North East bus passengers to face jump in ticket prices

Sir Keir Starmer announced on Monday (October 28) that the maximum price for a single bus journey will jump to £3 at the end of this year, an offer that will run until the end of 2025.

The move, which comes ahead of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first Budget on Wednesday (October 30), has been labelled a “stealth tax” and attacked by campaigners who have pleaded for the cheaper fares to be maintained.

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Bus fares outside of London have been capped at £2 since January 2023 and there have been warnings that the impending price hike will hit passengers in rural communities particularly hard.

Vicki Gilbert, chair of the North East Public Transport Users Group, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “50 cities in Europe have free buses and many of those include trains too, let alone a £2 fare. The reason that it’s important is that it gets more people onto buses.

“It gives people the ability to get to work, to entertainment, to school, to university, and to have experiences outside of the narrow cars that most people drive around in.

“It is good for the economy because it gets people to work who don’t have much money and it is especially good for climate change because it gets people out of cars.

“The thing people never talk about is that taking the bus helps with meeting other people – people talk to each other on the bus and that is good for community.”

Reports have indicated that the Department for Transport has deemed the £2 cap poor value for money and not financially sustainable.

Sir Keir told an audience in Birmingham that he understood “how much this matters, particularly in rural communities where there’s heavy reliance on buses”, but that “the Tories only funded that until the end of 2024 and therefore that is the end of the funding”.

But Karen Weech, a bus user from the village of Callaly near Alnwick, said being able to access buses is essential to the livelihoods of people in outlying communities.

She added: “It really galls me when you have the Government and councils on one hand saying they’re trying to encourage better green behaviour, but on the other hand they’re not prepared to encourage people to continue to use the bus because they won’t keep the cap.

“In some of the outlying villages, if you don’t drive your life depends on the buses. I couldn’t drive for two years and I experienced first-hand what it’s like – you’re solely reliant on the whims of somebody else, and not everyone can afford taxis. The only other option is the buses. What they’re really affecting is people and livelihoods – people getting to work and being able to get on with their life.”

Asked if mayor Kim McGuinness could use local funding to restore the £2 price limit on bus routes in the North East, a spokesperson for the North East Combined Authority said it would “need to undertake detailed work to understand the local impact” before making a decision.

The Labour mayor, who was elected in May, has pledged to take the region’s bus network out of the hands of private companies and return services to public control for the first time since the 1980s.

Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon, the region’s deputy mayor, told the LDRS that the £2 cap was “important” and that there “will be fare increases down the line” if the Government was not willing to provide more funding.

He added: “The major policy drive from the national government and local government is that we want to make public transport more attractive – that is to do with reliability and price and it is why we are going through the process of re-regulating the bus network here.

“The £2 cap is significant. We need more funding [to continue it locally]. In the North East we will look at what funding we have available.”

Richard Wearmouth, the Conservative deputy leader of Northumberland County Council, said the Labour Government “would have been much better not submitting to inflation-busting salary demands from unions and instead using the huge sums of money involved to back schemes like this that make a real difference in our communities”.

Newcastle Lib Dem councillor Greg Stone aired concerns that increasing the cap from £2 to £3 would “impact on passenger numbers and impact on the viability of some routes”.

Addressing the prospect of the mayor stepping in to maintain the £2 offer locally, he added: “Whilst any regional efforts to cushion the Chancellor’s stealth tax for bus users are a positive for fairness and sustainability, they will potentially make the business case for the Mayor’s public bus network even harder to stack up in the long term, so the finances will need to be looked at very closely.”