Bus subsidies costing BCP Council £8m a year

Transport portfolio holder for the council, Cllr Mike Greene, says continuing the subsidy is the right thing to do if the area wants to have a bus service when the economy fully recovers.

But the council will make some savings with a sliding scale of financial support based around actual usage from April.

In the current financial year there could be saving of around £350,000 in concessionary travel re-payments.

From April 2022 onwards the council expects to be paying out £7.67m over the year with the proportion of payments being reduced on a regular basis until it meets the actual number of passengers, currently running at around 65 per cent of pre-Covid passenger numbers.

Every two months the projected payments are expected to drop by 5 per cent until it meets the actual level of passengers.

Cllr Greene says that if numbers remain the same the 65 per cent level of payments could be reached in February or March 2023, but if the numbers using the buses increase the level of subsidy could be reached sooner.

“If the actual numbers rise the payments will be re-adjusted…so we can’t accurately predict the full budget cost at the moment,” he told a Monday meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny board, “But it is absolutely necessary that we do this…they are hanging on by their fingertips at the moment” he said.

Cllr Greene said there was an expectation from the Government that every council across the country continued to support bus services which would fit in with the national and local climate and ecological emergency measures to make better use of public transport.

In response to a question from Cllr Vikki Slade he said he believed that bus use might well decline because of Covid, with some people still wary or using public transport and many people had become accustomed to not travelling so much.

“Everyone’s pinning their hopes that we will get over this and public transport will recover to its previous levels,” he said.