mark, not on the four-minute mark. I call Monica Lennon to be followed by Fiona Heslop, up to four minutes. I am pleased to speak in today's debate in support of the Scottish Labour motion. I thank my colleague Alec Rowley for bringing in his passion to the chamber today. I think that public transport and buses are subjects close to all of our hearts. Alec Rowley is absolutely right. The debate is about people, first and foremost. It is about the future of our communities and young people and the very future of our planet. Buses are essential lifelines for our communities. They enable younger and older people the freedom to travel around our communities and beyond. They should be an affordable and reliable alternative to cars run in the interests of people and not private shareholders. Buses are also an essential part of Scotland's journey to net zero. The Scottish Government has rightly recognised the importance of buses in its national transport strategy and the programme for government where it pledges to support Scotland's bus networks. Unfortunately, despite the importance of buses to net zero and the pledges from the ministers, many of our communities face bus deserts, a point made by Graham Simpson. Those are areas where there are little or no reliable regular bus services available. Scottish Labour, of course, supports the expansion of the national travel concessionary scheme that we introduced in Government, but the point has been made what uses the free bus pass if there is no bus that turns up at the bus stop. People are frustrated. The minister wants us all to be very calm today, but the reality is that we cannot solve a problem if we do not admit it in the first place. I think that it is unfortunate that the very fair and factual points made in Labour's motion today have been deleted by the Government. Where bus services do continue to exist, many people simply cannot afford to use the bus. We know that buses are predominantly relied upon by people on lower incomes who cannot afford to buy a car. Around a third of people in Scotland are without access to a car, and Beesha's wishes talked about some of the challenges in our more rural areas. Colleys have heard me many times before raise the withdrawal of the X1 bus in the Hamilton area. That was our express service from Hamilton into Glasgow. The bus was withdrawn by first bus back in July 2020. A lifeline service for people in Hamilton enabled residents to get into the town centre and beyond to the city centre. People who were relying on that route for work, for education, for social leisure and also for healthcare for hospital appointments in Glasgow. In that time that people have come out of lockdown and want to get back out again, people have told me that it now costs them £15 return journey from one end of Hamilton to the other just to get to see a doctor. It is completely unaffordable. I have raised it many, many times. The minister is new in his pose and I hope that we will meet soon with local people from Hamilton to find some solutions. I have told the minister before, but I will repeat again. Over 100 people recently turned up at a bus stop to get a photo taken to send a message that they want their bus back. That is how serious that is, but people are not getting any answers. The cancellation of the X1 bus and the campaign led by the community highlights how much people care about bus services. Monday is the start of Love My bus week. The people of Hamilton loved their X1 bus. Communities around Scotland love their buses too. It is time that the Scottish Government showed that they also love buses and will provide not just the vision but the investment that we need for people and the planet. Thank you. Thank you, Ms Lennon. I now call Fiona Hyslop to be followed by Maurice Golden up to four minutes. Buses connect us to our communities and to each other. They give us freedom and choice. A good bus network should give us an environmentally friendly, accessible, cheap alternative to cars. My constituency in West Lothian is a semi-rural area with many towns and villages with a higher than average reliance on cars. Bus services in West Lothian are currently woefully unreliable and have been for some time. Changes to commercial bus operator services have meant that many services no longer run with some villages effectively cut off at certain times and on a Sunday. Of course, commercial operators' decisions to cancel or withdraw services are not the original source of current bus service provision issues. When I have raised concerns with our two major bus operators, McGill's and Lothian Buses, they cite driver shortages as one of the major reasons for the declining service provision. We know that driver shortages are a direct result of the impact of Brexit, which the people of Scotland did not vote for, and that the UK Government's current immigration system further limits potential recruitment of EU drivers. However, I suspect that I do not need to reiterate to members the extreme adverse and continuing economic impact of Brexit on Scotland's economy. At the very least, the UK Government must agree to put bus drivers on the shortage occupation list. The Scottish Government using its devolved powers provided local authorities with the powers to bring forward improvements to bus services in their local areas via section 34 of the Transport of Scotland Act 2019. £500 million via the bus partnership fund will be distributed through 14 bus partnerships across Scotland, one of which is West Lothian's bus alliance, in my constituency. Initial funding of £25.8 million was allocated to those partnerships so that they could undertake appraisal work. However, a pressing issue remains. We have yet to find out what action will be taken by the local authority with those new powers. West Lothian Council is already working on a long-term review of public transport options for subsidised support, which they can then apply to the £500 million bus partnership fund to support. However, in the meantime, now, buses are being cancelled. My constituents cannot get to their work or hospital. We need bus services support in the interim before people lose their jobs or just rear back to car usage. Under pressure from the public and the SNP opposition, the Labour-led Tory-supported West Lothian Council finally recently agreed for emergency support for one of the cancelled routes. West Lothian may be semi-rural, but it is a major source of commuting by cars along the M8 and M9 corridors to both Glasgow and Edinburgh. With far more people living in West Lothian than the city of Dundee, if Scotland is to reach net zero, we need viable alternatives to car use. Park and bus ride opportunities on the M8 from the Hartlands junction and the New Winchburg junction on the M9 are needed, but it needs transport co-ordination. I am told and to date this is singly absent with little movement on this. Circular, reliable bus links to the two railway lines going through West Lothian is also a sensible and realisable goal to achieve sustainable travel. We need to encourage people back on to buses and out of cars post Covid, but people cannot use public transport if the area is not served. Despite the takeover of the previously poor first bus service by McGill's and McGill's determination to drive up standards of reliability and confidence, the current limbo stasis while they get there is not helping anyone. In conclusion, lack of reliable bus services are having a huge impact on my constituents. People are worried about losing their jobs, they are missing health appointments, losing access to basic amenities and endlessly waiting for buses that simply don't turn up. Buses can bring freedom, choice and connection. We cannot afford to miss the bus on this one. I am going to focus my comments today on local bus services, the sort of services that act as a lifeline for our communities, providing the most vulnerable with everyday access to shopping, services and socialising. Despite the importance of these bus routes, it can be the case that they are economically challenging to operate, which is where local authorities step in, providing subsidies to ensure that these routes are accessible to those with few, if any, other transport options. It is of course great concern to see local authorities losing their ability to offer that support. With their budgets hollowed out by years of cuts from the Scottish Government, local authorities are inevitably making cuts of their own to balance their books. Sadly, local bus services are amongst those cuts.  