A temporary £2 cap on fares that the government hopes will reinvigorate some of England’s bus services starts on Sunday – but campaigners are already warning of more route cuts when the funding runs out.
The three-month “get around for £2” campaign, announced last month, will reduce single fares by more than 80% on some journeys, such as Plymouth to Exeter in the south-west, or Leeds to Scarborough.
The winter fares deal will conclude just as the last post-pandemic recovery funding runs out for the bus industry at the end of March. Campaigners say up to 20% of routes are at risk in some areas, and argue long-term subsidy is needed to keep fares down as the cost of living bites, and as operators’ staffing and fuel bills surge.
The scheme, backed by £60m of taxpayer money, will cap single bus fares at more than 130 bus operators serving more than 4,600 routes, saving almost a third of the average single ticket price.
However, the scheme has been rejected by some smaller operators, who say they cannot afford to lose any revenue, with the government making up only 80% of the shortfall. Some operators faced long waits for previous promised financial support during the pandemic.
Despite the concerns, the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) welcomed the scheme. It said affordable bus travel was a “win-win” for households and the economy, but called for it to be more than just a temporary fix. Alice Ridley, a CBT campaigner, said: “Obviously we’d prefer something to be extended indefinitely. It’s great, but in three months’ time when a fare goes back to £8 on some routes, people will not be incentivised to use the bus.”
Passenger numbers on buses outside London are hovering at about 80-90% of pre-pandemic levels. Weekend usage is occasionally even higher than in 2019, but weekdays are still down, with many people working from home.
The government promised a total of £3bn for buses as part of a national bus strategy in 2021, but more than half was swallowed up in emergency Covid bailouts while a £1.2bn allocation for “improvement plans” has been handed to only a minority of hopeful authorities after a bidding process.
“The ones who are getting it tend to be those who are equipped to submit bids,” Ridley said. “We’d like to see a bigger pot that goes to everybody. Everyone needs something.”
About a quarter of routes in England have already been lost in a decade, according to CBT research. Ridley added: “We need to get bus passengers numbers up or we’re facing the same situation, where we might lose rural routes.”
In August, the Department for Transport found a further £130m to extend post-Covid recovery funding until the end of March 2023, as the industry warned that bus operators were about to give notice of widespread cuts to routes.
“The cliff edge keeps getting moved back six months, and I don’t think it’s helping anyone,” said Graham Vidler, the chief executive of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, representing bus operators. “It’s brewing uncertainty for our members, customers and staff. The government needs to understand another six months is not the right answer – we need certainty for at least two years to plan and invest in routes.”
A further tranche of the network is at risk, according to Vidler, due to the combination of spiralling costs, the withdrawal of funding and the low level of patronage by concessionary travellers in particular – with older people having turned to online shopping during Covid, and some residual anxiety over using public transport persisting after the pandemic.
“There are always some routes that are fairly marginal in terms of how viable they are. Councils are short of cash and increasingly saying they won’t support routes.”
The DfT said it was considering long-term support for the sector from April, to provide the high-quality bus services envisaged in its strategy.
The roads minister, Richard Holden, said he wanted to see reliable and affordable buses, adding: “It’s really important to try and have schemes to get that ridership back on, because if you don’t, all we end up doing is paying hundreds of millions of pounds more in subsidy. What I want to see is that money going towards actually delivering services.”