Bus Improvement Funding Cut by 80%

Lancashire County Council, jointly with with Blackburn-with-Darwen, is to receive only 20% of the funding it bid for to implement the county's Bus Service Improvement Plan.

The government's National Bus Strategy for England, "Bus Back Better", invited local authorities and bus operators to develop proposals to improve bus services through Bus Service Improvement Plans, which would be granted funding from a £3bn pot.  The Plans were to be "ambitious" and were meant to transform bus services throughout England with measures such as more bus priority schemes, more frequent services, lower fares, better buses and improved publicity and information. They were also set to transform the way in which buses are regulated, away from a "competitive" model to one where "co-operation" was more improtant.

Lancashire County Council, in a joint bid with Blackburn-with-Darwen Unitary Authority, submitted a bid for £170 million's worth of improvements but has been informed that it will recieve just £34.2m out of a reduced total of £1.1bn (down from the promised £3bn) of government money.

Independent analysis of the 79 bids submitted found that the cost of fully-funding all of them would have been somewhere between £7bn and £10bn, far outstripping the £3bn budget. That budget, however, has been progressively reduced since its announcement, with much of it going on emergency Bus Serrvice Recovery Grants to keep existing bus services operating through the pandemic.

It Could Have Been Worse

Lancashire was one of only 31 councils to receive any funding, with neighbouring Cumbria and North Yorkshire Councils receiving nothing at all.. 

In the rest of the North West, Greater Manchester will receive £94.8m and the Liverpool City Region £12.3m, but Cheshire gets nothing.

The partners to the Lancashire Enhanced Partnership (of councils and bus operators) will now need to decide which of the proposals in their Bus Servicxe Plan to take forward, although it is possible that the funding will come with strings that reduce their ability to set their own priorities rather than adopt those of the Department for Transport.

The Bus Users' Group will be discussing this at our next meeting on May 19th in Lancaster Library (start time 2pm) and we hope to have a speaker from the County Council to update us on the latest position at that time.

More details of the announcement can be seen in this article in bus industry trade journal Route One.

Lune Valley Contracts - A Correction

 

Stagecoach service 81 at Kirkby Lonsdale - but not for much longer.

In our previous post on the new bus service contracts in the Lune Valley (read again here) , we made much of the "fact" that no bus operators had submitted tenders for the new contracts and that as a result, the Council had had to negotiate a deminimis agreement.

We were therefore surprised to be contacted by a local bus operator to say that they had submitted a number of tenders, both compliant to the contract specification and with alternative proposals. A second operator has also confirmed that it submitted a tender.

Our information came from Lancashire County Council's website, specifically the "Local Bus Service Tender Results" section, which at the time of writing was displaying this document

We trust readers will agree that our interpretation that "no tenders were received" was not unreasonable!

The information and detail that councils are required to publish when it comes to tenders is highly specified and, as with many legal documents, prioritises "the letter of the law" over what an interested lay person might find useful.  Lancashire has accepted that what was initially published could have contributed to the misunderstanding.

It seems that in fact three tenders (i.e. tenders from three operators) were received and that within those three submissions there were a number of alternative options. However, after consideration of all the options, the bid finally accepted varied slightly from the specification of what was originally put out to tender.  The original tender was therefore "not awarded", and a "deminimis subsidy partnership" was entered into with Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire instead.

The Council has now amended the information on its website to more correctly represent the outcome of the tendering excercise.

Read it for yourself on this link

We are happy to set the record straight and apologise for our part in any confusion.