In an effort to plug an £18 million hole in the council budget, more than £122,000 worth of support is being cut from the 51, the 202, the 204, the 206 and the 236 services. Those bus routes connect communities across the city from the ferry, the west end, Loughy, Curtin, Lawside and more besides. Their loss will be felt in each of those communities, and especially so by many elderly passengers who rely on them. As my constituents would expect me to do, I have taken the matter up with the leader of the council and, along with local councillor Derek Scott, I will continue to push for those services to be reinstated. Deputy Presiding Officer, this is not just a problem for Dundee, though. COSLA's Environment and Economy spokesperson, councillor Gail MacGregor, wrote to the Net Zero Energy and Transport Committee warning of that risk. She said, and I quote, There is concern that incredibly stretched levels of funding in financial year 23-24 will prevent councils from providing the bus services that they are currently providing either directly or by subsidising. With more than one in five Scots using a bus on a weekly basis, according to one survey, the loss of any service is a serious matter. But that is what is going to keep happening if the Scottish Government keeps gutting council budgets. It also completely undermines the decision to give councils the ability to run their own bus service. What good is giving councils that power if they have no money to actually use it? Deputy Presiding Officer, it is another example of this SNP-Green Government talking a good game, but failing to deliver results. Look at their target to convert the majority of Scotland's bus fleet to zero-emissions vehicles by 2023, another promise that looks set for failure. With the Transformed Scotland report estimating that just 16 per cent of the fleet will have been converted by the deadline. We have a Scottish Government that is off target that is not investing in our communities and that has seen passenger numbers decline by 40 per cent over the past few years. It all adds up to a Government that does not know how to deliver high-quality public transport. I invite them to listen to my constituents. They do not want gimmicks from this Government. They want their local bus services back. I now call Neil Bibby to be followed by Fulton MacGregor up to four minutes, Mr Bibby. Monica Lennon mentioned next week is Love My Bus week. I have to say that the event will seem rather ironic for many of my constituents who will be feeling unrequited love after their local buses have been removed. Many of my constituents do love taking the bus, but private bus companies do not appear to love them back. Thousands of my constituents in Renfisher are angry, are frustrated and are in despair after McGill's buses cut a huge 13 per cent of services at the start of this month. The company claims that the primary reason for this is the Government's withdrawal of Covid recovery support funding. Those are the latest cutbacks in the bus market that has been decimated over the past 16 years. For example, in 2007 there were 5,400 buses in operation under the last Labour Government, but that is plumeted to 3,700 in 2022. As Alex Rowley rightly said, young people and older people alike are asking now the question, what is the point in a free bus pass if there is no bus to get on? What we are seeing in Renfisher is the dilution of some services and the withdrawal of some services all together. In Cobarken, buses have been cut from every 20 minutes to one an hour. In Erskine, young people were without the 22 service to get them to college in Paisley. In Galahill and Whitehall, disabled residents are looking for losing the service from inside their scheme. In Neilston and Barhead, cuts affecting NHS workers are trying to make shifts at the REH hospital. In Foxbar, my constituent is a dialysis patient who is having to take a daily taxi journey because of early morning bus cuts. Working mothers in Johnston are also facing early morning bus cuts. It is now finding it impossible to get to work on time after dropping the kids at school. Services affecting Spatesden, Llynwyd, Fergusley, Hawkehead, Kirkland, Bishopton and more. The list goes on and on, Presiding Officer. Frankly, people have had enough. Those bus cuts are unacceptable to them, so they should be unacceptable to the Scottish Government, too. People do not want one word, but they want action. They want us to reverse those cuts and urgently deliver a plan to improve our bus services. SPT, who have little resources, has stepped in to support some services, but whilst welcome, temporary and very limited stopgap measures simply will not cut it. It is frankly astonishing that the Scottish Government has done nothing—precisely nothing—to stop bus services in Renfrewshire from being cut. It is also extremely disappointing that the new transport minister is denying the problem with his amendment today and has so far ignored my invitation to visit Renfrewshire and hear directly from the passengers affected. People in my area are rightly asking, what is this Government here for? For all the talk from the minister today, not a single bus service cut at the start of this month in Renfrewshire has or is set to be reinstated. The Scottish Government is not a bystander here, so it should stop acting like one and govern, because that is not inevitable. We can and should do things differently. There are solutions that should be implemented. Firstly, instead of happily handing over hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money every year in subsidies to private bus companies, it is long past time to impose stricter conditions on support. Secondly, as Alex Rowley rightly said, we also need a cap on bus fares. Labour mayors across England have capped single fares at £2, while my constituents pay amongst the highest bus fares anywhere in the UK at £2.85 for a two-mile journey. Finally, we need to make sure that the fundamental reform of the broken bus market, local buses, should be under local control. Improved bus connectivity is critical to linking communities, travelling cheaply and safely, and indeed our commitments to tackling emissions. Bus connectivity can ensure families and friends of all ages living in different areas across Scotland have a reliable way of keeping in contact with each other, something that we all missed so dearly during the pandemic. The Scottish Government's plan for a 20 per cent reduction in car kilometres by 2030 is dependent on improving and increasing the reliability of public transport options such as buses and trains, and the national transport strategy has specifically cited improved bus routes as a way to reach net zero. I am pleased to hear that the Scottish Government is absolutely committed to making sustainable travel modes more attractive, and that is demonstrated, I think, through the 23-24 budget that the Scottish Government allocated a record £425.7 million to support bus services and concessionary travel across Scotland. You may think that, because I represent a constituency in the central belt, that there is a wealth of bus routes across my constituency. However, that is not necessarily the case. In 2019, Cote Bridge, in my constituency, lost its only bus route connecting the town with the city of Glasgow, similar to the situation in Hamilton. The loss of that route left many in my constituency feeling isolated, disconnected and separated from the surrounding urban areas. Since that time, I along with my colleague Neil Gray in Neighbouring Eardream Shots campaigned with the community heavily for a return of a bus connection to a larger city. I am happy to say that, in March this year, the city-link 902 service was announced, which finally connected Cote Bridge to Glasgow again, as well as to Edinburgh Airport for the first time. It was great to meet up with the operations director to hear more about this excellent service, which I would encourage my constituents to continue to use. I have also been working with First Bus, who have found very collaborative and open to new ideas, and I am hopeful that a further service has been trialled this summer by connecting Cote Bridge and Coden specific areas in the town to the city centre. I have to say that there is no doubt that those services that I mentioned in the work that I have done in others with the community to make it possible would not even be off the ground if it was not for the introduction of the free bus pass for young people. Although those developments are welcome, there are still areas across the northern corridor area of my constituency that still feel disconnected. I am engaging with bus companies and in talks to try to find a solution to the more complex issue of connecting small villages that make up the northern corridor. There are others who have said that Scotland's concessory travel schemes have been trailblazing and encouraging both young and old to travel by bus, but until very recently, residents of my constituency would have found very little use for it, and that is something that I am hopeful will change across my whole constituency. From speaking with relevant stakeholders, I have been told that a backlog of staffing issues, including hiring and training new drivers, resulted in numerous delays in route cancellations, and I think that that is a really good point that Fiona Hyslop raised about the Brexit situation. Now that the backlog is drawing to a close, it is critical that routes that were cancelled are now revived and that new routes should be established where necessary. Indeed, as I said earlier, residents across the northern corridor and of my constituency feel that current bus services are inadequate. The community there is ever-growing, and I urge bus companies to examine the viability of increased services in this area. I want to take this opportunity to say that here in the chamber. I would also ask if there is anything that the minister can do to give consideration to this area of the country, I would be very grateful and I would be happy to speak with them about the issues here. In conclusion, I am confident that the Scottish Government recognises the importance of increased bus connectivity and access to bus services. I have seen in my constituency the sense of isolation that it comes when a route is discontinued, but I have also seen the benefits and the light that have come when reintroducing one different route. While increasing funding and new route announcements are welcome news, we must keep this momentum and continue to invest in our public transport services to the good of our communities, our economy and our environment. Bus services are essential public services that must be run in the public interests, but the reality is that we have been stuck in a cycle of decline in bus services that started with Tory deregulation in the 1980s. It is now time to break that cycle, and that