Better Buses East Midlands

02/09/2026

September is Catch the Bus month; the month-long campaign brings together operators, local authorities, community groups, businesses, charities and passengers across England, Scotland and Wales to celebrate the vital role buses play in connecting communities, supporting local economies and driving more sustainable travel
https://bususers.org/uk/catch-the-bus-month-returns-to-bust-myths-and-get-britain-on-board/

23/08/2026

Andy Burnham in his book 'Head North' (p202) writes; 'In the Bee Network, operators are answerable to the public. If they fail to deliver a good service, they can suffer financial penalties. This is exactly how it should be'.

From July 10th 2026 passengers experienced problems on 3 consecutive days on subsidised bus service 160 from Matlock to Chatsworth. One day the driver didn't pick up passengers waiting for the first bus in Matlock bus station despite the bus being seen in the waiting bay by a colleague. On the Saturday, a driver told a bus user that he wasn't prepared to serve part of the route at weekends because of parked cars. Complaints were made to Stagecoach, but if Mayor Claire isn't actively gathering feedback from bus users how will she know that services need to be improved?

23/08/2026

Public control of buses is quite different to public ownership:
In their articles with the headline “Seizing Derbyshire bus services from private providers remains on the table” a number of local media outlets, , , have repeated a commonly held confusion between public control of buses (known as franchising) and public ownership. The two are quite different.

Public control of buses is what currently happens in London and Greater Manchester and which most regional Mayors (but not EMCCA Mayor Claire Ward) are now pursuing as an option. Under public control, a public transport authority determines the routes, timetables, and fares, while private companies are contracted to run the services. This gives greater public control over how funding is used to support the local transport network and allows the coordination of buses with the rest of the network like trams and rail. This has massive public support – last year Better Buses East Midlands submitted a petition of over 2,500 signatures to Mayor Claire in support of the need to bring buses back into public control in the region. Public control is generally shown by numerous independent studies to be a far better option for bus users than the alternative of an Enhanced Partnership (or EP, a legal agreement between a local transport authority and local bus companies). While an EP is better than the complete free for all we had with deregulation it doesn't offer all the benefits of full public control. Public control is a fairly modest but sensible step towards better governance.
Public ownership of buses means that public transport authorities own and run the bus services themselves. The UK's Bus Services Act 2025 lifted the long-standing ban on local authorities creating and running their own public bus companies. A handful of publicly owned bus companies still exist in the UK. For example, Nottingham City Transport, the main bus operator in Nottingham is still majority (>80%) owned by Nottingham City Council . However the vast majority of bus operators are privately owned. Not even London or Greater Manchester have taken buses back into public ownership which is a more expensive and difficult option.

For more information see our FAQs on bus franchising here

06/08/2026

A new report by the New Economic Foundation ‘Getting moving on the cost of living. A plan to bring down bus and rail fares’ was published in July.

https://neweconomics.org/2026/07/cutting-the-transport-cost-of-living

The report shows that bus and rail fares have risen faster than the rate of inflation over the last 25 years, and “a high, and growing, level of car dependency has resulted. They estimate that the government could make all bus journeys in the UK free, at a cost of about £5.6 billion per year.

That £5.6 billion is less than one-eighth of the £50 billion that could be raised each year by taxing wealth more effectively according to figures from Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires

A plan to bring down bus and rail fares

24/04/2026

Here is an article in the Guardian about left behind communities suffering with the removal of bus stops - this one in Cornwall stops outside the village entailing a walk uphill on a road with no pavement apparently.

‘It’s a big loss’: what happens when a beautiful village loses its bus route?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/21/what-happens-when-beautiful-village-loses-bus-route-mousehole-cornwall

This is happening up and down the country, including in the East Midlands, where rural bus services have been cut leaving communities isolated.

Mousehole in Cornwall once had a butcher, post office and general store. Now it doesn’t even have an ATM – and one of its crucial bus services has been cut. Can residents save this vital resource?