Passengers face patchwork of mask rules on public transport after 19 July

Passengers on buses, trams and trains in England must deal with a patchwork of different rules on face coverings next week after several mayors said masks would still be required on public transport.

The government is dropping the legal requirement to wear a face covering on public transport in England from Monday, as ministers seek to move to a system of “personal responsibility”.

However, on Wednesday, the mayors of multiple English regions said they were concerned that dropping the requirement would make buses and trains “no-go” areas for vulnerable passengers and that they should still be worn.

Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, said masks would remain compulsory on public transport in the capital, while Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, said they would also be required on the region’s Metrolink tram service.

Mayors in other English regions, including the Conservatives’ Andy Street in the West Midlands, said they did not have powers to make masks mandatory but urged all passengers to continue to wear them.

In West and South Yorkshire, face coverings will be mandatory in bus stations and interchanges, but the mayors have no power to make them compulsory on buses or trains. Labour’s regional mayors in Liverpool City Region, North of Tyne, West of England and Sheffield City Region also called on the government to continue to make face coverings compulsory on all public transport.

It came as Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said he always “expected, and indeed, wanted” some train, bus and rail companies to insist on mask-wearing on their services, despite the government dropping the legal requirement.

Shapps said: “While we are going from this being a legal requirement to guidelines, we do expect individual carriers to make sure they are putting in place whatever is appropriate for their network. The airlines have already said that you will need to carry on wearing masks. It is very much in line with what we expected â€" indeed wanted â€" to happen.”

The government decision creates a patchwork of different rules across England, with compulsory mask-wearing on public transport in London and on trams in Greater Manchester but not elsewhere.

Burnham said he hoped that making masks a “condition of carriage” on the tram network would encourage people to continue wearing them on buses and trains too.

He said there was a need for “much more clarity across the system” and called on Boris Johnson not to ditch the legal requirement for masks on “freedom day” on Monday.

He added: “We are still in a pandemic and we need to think in terms of collective safety rather than individual freedom or personal responsibility.”

Announcing Transport for London’s position on Wednesday morning, Khan said: “The simplest and safest option would have been for the government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport.”

Street became the first senior Tory figure outside Westminster to diverge from the government’s position, as he urged people to continue wearing face coverings on public transport.

He said the region’s transport body did not have the powers to make face coverings mandatory on buses and trains, but that it did “have a clear expectation of all passengers to continue to wear their face coverings across all modes of public transport”.

Jim McMahon, the shadow transport secretary, urged Shapps to ensure that masks remain mandatory on rail services across England: “We all know that masks are designed to reduce the risk of passing on the virus to others. So I can’t understand why, when the scientific evidence shows their benefit and most of the public are supportive of their use, you aren’t continuing to mandate them on public transport.”

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