means not just reflecting on how bad things have got, but also what the solutions are, and it is the solutions that are represented in the Government amendment to this debate. It is absolutely clear that with the widening of the concessionary travel to under 22s, we are seeing a new generation of young people choosing bus. Over two-thirds of young people, two-thirds under 22, now hold the national entitlement card, with over 62 million journeys taken to date. The card is improving access to education work, social opportunities and saving hundreds of thousands of young people and their families money during a cost of living crisis. Holding the card has built a confidence and independence of teenagers. It has helped to address transport poverty across Scotland. It has enabled young people in desperate need to access food banks and helped many access a job for the first time. The evaluation of the scheme and the fair fairs review should point to where we could go next with concessionary travel. I see a pressing need to extend the scheme to those in the asylum system, who, thanks to Tory cruelty, are forced to live on £45 a week. I also see the case for an extension to young folk on islands who use ferries like buses. I agree with Monica Lennon that you can only get on a bus if the service exists and is reliable. Too often, private operators are removing or scaling back services, despite the huge amounts of funding from concessionary fares and subsidies from the Scottish Government. I was pleased that the previous transport minister announced a full review of all funding streams from the Scottish Government to bus operators in Scotland. I believe that that will bring the kind of conditions and the conditionality that Neil Bibby was calling for. I am sorry that I do not have time. It is time to hold private bus companies to account on fares and service cancellations, and for the Government to work with the traffic commissioner further on enforcement, such as using the bus open data system in Scotland that would help passengers and the commissioner to sanction poor delivery that we are seeing from many of the companies. The 2019 Transport Act delivered new bus powers for councils, which gives them the ability to serve the needs of local communities by setting up municipally-owned bus operators. Those are powers that have the potential to revolutionise services. It is disappointing that Alex Rowley's initial comment said absolutely nothing about municipal ownership of bus companies. Maybe he needs to take a leaf out of Andy Burnham's book, which has focused on the solutions and the solutions of public control of a public service. That is what we need from Labour. We need solutions, we need them coming to the Chamber, agreeing on areas such as municipalisation and working with the new minister with councils to deliver that. Let us focus on the solutions, not just how bad things have got. I want to get on to the solutions, Mr Rowley, because the community bus fund will provide critical start-up funding for those interested local authorities to explore those new powers around franchising and meaner supply. We should also remember that local authorities have powers over road user charging, workplace parking levies, to help to build the funds that are required to sustain municipalised or franchise bus services. Let us get investment into publicly-owned, publicly-controlled bus companies. I hope that councils are showing the political leadership to use those powers going forward. We have barely scratched the surface this afternoon and the reforms that are needed to improve our bus services. I look forward to more constructive opportunities to debate and develop the vision and the solutions for what we need. The bus industry is changing. I think that the last few years have seen major changes in areas from passenger numbers to journey types and frequency of services, but nowhere is the change greater than in the buses themselves. Electric buses are now being introduced, even if it is a pest that suggests that the Scottish Government's targets to remove the majority of diesel buses by the end of the year will be another example of big on talk, short on action. Listening to the minister's reply to intervention by my colleague, it seems that he is content to mask this failure in not achieving his target by pointing elsewhere. I suggest to the minister not to set targets that you have no hope of reaching. Recently, I met representatives of stagecoach West of Scotland and saw some of the newest electric buses. They have been used to run the first fully electric semi-rural service in Scotland through the Irvine Valley. Those electric buses, while a significant step forward, do still have their limitations. Despite considerable advances in battery technology, increasing range and optimising lifespan, charging throughout the day remains vital. That requires investment in chargers at bus stations, depots and potentially elsewhere on the route to keep the battery topped up. All of that infrastructure, together with the buses themselves, come at a substantial cost. An electric bus can be at least twice as expensive as its diesel equivalent. While those costs can be offset over the lifetime of the vehicle, the upfront cost is substantial. Similarly, the charging infrastructure comes with a large upfront cost, particularly if it needs to be installed in more rural areas or areas that need wider grid upgrades to accommodate it. The chamber will now be familiar with my view that hydrogen can be the missing piece in the puzzle to achieve net zero. Here, too, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may be the key to unlocking longer-range zero-emission buses. While some early trials with this technology have had mixed results, I urge the Scottish Government to continue supporting research of this emerging technology. Of course, the biggest challenge for bus providers remains how to meet the costs of running these services and the significant losses during the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated existing financial pressures to agree that could never have been predicted. In this chamber, we routinely call for bus companies to continue to run services on routes that can never credibly be profitable. Those services often lifelines for smaller rural communities should be protected, even if there is a cost to government attached. Granted, there are many demands on government's finances—very overspends, ministers for independence, cleaning up after whatever mess the Scottish Greens have made of a policy this week. However, there is a strong argument that improved targeted financial support for bus services would have significant benefits, particularly in rural areas such as my own south of Scotland region. I would love to, but I do not have time. Before closing, it is important to stress just how important a role Scotland's bus networks have to play in reaching our net zero targets. One of the first things that any of us learn as a child is that the wheels on the bus go round and round all day long. If that is to remain the case, we must ensure that bus providers are given the right long-term financial support, which gives them the confidence to invest in new technologies, keep fares low, and protect those lifeline routes that offer the only real public transport option for so many people in rural areas. Thank you, Mr Whittle, for that trip down memory lane. I call the final speaker in the open debate, Keith Brown, after which we will move to closing speeches. All those who participated in the debate will need to be in the chamber. Mr Brown, up to four minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am pleased to be able to take part in the debate, although it has been quite a dispiriting one, especially, I think, from the Labour benches. After 16 years of failure in this Parliament, you would think to be some analysis, some understanding of the problem, some possible solutions that we heard nothing about that from Alec Rowley. All we heard were the usual soundbikes and attack lines. Everyone that is involved in bus travel that, as a constituent that has come to him about an issue, knows that two of the main issues are in relation to climate change, in relation to social exclusion, but the causes of some of the problems that we have talked about have been the pandemic and have been Brexit, in particular the point raised by Fiona Hyslop in relation to the recruitment of drivers. Every time, for example, Lothian region gone on a recruitment spree, every other part of the country loses out in terms of the pool of drivers. Of course, we had many people, not least on the east of Eastern Europe, that were previously happy to be drivers who have now been prevented from doing that because of Brexit, not a word about Brexit, nor a word of Brexit or the pandemic. Everybody knows that the pandemic has altered people's work patterns and commuting practices. During lockdown, many drivers sought other jobs and then did not return. Brexit cut off access, as I have said, to another source of drivers. I have seen the shortage of drivers in my constituency, leading to reductions in services and a couple of routes. I have said that I am not taking any interventions, I have only got four minutes. Is it a uniquely Scottish problem? Of course it is not, no more than it is a uniquely Kilmarnish and Umblayne problem. Neil Bibby invited us to look at the record of the Labour Party elsewhere in the UK government, so let us do that. Let us look, for example, at Wales, where the Labour Party are actually in power. The number of passenger journeys prepared—I know that it gets them very uncomfortable, but it will not last very long—has been decreasing across