Skip to main content

DfT provides extra £130m for endangered bus routes in England

Services in the north-east and South Yorkshire were facing cuts as end of pandemic funding nears. 
Regional bus services in England that were facing the axe have been given a reprieve after the government announced £130m of funding to keep them going for at least six months.

Services in the north-east and South Yorkshire were at risk amid concern that many more routes could be cut back when Covid grants, which propped up routes during the pandemic, expire at the start of October.

The Department for Transport said on Friday it would provide further support to ensure that services keep running until March 2023.

The additional £130m of funding takes the total amount of pandemic support to £2bn as bus companies wrestle with rising costs and continued low patronage of their services. The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said: “At a time when people are worried about rising costs, it’s more important than ever we save these bus routes for the millions who rely on them for work, school and shopping.”

Covid grants for bus companies were introduced to help sustain routes that had lost passengers during the pandemic.

They were extended in the spring for a further six months with £150m to stave off feared widespread cuts to services, but the government had previously warned that no further funding would be available.

Operating costs have escalated by about 20% since the start of the pandemic, according to the Confederation of Public Transport (CPT), while passenger numbers remain 15% down on average countrywide.

Kent county council last month warned it would have to cut dozens of routes, despite receiving £35m in bus service improvement plan funding. Tyne and Wear’s transport authority, Nexus, said about 100 buses a day had come off the roads since March and that it expected further cuts. In Somerset, FirstGroup told passengers it will be withdrawing additional unviable routes.. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Harvard nutritionist shares the No. 1 vitamin that keeps her brain ‘young and healthy’—and foods she eats ‘every day’

As a nutritional psychiatrist, I always make it a point to maintain a well-balanced diet. Much of that has to do with making sure I get all the right vitamins, especially because it’s essential to preventing cognitive decline. And given that the risk of neurological diseases increases as we get older, one question I often get from my patients is: “What is the best vitamin for protecting our aging brains?” Each of our microbiomes is like a thumbprint, so a truly effective eating plan is personalized to the unique needs of an individual. But the vitamin group I prioritize the most to keep my brain young and healthy are B vitamins. The brain benefits of B vitamins Depression, dementia and mental impairment are often associated with a deficiency of B vitamins, a study from the Wayne State University School of Medicine found. “A B12 vitamin deficiency as a cause of cognitive issues is more common than we think, especially among the elderly who live alone and don’t eat properly,”...

AUPCTRE to Buhari: Save NDDC from destruction, inaugurate board

The groundswell of agitation for the inauguration of the substantive board of NDDC in compliance with the law, has continued to rise with the demand from a Labour group, the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporations, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE) to President Muhammadu Buhari to inaugurate the board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) The appeal was contained in a statement issued by the General Secretary of AUPCTRE, Comrade Sikiru Wahid, on Sunday, August 14, 2022. The labour union said the call has become imperative to save the commission from destruction. There has been unending calls by authentic stakeholders who have consistently demanded that the NDDC Act should be complied with in the governance of the Commission noting that it is illegal to have contraptions of interim management committees / sole administrator to administer the NDDC and arbitrarily utilise the monthly sums due to the Commission.  AUPCTRE in th...

China issues alert as drought and heatwave put crops at risk

                                  Good day 😊 Local authorities told to take measures and ‘use every unit of water carefully’ in effort to save autumn harvest  A drought in China is threatening food production, prompting the government to order local authorities to take all available measures to ensure crops survive the hottest summer on record. On Tuesday, four government departments issued an urgent joint emergency notice, warning that the autumn harvest was under “severe threat”. It urged local authorities to ensure “every unit of water … be used carefully”, and called for methods included staggered irrigation, the diversion of new water sources, and cloud seeding.  A record-breaking heatwave combined with a months-long drought during the usual flood season has wreaked havoc across China’s usually water-rich south. It has dried up parts of the Yangtze River and dozens of tributa...