At the end of October, the Department for Transport confirmed that the Bus Services Bill that had been slowly progressing through Parliament was now complete and had become the Bus Services Act.
The government and the Secretary of State for Transport, Heidi Alexander MP, have made some claims as to how this Act will improve bus services in the country, saying, "Better buses are on their way for thousands of passengers across the country after the government’s Bus Services Bill became law yesterday evening (27 October 2025), marking a new dawn for bus travel in the UK.”
They also say:
"This landmark move will end the risk of routes being scrapped at short notice by tightening the requirements for cancelling vital routes, an issue which has left passengers, particularly those who are elderly, disabled or living in rural areas, cut off and isolated from their communities.
"The government will now empower councils to identify services which they deem as socially necessary, meaning strict requirements must be followed if operators wish to cancel or change them.
"Not only will the new laws ensure services are protected but it will also lift the ban on local authorities setting up their own bus companies, allowing them to run their own services to ensure that passengers, not profit, come first.”
See government press release.
As part of the government plans, Cornwall and some other local authorities have been given money to explore how they could make changes in their areas. It is said that, "the scheme will offer each pilot area up to £500,000 in 2025-2026 to design and implement the new approach, aimed a making buses more reliable, accessible, and accountable in rural and coastal areas”.
But what will this all mean in reality?
The first thing to say is nothing will happen particularly quickly. Although the Act has been passed by Parliament, the actual implementation will be dependent on further statutory instruments to be passed by the government over the next year or so.
The second thing to say is that allowing local authorities to regulate bus services in their areas, as opposed to the current “deregulated market” is probably a good thing in principle. But in order to make bus services better and more comprehensive than they currently are, you have to be prepared to spend a lot more taxpayers’ money on subsidising services that would otherwise not be economic to run, and/or you need to persuade a lot more people to use buses rather than their motor cars. The carrot to doing that is to make the bus services affordable, convenient and frequent, but the carrot on its own will not be enough to persuade most car owners to forego using their cars.
The reality is that the only way to get more car owners to stop using their cars so much is by using a stick on them, e.g. by banning cars in certain areas or on certain roads, or by introducing measures such as congestion zones, or by restricting car parking spaces and making those spaces more expensive, or for central government to make the cost of using the car more expensive by, for example, putting up the rate of fuel duty. However, neither central government nor local government have the political courage to do these things. Central government has frozen fuel duty since 2011 (in fact actually reduced it by 5 pence per litre in that time). Local government is afraid to raise car parking charges to a sufficiently high level to discourage car owners from driving into towns. For example, Cornwall Council has this bizarre scheme whereby through the Just Park wallet facility, a motorist can park in the centre of Truro all day for just £2.78. It is no wonder that people opt to do that rather than catch a bus or use the park and ride service.
It should be noted that the park and ride service in Truro is a council service operated in just the way that a wider franchised network would operate. The council determines the route, the stops, the frequency, the fares and collects all the fare money, and pays the operator (First Bus) to operate the buses for a contract price. But the council has failed to make a success of it because it has not had the political courage to make people use it more by restricting parking in Truro and charging a sensible price for parking in the city. And it continues to give its own staff and councillors free parking at County Hall which is why you will hardly ever see a council employee or councillor using the park and ride. As a consequence, the service is grossly underused, passenger numbers have decreased, the car park at Tregurra is barely half full most days, the service is costing the council money and service frequencies have been cut. If the council cannot make a success of this service, how on earth is it going to make a success of running franchised services across the whole of Cornwall?
If the attitude of central and local government is that bus services are only for people who do not own cars, they will never be able to afford to subsidise those services sufficiently to maintain them. Until MPs and councillors have the political courage to tackle the motor normativity culture, we are never going to have decent public transport in areas such as Cornwall.
Meanwhile, I am sure that firms of “transport consultants” are rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of getting a £500k consultancy contract to look into the whole subject and give the council the answer that it wants. Whether that answer is to go ahead with a franchise model or just tweak the current system, I cannot guess.