Great Britain since 2008 and 2009. In Wales, the number of journeys per person is less than half the rate in both Scotland and England, while the total distance travelled on buses in Wales increased by almost a third compared to the previous year. The total distance travelled decreased the most in Wales compared to pre-pandemic levels, and it has recovered the least compared to England and Scotland. I do not quote those figures to try and make the Welsh Government look bad, merely to point out that the Labour Party does not have a magic wand to fix bus services in Wales patently, and it does not have one—the suggested one—for Scotland either. Of course, it is the job of oppositions to oppose to highlight where the Government may be going wrong, but there is a duty to be honest with the public if they think things should be done differently to make suggestions. Let us look at the motion. Yes, they tell us that the improvement of bus services should happen more quickly, that local authorities should have more resources, although the Tory is going to do that by cutting £500 million from the Scottish budget through the tax cuts. I do not know how they are going to manage that. There is simply no indication from either side of where the money will come from, and when you are dealing with that, it is virtually a fixed—what we are dealing with is virtually a fixed-size budget. That is just irresponsible, but surely the motion was brought for because it wanted to do more than simply gripe. There must be a big idea, a cunning plan to transform bus transport in Scotland, so it is cap fares. That is the solution put forward by the Labour Party. No reference, no understanding of the impact of Brexit the pandemic, what a positiate of vision that represents. One idea on its own is highly unlikely to lead to the increased passenger numbers, which help to make bus routes more sustainable. A broad package of measures is what is needed, and that is what the Scottish Government is addressing. Just this month, the transport minister launched a £300,000 campaign co-funded by the Scottish Government and the confederation of passenger transport, encouraging people to choose the bus. Meanwhile, the various concessionary bus travel schemes, brought in by the Scottish Government, have now reached the significant stage in which 100 million bus journeys are being taken each year by holders of one or other of the concessionary travel schemes. I am absolutely delighted that the people of Cluckman, Shernan and Blane and right across Scotland are taking advantage of the concessionary travel cards available, and those figures underline the SNP's commitment to widening access to free bus travel. For that reason, I support the amendment in Kevin Stewart's name. Aspects of this debate have been really good to hear. It is clear that there is cross-party consensus on the benefits of buses. Alex Rowley described them as a key lifeline service. Maurice Golden developed that to describe them as lifelines in our communities providing the most vulnerable with everyday access to shopping, services and socialising. Brian Whittle stressed just how important a role Scotland's bus networks have to play in reaching our net zero targets. It was really important to hear about the challenges faced by our bus operators. For example, the cuts to local authorities that left the COSLA warning incredibly stretched levels of funding will prevent councils from providing the bus services that they are currently providing. Maurice Golden told us that it is happening in Dundee right now. Just today, the P&J reports that stagecoach has slashed bus services across Aberdeen and the Shire following council cuts. We heard from Brian Whittle about the lack of investment in renewables charging infrastructure, and we heard about the Scottish Government's decision to cut the network support grant in March, which has led to operators' warning of rises in fares and a reduction in services. That lack of support is stark. The Confederation of Passenger Transport tells us that even though the bus sector accounts for 75 per cent of all public transport trips, First Bus pointed out that each bus journey is supported by 27p from the Scottish Government. In contrast, the train gets £3.27 per trip. That cross-modal piece is important, which is why the failures to introduce a cross-modal travel card and to conduct a fair fairs review is so concerning. However, what has been so thoroughly depressing, Presiding Officer, and this is a point that was well made by Alex Rowley at the head of the debate. Whilst we have heard from Graham Simpson that the Government's goal is to remove the majority of the country's diesel bus fleet in favour of zero-emission models by the end of 2023, but has achieved a mere 16 per cent, whilst we have heard from Brian Whittle that the target to reduce car kilometres by 20 per cent by 2030 lacks detail and credibility. Whilst we have heard that the Scottish Government's £500 million bus partnership fund to deliver bus priority measures has paid out just 5 per cent since 2019, the Scottish Government nevertheless comes to this chamber with an amendment that utterly fails to acknowledge the issues and instead tries to present a picture in which all in the garden is rosy. On the rare occasions where issues were acknowledged by speakers like Fiona Hyslop and Keith Brown, they then come back and blame the operators, the councils, the pandemic, and try to distract from their failings in this chamber by talking about Wales. That is what I find the most galling, Presiding Officer. As Monica Lennon put it, we cannot solve a problem if we do not admit it in the first place. If this Government will not acknowledge the problems and challenges, it cannot meaningfully implement the solutions, and we have all been sent those solutions. We have been sent really exciting, data-driven, evidence-based, detailed solutions by Transport Scotland, the Confederation of Passenger Transport, First Bus, the Poverty Alliance, Friends of the Earth Scotland and more. In contrast, as Alex Rowley said, we have heard no vision, no clue, and this Government will continue to fail the people of Scotland. All those organisations are watching to see if this Government will acknowledge the problems, listen to the opposition benches today and learn from those submissions, or will the SNP and Green MSPs vote at decision time for a weak amendment and more decline under this failing Government? I welcome the opportunity to highlight the importance of bus services in Scotland today. I wish that the debate had been a little bit more consensual, as Alex Rowley claimed that he wanted to see, but that has not been the case. It is very interesting that there is always in this chamber a real kickback from the opposition when it is pointed out to them the differences that are here, compared to the other parts of the UK, where Labour or the Tories are in power, because not everything in the garden is rosy there either. A number of members were quite realistic in terms of their contributions. Ms Hyslop and Mr Brown pointed out the difficulties that there are with Brexit. If Opposition members were to go out and speak to bus operators, they will find that they have a real difficulty in driving shortages in many parts of the country, which is having an impact on services. Let us look at some of the support that we are giving. I have already highlighted in terms of the financial support that we are giving to ensure that our bus services are the best that they can be. Over £420 million is being allocated in 2324. Another interesting aspect of the debate has been that there have been calls for more subsidy from the Labour benches, and at the same time, Mr Riley says that we do not want to see money going into the pockets of shareholders, which I would agree with. I think that our concessionary fare schemes provide the best possible way of ensuring that we get patronage on our buses. We have seen with that concessionary fare scheme that the under-22s extension has led to more bus services in certain areas. West Coast motors have doubled the frequency on one of their main routes earlier this year because of the patronage from under-22s going up. That is a good thing. Over 62 million free bus journeys have been made because of that under-22s scheme, as Mr Ruskell pointed out. That shows that there is an appetite for sustainable travel in Scotland, and we are aiming to build lifetime habits here. I will give way very briefly to Mr Riley. I appreciate that. I use the buses, and I have to say that I was quite shocked at the massive increase in bus fares a few weeks ago. Do you accept that a 15 per cent increase in bus fares is a barrier to poorer people being able to access public transport? Yes, I do accept that. That is why we are undertaking the fair fares review. In order to get that right, it is not good that folk are facing those increases, and we are doing something about it in terms of that review. I hope that Mr Riley will support it and encourage folk to get involved in that review. The Scottish Government has supported the decarbonisation of approximately 15 per cent of the public service bus fleet, and we added another £58 million in terms of the ScotZeib fund this week, increasing environmental benefits. I hear from the Tory bedsters that that is terrible. It is a hell of a lot better than it is south of the border. We have ensured that local transport authorities now have the power to run their own bus services, and further secondary legislation to allow bus franchising and partnership will be introduced later on this year. I hope that local authorities will be ambitious and will have vision and set up those municipal services across the board. We