Vital South Yorkshire bus plan aims to avoid more cuts to “atrocious” service

The plan has to be submitted to the government Department for Transport by June 12, a meeting of South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority in Sheffield heard today (June 4). That will lead to the release of £7.82m revenue funding for 2024/25 that will mainly be used to fund South Yorkshire bus services.

A report to the meeting said: “Without this funding tendered services may have to be withdrawn, depriving communities of public transport options mostly on evenings and weekends, increasing transport-related social exclusion.”

It updates a plan submitted in 2021.

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Mayor Oliver Coppard said: “This is a process which we have been forced to take at no small pace and we are being asked to do in what feels like in quite a rush when this government haven’t given us the time and space which I think we needed to actually develop those plans in a sensible way.”

Viable

He said he was pleased to see how far the plan had come in such a short space of time. The mayoral authority has worked with organisations including the four South Yorkshire local authorities and bus user groups to put the plan together.

The government calls for a ‘minimum viable product’ level of information from the authority but the plan submitted will be wider than that, to argue for “transformational growth” of the service.

Doncaster mayor Coun Ros Jones said: “The bus services in South Yorkshire are far less than best. More importantly, as representative of Doncaster, they’re atrocious and I’m hearing it day in, day out still – we’re doing all we can.

“This is down to government not giving us the funding we require in order to deliver for the people and actually keep people in work, getting our buses to the right place at the right time, and therefore I would hope we’d have a substantial increase on what we’ve got because, other than that, they’re actually driving bus usage down, not up.

“It doesn’t go to zero carbon emissions, does it?”