Val finally gets off her battle bus...

The woman who fought off Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of Oldham’s buses for seven years is finally quitting public life — and leaving the country.

Val Stevens, who led Greater Manchester Buses’ declared policy of staying in public ownership for as long as possible, has stepped down as deputy leader of Manchester City Council.

The iron lady had just uttered her fabled remark about bus users over 30 being failures when the then left-wing firebrand was appointed chairman of Greater Manchester Buses — the forerunner to Oldham-based First Manchester — with an official brief of preparing the undertaking for privatisation.

In fact, she was under a go-slow instruction from the Labour-controlled Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority and managed to defy the Tory government and put it off for the next seven years.

Now 65, she has decided to retire to the South of France. “I’m following the Terry Wogan philosophy of going while people are still surprised enough to ask you why,” she says.

She was elected to Manchester City Council in 1978 and was appointed the city’s representative on the PTA as it took over the transport responsibilities from the axed Greater Manchester Council.

She stepped down at the elections in 1987 in a prearranged understanding with her PR consultant husband Bill who worked from home and looked after their two young children while she was engaged in the high-octane Labour politics of the 80s. But she was never likely to step away completely from the struggle against Thatcherism and was quickly installed as chairman of GM Buses.

Bus deregulation had come into force in 1986 — the same year that Greater Manchester County Council was abolished — and municipal bus companies across the country were falling to predators from the private sector. GM Buses had to be a sustainable profitable company and it became a limited company — although it was still owned by the PTA. And there was no shortage of competition.

In those early days of deregulation, Greater Manchester had 72 bus companies on its roads — the highest number of anywhere in the country.

“It was a bit of a hybrid and the whole seven years I was there, there was pressure from the Government to privatise,” she recalls. “We hung on when others were going and when it finally happened, we were the only metropolitan bus company which was forced to split on competition grounds. There was a feeling that that was a punishment.”

Mrs Thatcher herself did not concern herself with the fortunes of Greater Manchester Buses and most of the pressure came from a junior transport minister by the name of Michael Portillo.

She was welcomed and worked well with chief executive Ralph Roberts but at the time she was just about the most senior woman in the bus industry apart from Stagecoach founder Anne Gloag and there were problems.

“There was a lot of suspicion because I was a woman,” she says. “Some people used to write to me as Mr because they couldn’t believe anybody in that position could be a woman. And because of my left-wing past, the trade unions had some issues. My secretary told me that someone in the T&G had said ‘We’re getting that lesbian from the council’ when told I was taking over.”

When she was chairman, Neil Scales, now Merseytravel chief executive, was director of engineering. “We used to go to exhibitions to look at buses and people used to start pitching to him.

“And when they had finished, he used to have to say: ‘Thanks very much but she’s making the decision.’

“I went round all the depots. They all thought, because of my reputation in the city that I would be going round and telling them to take all the pictures down. I never actually did but strangely enough they all disappeared anyway.

“I think that women in engineering are still viewed with suspicion. I go to conferences and they decide I should be speaking to the wives who are there.”

Greater Manchester remained resolutely determined to hang on to its bus company and made many visits to London in search of an alternative to a sell-off.

But the Government had an ace up its sleeve. If the operation was privatised, the employees could remain in the local government pension scheme. And that was a big concession to the unions.

“It was becoming more and more obvious that we couldn’t sustain the opposition,” says Stevens. “The employees had to be safeguarded and there were hardly any local authority bus companies left.”

The growing power of Stagecoach and First were also making competition uncomfortable. “We had to ask ourselves if a public organisation could really compete in a highly privatised world.”

In preparation for privatisation, the company was split into GM Buses North and GM Buses South in December, 1993. Both companies were sold to their managements in March, 1994.

Two years later, GM Buses North was sold to First and settled in Oldham and GM Buses South to Stagecoach with its headquarters in Stockport. A year after that, Stevens became a councillor again.