Workshop 5 Report: The roles and responsibilities of government and operators

The separation of purchaser and provider requires identification of the respective roles and responsibilities of the two parties. In the spirit of previous Thredbo conferences, we saw it as clear government should be responsible for strategy and operators for operations. That left, as always, the problem of how best to deal with tactical planning as the core issue, and as always there was no simple solution. Government authorities should set the context in the form of contracts, which would inevitably influence the tactical planning process. But it was felt that operators, and particularly smaller locally based operators, would have a better knowledge of the needs of their passengers and of the commercial possibilities of alternative ways of serving them. Thus tactical planning would inevitably involve both government and operator, as well as other stakeholder groups. The workshop also considered issues related to the nature of the government authority that should have responsibility for public transport, the nature of the contract itself and how governments could best create the right environment for contract management, before reaching its conclusions on policy and on research needs.