Bus improvement funding cut delays by a fifth and added 4% more passengers, DfT evaluation finds
The final report on the first £1.085bn of Bus Service Improvement Plan money says the schemes finished by March 2025 are likely to be medium to high value for money, but passengers grew less happy with the cost of travel after the fare cap rose to £3.
By Daily Oracles News Team2 min read
Buses in parts of England became more punctual and attracted more passengers after the first wave of Bus Service Improvement Plan funding, according to an independent evaluation published by the Department for Transport on Tuesday.
The final report, by Frontier Economics and SYSTRA, looked at the £1.085bn the department allocated to 34 areas between April 2022 and March 2025. It focused on the 27 local transport authorities in that group. A separate study will cover the seven mayoral authorities.
The evaluators compared areas that received the money with what would have been expected without it. On that basis, the schemes delivered by March 2025 reduced average delays at bus stops by 19.4%. On roads where new bus lanes and other priority measures had been completed, journeys were 7.0% faster. Passenger numbers across the funded areas were 4.2% higher than they would otherwise have been.
Only part of the money had been spent
The findings cover a fraction of the programme. Delivery was slow, particularly for building work, and councils were allowed an extra year, to March 2026, to spend their allocations. In the 16 areas studied in detail, about £204m of £470m, or 43%, had been invested by the end of March 2025, so the value for money verdict applies only to that share.
For those schemes, the evaluators put the ratio of monetised benefits to costs at between 1.7 and 2.1, which they describe as likely medium to high value for money. They said benefits that could not be given a price, such as better access to jobs, would add to that.
Allocations to individual councils ranged from £2.6m to £163.5m.
What passengers noticed
A panel survey in five areas found overall satisfaction up 4 percentage points between 2023 and 2025. Satisfaction with frequency, reliability, the quality of buses and ease of changing services each rose by 8 points.
The one measure that went the other way was cost. Satisfaction with the price of bus travel fell by 5 points. Participants in focus groups linked that to the national single fare cap in England outside London, which was £2 from January 2023 and rose to £3 in January 2025.
Young people responded most strongly. Among survey respondents aged 16 to 24, 42% said they had made more bus journeys in the six months after March 2025, against 25% of those aged 25 and over. Several areas used their funding for cheaper youth fares.
The gains were smaller outside towns and cities. In urban areas 29% of respondents said they were using the bus more, against 20% in rural areas, where the report found cars remained more flexible and cheaper for many journeys. Of those who had increased their bus use, about half said they would otherwise have driven.
The report also records that councils found the three-year window for capital schemes very difficult because of consultation, planning, procurement and rising costs.
