In August 2023, First Bus gave Cornwall Council 6 months’ notice of termination of its contract to operate the Truro park and ride service. In response to my question at Full Council today, Cllr. Williams-Pears, portfolio holder for Transport, confirmed what I had I had put in my previous post, i.e. that First has agreed to continue to operate the service through to October 2024 - presumably, the Council has had to agree an uplift in the contract price (thanks again to my reliable source within the bus industry for this information), but Cllr. Williams-Pears did not admit this.
He also said that the Council would be putting the contract out to tender in March and that we would have to wait for the result of that tender before we could see the financial impact of this contractual hiccup.
In reality, the bus operators have got Cornwall Council over a barrel on this service. The Council cannot countenance not awarding a contract because the consequence of not having the park and ride service would be for the hospital car parks to be overwhelmed and Truro city centre traffic would become gridlocked. What we may see, however, is a further reduction in the quality of the service following last year’s degradation which involved the removal of the ticket offices, the reduction in service frequency in non-peak hours, the increase in the daily ticket price and the introduction of expiry dates on multi-day tickets.
The other impact of this contract retendering will be on the Council’s local transport budget and any additional monies that have to be spent on the park and ride will come off the monies available for other supported bus services. This is on top of the bizarre decision to press ahead with the so-called Mid Cornwall Metro which will probably require a running cost subsidy from the Council which will also impact on the local transport budget.
Update
16 January 2024
The official reply to my question has been published as follows:
"We can confirm that the Truro Park & Ride will continue to be Operated by First Kernow until at least October of 2024. We are anticipating that the service will be tendered in March for an end date of March 2028, and an indicative starting date for October 2024. The current operating model has been in place since 2015 and there is now an opportunity to revisit this, to ensure that the service is sustainable for the future. Officers are currently working on this, including seeking feedback from interested Operators and stakeholders, and this information will be used to feed into the future tender specifications. At that point we will be able to know any financial implications.”
I am advised by Cllr. Rob Nolan who asked a question of the portfolio holder later in the meeting about the retendering of the contract that Cllr. Williams-Pears said that "there were several interested parties”. We shall see in due course whether this turns out to be the case in practice.