may have different views. I am willing to listen to those views as we move forward consensually. It would have been a more constructive debate if the minister had not started by deleting most of our motion today. We have got agreement right across this chamber of the importance of bus services to our constituents. In the early days of the Parliament, I introduced free bus passes for the over-60s. We made sure that in the 2019 Transport Act Labour amendment that we got the support for municipal ownership of bus services, because we know the benefits of low-day buses. We know the benefits in Manchester and London of making sure that you use municipal ownership to deliver services, and we welcomed the introduction of free bus passes for the under-22s. Our choice would have been 26, but it gives young people the opportunity to use buses as a matter of course. However, as Monica Lennon said, that only works if they have bus services to use. As Neil Bibby said, we need conditionality. We need to make sure that we get the maximum benefit from the huge amount of money that is going into bus services, and we need to make sure that we get the right response from the private companies that are taking that money. In the last few years, we have seen a loss of 25 per cent of our bus services compared with more than a decade ago, and the excellent briefings that we have had across party from lots of organisations have highlighted the need for us to act now. Buses are vital to give people low-carbon choices, if it is very brief. Does Sarah Boyack think that Love My Bus Week should be renamed Where's My Bus Week? Having met them this morning, we need actual buses, so it is Where is My Bus, and that takes me on to digital connectivity. If you look at the points that Beatrice Wishart made, there are massive areas of Scotland where there are no buses at all. There is also a digital disconnect, which is particularly an issue for older people and for people on lower incomes. They need to know about availability of those buses that are there, and they need to know when they are going to be there. We need to make sure that that is accessible for older people. Real-time information at bus stops, we need more, not less of that. We need to make sure that people are able to use buses. A key issue that was given in the research that we got sent was that reliability for 83 per cent of those surveyed said that it was their top issue. They are not being stuck at a bus stop if they are elderly with kids or trying to get to work on time. We are not only losing bus services, but we are also seeing the costs of fare rising. That is at a point when we are seeing major amount of money spent, so we need to get value for money. That means political leadership from the SNP Green Government. We are not seeing that. We need more promotion of bus services that are available. We need to see investment to enable communities to be served so that we make that shift to low-carbon buses. That is not just about having low-carbon buses, it is about having the services. It is about empowering and funding our local authorities to invest in bus priority schemes, to enable buses to be more reliable, and to make them more attractive to people who are currently having to rely on cars. As we move forward, as people are going to move to electric vehicles, that is going to rule out huge numbers of our constituents who will not afford those cars. It is going to make buses more important than ever, so we need to make sure that we reverse the cuts that are currently taking place and have more services for the future. That is about municipal buses, but if you look at today's report by the Accounts Commission, it highlights that councils are at breaking point, I quote. If you take the comments made by COSLA, they know that they do not have the money to make the radical change need. We need the fares cap now to keep people able to use buses. We need conditionality for the money that the Scottish Government currently spends on buses through our over-60s and our under-22 schemes, and we need to see investing and supporting bus services as a key action. If we are going to tackle social inequalities, if we are going to shift people out of cars and if we are going to tackle the climate emergency, and if we are going to address constituents' fears that they have now that there are more bus cuts to come, it is in Renfrewshire, it is in West Lothian, it is in Pathhead in Mid Lothian, right across the country, even in Edinburgh with Lothian buses. We are seeing constituents right to us because we have lost buses like the 42, we are losing the 41 and the 49. We need action now, so it is a political commitment. I would go back to the minister's first word. Can we have consensus? Yes. Cross-party groups on sustainable transport have a mission, they are telling the Scottish Government what to do now. Our motion says what we need now. If we take the amendment and we get action before the summer holidays, love my buses next week, whereas my bus is a now problem, and we need action from the SNP Green Government now. Not warm words, not nice pledges, action. Next week, announce what you're going to do to spend that money to get better results for our constituents, because trust me, we don't have the climate emergency without it. Thank you. That concludes the debate on access to bus services. There will be a very brief pause while front benches change ahead of the next debate.


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Today's debate is much like the dish we're discussing. They seem so simple on the outside, but once you dig in, things get messy. Join us as we debate which region makes the world's best burrito. My name's Trey Crowder.  The objective of this show is to settle these debates once and for all. Welcome to Grubbin. Today we're welcoming James Beard, award-winning food writer, Bill Esparza. Who'll be advocating on behalf of the traditional northern Mexican-style burritos. Almost everything in Mexico comes in a taco, and burritos are tacos. And on the other side, we've got Carlos Stone, the owner of Los Angeles Institution, El Tepayeque. He makes the supersized Hollambeck burrito. The more stuff, the better, I always say. Before the food fight commences, let's dive into some history. There are two donkey-based claims to the burrito's origin, which makes sense because burrito means little donkey in Spanish. One story has it that during the Mexican Revolution, a food vendor from Juarez named Juan Mendes became famous for wrapping his food in a flour tortilla and selling it from the back of a donkey. Another claims that burritos were invented by Mexican miners in Arizona who would travel by donkey deep into the mines, carrying a day's worth of meat, beans, and cheese inside a flour tortilla.  By the way, did the history sounds is that close as far as you know better than I do? Well, it's coming from a burro, so I don't know. But once the burrito reached LA, it grew and changed. Emphasis on grew. One of the innovators behind that growth was Manny Rojas. The owner and chef of LA Institution, El Tepayeque, who created the Hollambeck burrito. A monster of a meal packed with pork, chili verde, guacamole, beans, and rice. Oh, and it's got a layer of pork on top too. We've been doing our burritos the same way since 1956, and it hasn't been a problem since, so I mean, we keep doing it the same way. Whether it's traditional or not is up for debate, but its fans love it. So it seems like one of the main differences between traditional Mexican burritos and their Mexican-American counterparts is size. So, simply put, does size matter? My grandfather made the burrito really big, I guess, to deal with the Hollambeck Police Department. They asked for something really huge. Okay. They wanted something to throw everything in there. It's not a snack, it's a 2.5 pound burrito. So, you're looking at dinner for two probably.  You don't, they don't do that in Mexico. It's a snack in between meals. You don't sit down and have a two and a half pound burrito for dinner. That's very Mexican-American, and of course, now American. Clearly, y'all have different ideas as to what belongs in a burrito. So, I'm gonna toss out some ingredients and I want you to tell me if I should wrap it or scrap it. How do you feel about rice as an ingredient? Again, our food has been working for so long and the rice is one of the ingredients and I think it works as far as like, I mean, because our burritos are so massive, so I would say the rice helps with the stew and all the meat. So, we're in Boyle Heights and I don't know if anybody knows Little History, but it used to be a lot of Japanese that live there and a lot of our customers that still live in the area that are Japanese, they don't like beans at all. So, I mean, the rice works for them in there and they love our burritos, no beans. Right. But rice is like kind of a controversial ingredient, isn't it? Burrito, it's more about the guisado, so the rice tends to kind of mute the flavors of that stew. What about the beans? What kind of beans? Only pinto beans, that's it. When I think pinto beans, I think Mexican food. Is that like the standard pinto? No, I mean, in Mexico, you know, it is, again, when we're talking about Mexican-American culture, things have been reduced down. There are few stews. We don't use a lot of different beans, but in Mexico, they're gonna use a lot of different beans when they're cooking. Avocado. Cornesada burrito, guacamole. Right, specifically in the form of guacamole. All our burritos, yes. Yeah, okay. I like it, I think it's good. Got the guacamole in there, all the flavors dancing around in there. French fries. Mm, no. No, not at all. I don't think French fries belong in a burrito. I'm with you. I feel the same way. This is the point where you gotta stop, you know, that you're just making a mutant food. Sour crane, nope. We like crema, but that's for the enchiladas. That's for the antujitos, you know. Hot sauce. This is a funny question. Okay. Mexican food is not spicy. Okay. So this is like, we don't cook like Asians. So in India and China, they'll put a lot of spice in the food, but we don't do that. We cook with mild chiles, mild flavors, and then you add salsa or you chase it with a chile. So I'm gonna have to disagree. The hotter the better, yeah. As far as restaurant wise, I mean, do you have anything hotter? Can we have something hotter? Sure, yeah. Like I said, all the workers, I made this salsa trade out, it's really hot. I truly cannot believe this has happened again, but even after my probing investigation, we remain deadlocked. Looks like we gotta give our guests one more chance to state their case.  