Buses

Buses are key to tackling loneliness and social exclusion and help ensure thriving communities. They are crucial to reducing congestion on our roads, and zero emission buses help tackle air pollution and climate change.

If we all took the bus instead of the car just twice a month, by 2050 this would create a reduction of 15.8 million tons of CO2 – the same as the total emissions of the North East in 2019.

But despite their social, economic, and environmental importance, buses have faced a difficult time:

• Cuts to national and local funding for buses have led to many services being reduced or withdrawn
• Bus fares have risen much faster than rail fares or motoring costs
• In many places buses are no longer frequent or reliable, and traffic on the roads can make journeys slow.

In 2021 after many years of campaigning by us and others, the previous Government launched a national bus strategy called Bus Back Better. It aimed to address the long-term decline in bus services and create a bus network fit for the future. A hugely ambitious strategy, it contained many of the policies we had campaigned for over the years but crucially lacked the funding needed to deliver on its ambitions.

Following the 2024 general election, the new Labour Government announced it would bring in legislation to give all local authorities powers to franchise buses and lift restrictions on new publicly owned bus operators. The Better Services Act became law in October 2025 and the following month the Government announced it was moving to long-term funding settlements for local authorities, another milestone we had called for.

We want to see a regular, reliable, affordable, zero-emission bus network in every village, town and city. To achieve this, we need to:

• Keep bus fares affordable
• Set minimum levels of bus service provision for all communities and make providing socially and economically necessary services a statutory requirement
• Introduce a comprehensive and robust National Bus Stop Standard which prioritises accessibility, safety, comfort and up-to-date information
• Allocate a greater proportion of bus funding towards ensuring more frequent buses and cheaper tickets
• Reallocate money away from carbon intensive transport, like road building, to buses instead
• Accelerate the move towards a zero-emission bus fleet.