Government announcement on bus fares

[Poppinpoppinpopcorn]

Bus fares across the country is to get capped at £2 for a single journey from January. This is amazing news and will help so many people especially those of us who have been paying £3 pound. But I do think London should do this as well as it unfair they will pay less than the rest of the country, as they have done for many years. That way they can make some of the money back.

How would it reduce the subsidy to the rest of the country? TfL don’t run transport outside London.

@Bikenutz There are no buses at all where I live! The Labour Party doesn’t care about the countryside or anyone living there.

Exactly

So unemployed people should pay a small fortune to do a food shop/get their dc to school then?

It's £2 for a single journey.
If you need more than one bus you have to get a Dayrider ticket or pay multiple £2s.
The London equivalent of a Dayrider (the daily cap) is £5.25.
The Midlands town where my mother lives and I will be for part of the summer is £4.90.
London doesn't always mean cheaper.

London weighting is generally a few grand a year at most. It doesn't scratch the surface of the higher cost of living. Yes, there's more job availability, but more competition too.

In any case, anyone particularly aggrieved by the 15p bus fare discrepancy is free to move to London to take advantage of it!

Have all your buses been cancelled since Labour came in? If not that doesn’t make sense.

Really? that's a stretch.

Most people in London aren’t really paying 1.85 for a bus journey of say 30 mins.

its just part of a longer journey with tube etc. so 10 mins bus to station or tube into London and maybe bus a few stops at the end. Generally covered by a monthly travelcard. Or even the daily price cap if doibg a few journeys that day.

if not having a travelcard I tend to not use the bus for 10 mins journeys -unless I can go there and back in under an hour when the second journey is free.

I think it is good.

Generally a lot of bus journeys tend to be used by younger/poorer people getting to work and education. This puts more money in their pocket and I think it is a good thing that young people are encouraged to work.

The potential downside is that it might end up with a lot of money being shovelled towards the owners of bus companies.

It's a small drop in the cost of living but will be a welcome one for many people.

Free buses for all kids in education including uni students. Not much can be done when living rurally. It cost me £30 a week to get my two kids to school, that was 8 years ago with the cheapest tickets and I still had to drive them 3 miles to a bus stop. School is not something you can choose not to do.
There is no bus to the nearest school, you would have to setoff at 6.30am, take3 buses to get there for 9am. We should have more school o ly buses but wouldn't be cost effective, £550 per year upfront (per child)the ones near me, so expensive.

The only thing people have been able to say about Burnham’s tenure as Manchester mayor was that he did good things with buses.

his second policy as PM is bus related.

in the meantime he’s appointed two people to his cabinet who recently had to leave due to misconduct and chosen a foreign secretary who will antagonise our closest enemy

channeling Miranda Priestly - “groundbreaking”

I assume you mean unfunded. This is how it will be funded:

"This action to ease the cost of living is funded through an extra £454m (including funding for devolved governments) which comes from a reprioritisation of DESNZ’s budget, switching funding that had been set aside for international climate finance projects into loans"

Is the government going to offer compensation or subsidies to the bus companies who can’t turn a profit as a result, or increase salaries for their drivers, and go out of business?

Wasn’t it Labour that increased the cap from £2 to £3 originally? So Burnham has just reversed a policy that clearly didn’t make as much money….

Our village bus services were scrapped around 2005, under both a Labour national government and a Labour local government. Our village library was closed the year afterwards, again under Labour.

It's neither unfounded nor unfunded

England only
*cries in Scottish

The govt DOES pay bus firms subsidies to run the services at a loss, likewise they pay bus firms for OAP free bus passes. The buses aren't running services for just £2 or free without government funding to do so.

Last time I checked there isn't a specific london minimum wage.
Many, many of us in the capital are just about breaking even.

Absolutely this. The fact that these 'rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic' policies are what he has launched with, frankly beggars belief. £45 quid a year off bill which will be wiped out by the uplift in the price cap anyway and bloody buses. He is so parochial it's embarrassing. The cabinet is stuffed with his mates and he is acting like he is running a parish council.

That's just what we need; the government funding more businesses who aren't making enough money for their shareholders. It's gone so well with the water companies and train companies hasn't it?
Time to re-nationalise public transport!

It's a shame you were still in school in 2022.

Looks like it

The original £2 cap was introduced by the Conservative government in January 2023. The increase to £3 was announced by Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves ahead of the Autumn Budget, taking effect in January 2025

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