Really has a sense of place. Wrapped in a skinny snack that you can enjoy in between meals in the morning or on the go. I think burritos are the best travel food ever invented. And so that's what I would look for in a burrito is that local flavor. Okay, what about you, Carlos? I learned a lot of stuff from Bill and I found out like, you know, traditionally how stuff probably should be made. I mean, as far as we go, we kind of please the masses and if it's not broke, don't fix it.  We still Mexican food or Mexican inspired. We still has all the staples. Mexican American is Mexican. So thank you to our guests for sharing your expertise with us. Hopefully we inspired folks to try some new grub and taught them a thing or two in the process. Y'all keep the conversation going in the comments and keep it spicy, but you know, respectful. If you like what you sawed, subscribe to the attention YouTube channel. Continue your culinary education and check out dish history.


I just had my first week as an attending internal medicine hospitals. That is a mouthful. Let's break down exactly what that means. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician. And for the first time on this channel, I can say it, I'm officially an attending, which means I'm the head honcho. And in this channel, we help people just like you succeed on whatever medical journey you're on. But today I want to share about a very special part of my journey as being a physician, which is my first week as a full grown up independent physician. Right now I work as an internal medicine hospitalist and in this video, I'm going to break down exactly what that means, what I did in my first week, what my experience was like, what my hours were like, what my salaries were like, as well as in pros and cons. Break all of that down in today's episode, let's get into it. And before I forget, if you are on your medical journey, there's tons of free resources linked down below in the description that you guys can check out to learn things like studying productivity and so much more. All the goodies will be linked down below. So first let's break down exactly what a hospitalist is. Now it sounds like a very eccentric term, but it's very simple. A hospitalist is basically your medicine doctor that takes care of patients in the hospital. There you go. So that means that any basic problem that would get you into the hospital like an infection, a pneumonia, an asthma exacerbation, a heart attack, heart failure, those would be taken care of by a medicine doctor. But in addition, anything like a surgery where the surgeon may do the procedure and then they want to watch you for a few days as you're recovering, then a medicine physician may take over all of your care while the surgeon is just kind of managing the supervision of whatever they did a surgery on. So a hospitalist is basically a physician who works on a very unique schedule, which we'll get into in a second, but takes care of a variety of problems, but specifically only in the hospital. My job as a hospitalist is very simple. I go to the hospital, take care of the patients that are there at the moment, discharge them when it's time for them to go home, and then I add more patients to my list and repeat the process. So now let's transition into the hours as a hospitalist. I'm going to talk about vague and then I'll get into my own experience in a second. Now the hours of being a hospitalist is probably the most unique part about the job. You're not going to call a doctor pretty much any job. You're kind of used to going to work at eight or nine o'clock in the morning and then finishing around three or five o'clock. Now if you're a surgeon, your hours are going to start earlier and may end later. But typically it's a weekday thing. You may work on the weekends as a doctor depending on a group or if you need to be on consults or whatever, but usually you're a Monday to Friday kind of physician. Hospitalists is different. You work seven days in a row, seven a.m. to seven p.m. and you may say that sounds awful, but you work every other week. That means as a hospitalist right now, for example, I worked Tuesday to Monday, seven o'clock to seven p.m. And then starting the following Tuesday, I didn't have to go to work. No one's calling me about patients. And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you guys get the gist all the way up to the following Monday. I'm off. Vacation.  That's exactly why a hospitalist's career is so attractive to a lot of new graduating residents and trainees like myself because you have basically half a month that is completely off to do what you want with it. Now, if I've gotten your interest, let me just get to the other side, which is you still work 12 hours a day. So you work from seven to seven, and that means in a week you're pulling off 84 hours or essentially two weeks worth of full-time hours for any other job or any other physician. Now, depending on who you are, you may say that that's awesome or that's a lot of work and it's really busy. I don't know if I can do that. I'll talk to you about my own experience and why it's actually a lot better than I expected. So now let's go ahead and transition into talk about my first week as a hospitalist. Now, I currently work as a group of hospitalists within the hospital that I work with. That means that first I'm an employee of the company that I work with. So they get to determine my salaries and my contracts, etc. And the colleagues that I have around me that are working are all members of this company. But there are also other companies within the hospital that also have their own hospitalist and they take care of a variety of patients. How those patients are distributed usually depends on insurance and things of that sort. So overall to keep it simple, there's about a group of 20 to 30 of us that work on every other week basis and essentially I'll be working with 10 physicians throughout a week and there'll be another 10 physicians that be working on the weeks that I'm not. So now we get into the juicy detail, which is what was my first week as a hospitalist really like. Some people obviously talk about the lifestyle benefits of it and other people talk about the hours and how gruesome they are. My first day was actually not bad. And so my first day I showed up all dappered up, as you guys can see in this photo, essentially showing about 6.30 before anyone got there. Some patients figured out how to work the EMR, wrote my notes and I was pretty much done at four o'clock. Now keep in mind, you still technically have to work till 7, but we'll talk about that in a second. But my second day was a complete overwhelming experience. The reason is is kind of I expected if I had seven patients my first day, maybe discharge to second day, you have a total like 12 patients, something a little bit higher, but nothing crazy. Second day went straight from 7, discharging three patients. I now have like four left over all the way back to 16 patients, full load, just like everybody else and had to figure it out. It was hectic. I didn't know where I was going half the time in the hospital, getting lost in between the ICUs and the normal patients. In the midst of still trying to learn the EMR, trying not to get lost in the hospital, the other issue that I had is that often the patients that you get are not all new patients. So as a hospitalist, one thing we didn't talk about is you're always having new patients join your list or your service. You may have new patients that may have been admitted by the team over nights. There's a team of hospitalists that just work nine times. They're taking care of the patients and then they distribute across the group equally. So every time I go to work now and every time I had to go on my first week, there's always new patients I would take care of. But in addition, let's say one day you had 10 doctors working and the next day you have nine. That means that the patients taken care of by that last doctor that's not there because they're sick or maybe they're just covering a shift, get redistributed. So you may be taking care of a patient that had been in the hospital for 40 days, but it's your first day taking care of them and you have to read about all their charts and still take care of all your other patients. And in addition, on my second day, I was a full blown hospitalist. That means I was also having to take admissions, which we'll talk about in a second. So you can see how overwhelming this gets really quickly. But hopefully for those of you guys that are not new to the channel, you know that I'm really big on efficiency. So by day three, I had figured out the things that was slowest at, which was the EMR and finding the rooms to my patients actually see them. And my third day, I was essentially done with all my notes and seeing my patients by 12 PM, which was awesome. And so I get into my first pro or my first great experience about being a hospitalist is that once you kind of have the system figured out, once you know where you're going, how to write your notes, how to write your notes even quicker, then things are super quick and you can be very efficient. You don't have to around. You don't have to present to an attending because you are attending. I feel still pretty weird and cool to say at the same time. And things kind of go on your schedule. If you needed to just take a 30 minute break to go for a walk because you're just like tired, you can do that versus in residency or in training. You're kind of on somebody else's schedule and time to try to do things. If there's an admission in the emergency room that I have to see and I still have to see for more patients, I can quickly put orders in for that patient in the emergency room. Take care of those four patients I have left to see and then go see the patient. The schedule is how I want to run it, which is pretty nice. Now I'll get into my second probe, which is actually admitting patients constantly. As a trainee, it's pretty normal that you would have days that you'd be admitting and then another day where your colleague would be admitting, but maybe you wouldn't. Again, it depends on your institution about at least where I went. We would be admitting new patients about every four days, which felt like a good pace. The problem was is that your experience and your exposure is pretty much every four days. You take care of current problems. You have those patients.  As a hospitalist, you're always kind of getting packed and so I'm always admitting patients. So some of them are very simple. Some of them are very complicated, but I get that experience of being a medicine physician and trying out different things and learning different things by simply having new admissions on a daily basis. On some days I'll admit maybe just with two or three patients. On some days it may be four or five. It really just depends, but constantly there is a mix of experience that I'm getting. And on that note, pro number three is that you're no longer taking care of only medicine patients. I thought that this was going to be a con. This is actually something that surprised me, but as a hospitalist, depending on where you're working, it's very common that you won't just be taking care of medical problems. For example, where I work, the general surgeons, the orthopedic surgeons, the urologists, and some of the cardiology services don't have their own kind of group of patients where they take care of all of them. They may take care of that problem. They may, for example, do a femur repair and then I have to manage that patient on other channels. I admit the patient. I take care of the patient. They're managing their surgery related things, and then when they are ready to be discharged and they're ready to be discharged on me, I take care of their discharge. I thought I wouldn't like managing patients for neurology, for cardiology, for orthopedic surgery, for general surgery. They're going to, for example, get an L2, L3 decompression surgery. Just need physical therapy the next day. Somebody managed their blood pressure and their diabetes overnight and then get discharged. That patient is very easy for me to take care of. On the other end, I may have admitted to a patient, which also this is something we haven't talked about, that actually needs an ICU. And as a hospitalist, as a trainee, it would just be you take care of patients in the ICU or they're not in ICU, but depends on the service you're on. As a hospitalist, I take care of patients that are in the ICU that may not require intubation or anything like that. But if they need ICU level care, I'm still their doctor. But if they're on the normal medical floor, is what's something more simpler, like an asthma, exacerbation, and ammonia, or DKA, then I also take care of them. So again, there's a nice variety between simple patients, complex patients, patients that are very bread and butter medicine, and makes the day very kind of intriguing and definitely not boring. So now let's go ahead and transition to some of the cons. Some of the ones I've already talked about. Number one is that you can have a day that can be very overwhelming and on the other days that can be very slow and relatively boring. There is also going to be hills and valleys in your week in terms of how interesting, how exciting, or how boring it is depending on how acute or how busy your patients are going to be and require of you. And so after going through my first week it just wasn't helpful that my second day was the busiest day I had my entire week because I was trying to learn the system. But as I went throughout the week the patients were more familiar because I already knew them. It was easier to take care of situations and kind of had the gist of what to do and things became a lot more smoother. Con number two is trying to balance the multiple responsibilities including the responsibility of being the admitter. So this is something that we have been talked about, but as a hospice you likely will triage and work with your teammates of deciding who gets the call from the emergency room and saying hey doctor we have somebody that we'd like to admit to the hospital and have you take care of them. It kind of doesn't make sense if you have a group of ten doctors that are working for one company for all of them to get calls by the emergency room. So instead as you can imagine there's one person that gets designated to be the admitter or the triager for that group. And so at those days in the place that I work you call the quarterback you essentially have a phone that basically will get calls and text messages from the emergency rooms but also from other hospitals that need to transfer patients for X amount of reasons to your hospital. While you're doing that you're trying to send those patients to the next person that's in line waiting for a patient but also trying to manage your patients. So you can see how there's a lot of juggling going on. And so my first day of managing and being a quarterback I was getting maybe four to five transfers in about two to three hours. You have to call the facilities, understand that the patients are responsible and somebody who is appropriate to come to your facility manage where they go and then keeping track of them. Manage patients who are coming from the emergency room and sending them to the hospital who are waiting to get admissions and then still manage the patients that you've taken care of while taking care of admissions yourself. There's a lot to do there but again after doing it multiple times there's a nice little bit of triage that you can do and hopefully throughout the channel if you guys are interested I'll share the tips that I've learned as in attending how to be more effective how to be more efficient and still do really well at your job. And then finally con number three is not really con but more of an observation is that there's a comfort of being used to how things were done at wherever facility you were.  New policies, new things that you have to do, new EMRs to learn, new physicians to kind of master in terms of like a path to interact with a surgeon who's a nice one, who are the mean ones. What do they like to do? What do they want me to do on behalf of them without asking? Just learning those little kind of unsaid rules is something that requires a little bit of time. I still haven't done it. I've been a very silly doctor where I still felt like I was in my residency kind of hat but then I realized that I'm actually attending. It's okay for me to ask these questions of specialists and professionals because man frankly I just don't know the answer of what they prefer out of me. So learning these policies and just going through the repetition is how I learn through them but there's always going to be a level of discomfort when you're starting the job as I'm about to start my second week. Now to wrap up this video we'll talk about my schedule and my hours and finally kind of salary over overall hospitalist in case you guys are interested. So my hours and as I alluded to earlier in the episode is really where things get nice. Yes I have every other week which is amazing. I had to take my board exam this past week for my internal medicine exam and having a week off where I didn't have to try to find somebody to get coverage which I had to do in residency that was pretty nice. And then having a weekend where I can enjoy time with my family and still know that there's like multiple days after this I still get to enjoy with you that's also nice but in terms of hours again you work from 7 to 7 that means you have to show up to the hospital at 7 o'clock in the morning you will get patients overnight that people admitted that will likely be added to your list and where I work we have a roster as well as the patients they're taking care of so I can simply look at that list and say who do I not recognize from yesterday and say these two or these three are new admits from overnight let me look up their chart and add them to my roster and my list and so that way now I know who to follow up with for today now what I do between the 7 to 7 slots differ but for the majority of the time when I get there at 7 o'clock between about 7 to 745 I'm looking at my list at 15 to 17 patients and making sure that their vitals are stable on a piece of paper this is not one of my notes but I'm just kind of going patient by patient so when I walk outside the room I'm saying this Jones today needs X, Y and Z or there's nothing really needed to be done we're just waiting for her to go to a rehab center those kinds of mental notes especially when you have so many patients helps now between 745 and about 845 9 o'clock I'm seeing my list of 15 patients usually as a resident seeing 15 patients in an hour and a half seemed impossible as an attending it's both necessary and doable because again I suggest the plan that you want to make with them anyways without waiting to discuss with an entire team of other residents and attendees I make the decision so if the patient tells me they're nauseous we can start something for their nausea I don't have to talk and get permission for somebody else to do though so that part is nice and by the time 9 o'clock hits usually I have an hour window before I have to meet with the social workers and all the other team members of the patients like the pharmacist the physical therapist and nutritionist to discuss each of our patients so from 9 to 10 I usually will come to a meeting with the social workers to discuss some of the things that I have been interested in using one of those mics this is not a mic but if you've ever used a dragon for taking notes it's really cool essentially I can dictate my notes and say all the things that a patient talked about adjust my notes and my plan and so usually during this time I can write about 9 to about 8 notes and then have a little less than half of my list on the same page of what type of things a patient needs before they can go home in case there's somebody that I need help with getting a facility to go to or getting medications ready before it's time to get discharged that way everybody's on the same page and the patient has a safe discharge plan now after that 1030 slot which is usually what I'm done with the rounding with all of the different groups of multidisciplinary staff then I basically will try to get a patient the second time especially if they're sick from 12 to 1 I usually will grab a lunch really quickly while I'm finishing my notes and usually by this time I've done all my work now this is where the schedule gets very nice as I mentioned you have to technically work from 7 to 7 but no one says that you have to stay in the hospital all the way to 7 p.m. this is the part that surprise me part that I like and depending on the facility part that's what it means you definitely have to stay in the house up to those hours and then there's some afternoons that you will be taking patients and admissions only from 3 to 7 that means you can show up early take care of only your patients and not be expected to take patients from the emergency room but then from 3 to 7 a few times a week that's when your admission kind of timeline works and starts there'll be a group of 3 to 4 of us that work the ladder shift and a group of 7 8 of us 7 because you're taking admissions all the way to up to 659 but on the days where you're not in that second shift if it's 3 p.m. you've done all your work all your patients are stable your discharges are ready all your patients and their families have been called so there's still a lot of work to do then and you feel comfortable you can step away from the hospital take messages from your phone your pager and if something needs to be done you can take care of it on your work computer or your home computer all of this will vary depending on where you work but it's definitely made my first week a whole lot easier because I essentially worked 2 to 3 of those ladder shifts but that means 4 of my 7 days I was not in the hospital all the way to 7 p.m. I was still checking out my patients on my computer screen but then I could still hang out with my dog my wife and get a workout in at home or just relax which is very nice so definitely something that surprised me and something that I will definitely be enjoying about this job now before we get back let's talk about today's sponsor which is Picmonic now if you're unfamiliar with Picmonic and you're on your medical journey they have hundreds and hundreds of videos for literally any class or material that you may need and what makes Picmonic so unique is that in addition to having so many videos on literally any topic you need so for example here where in microbiology you can click on any videos so here's Staph Aureus and their videos themselves are very short so this video is about 1 minute 54 seconds but essentially will break down the most high-yield components that you have to know and there's a very nice Oreo cookie that essentially will link an image to your brain on an important concept about that and the future videos you may find that the same memorable image is included in another related video so then you can link together concepts for example here this venom jar with green represents food poisoning so any bacteria that may cause food poisoning may have this image in their overall picture and video so you can say okay I know all different bacterias that have food poisoning and then whatever you feel comfortable with their relatively short video and quiz phase and actually quiz yourself on the various different high-yield components now in addition to having a very unique and easy way to remember information for your quizzes and tests you can also add all of the videos you're watching into a relative playlist so if you're studying for a microbiology class you can go ahead and essentially click all of the videos that you add and add it to those playlists and then whenever it's time you can come back to your individual playlists and either watch those individual videos again or ask for specific quiz questions related to the videos that you've now said that you've mastered scratching the surface in terms of features that Picmonic has to help you on your medical journey other cool things include having a weakness guide so you can see which topics you're the weakest in as well as their study scheduler so you can actually say these are the topics I need to know and here's my test day and then it will essentially give you a study schedule based off of that so if you're looking for an all-in-one resource for your on your medical journey and you haven't quite found it definitely recommend checking out Picmonic if you're interested they'll be linked down below and our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount on your medical journey at checkout and so if you're interested in learning more about Picmonic that link will be down below and as always thanks to Picmonic for being today's sponsor and now last because I know you guys are interested is salary now talking about salary I will be much more broad because these numbers will be higher or lower depending on where you're working so it doesn't really make sense for me to just share my name majority of hospitals will make about $250 to $300,000 again all this will vary depending on where you're based off your productivity so if you see a patient you can essentially bill and this is something I'm still learning on the complexity of the patient if somebody is an ICU level patient they're going to give bill a very high level complexity if somebody on the other end is someone who you're not doing very much for maybe you're just waiting for them to get accepted to your rehab center and you're not making any changes to their medical plan you'll do a hybrid where you get a base salary for either every shift or every month and then you get a percentage of what you bill and then the final group is just going to give you a base salary you can see 30 patients or 5 patients you're going to get paid the same amount and so the income that you make is likely going to be on the higher end if you're an IRVU model which basically means that you make what you bill it's pressure to see more patients because you make the same money regardless now I currently work in a hybrid model which means that I make a certain amount on a daily basis for seeing an X amount of patients and then if I see more patients because the hospital is busy or whatever then there's a percentage split between my company and me and that percentage changes over the time and the years that you work with the hospital so again that number varies but I would say it's safe to assume there's definitely going to be somebody in the comments that say I know someone who's in a big city who's making like $500,000 of the hospitals good for them that's awesome there's going to be somebody who says that I know somebody who is working in the middle of nowhere that makes absolutely nothing it's going to be situational it doesn't really make sense but that range is basically where my salary will fall in after this year that's where a majority of my colleagues and most people will be working a few days a week where you're not doing something so that will also depend in my personal experience I likely will take on more shifts starting the next few months as I have things figured out and I have more free time on my end now hopefully that got you excited about the life as a hospitalist but I know there's going to be more questions so make sure you drop in the comment section down below if you're watching on YouTube and while you're down there's going to be tons of free resources around exactly how I studied that's also free now if you enjoyed today's episode and you want to do well on your medical journey to essentially get any job any position that you want and I'll talk about that later in future episodes then go ahead and watch this episode right here on how I got a 3.9 GPA in medical school and all the study strategies I used as well as this strategy that here using Anki and all the advanced strategies that I used with it to essentially make med school so much easier as always my friends hopefully I was a little