Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the trends in the (a) quantity and (b) frequency of bus services in (a) Ellesmere Port and Neston constituency and (b) England since 2010.

The Department does not hold any data relating to the quantity and frequency of bus services in Ellesmere Port and Neston constituency. The lowest level geography available is the upper tier local authority, which in this case is Cheshire and West Chester. Data on vehicle miles on local bus services by local authority in England, including Cheshire and West Chester, is available for the years 2013/14 to 2016/17 in the data table BUS0208 in the Annual Bus Statistics for each respective year at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/bus-statistics#published-in-2018

Bus operators must register their services with a traffic commissioner in the traffic area in which the service operates. The Traffic Commissioners’ annual reports provide information on the number of live local bus registrations in the North Western and all other English Traffic Areas as at 31 March of each year; this information can be found here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/traffic-commissioners-annual-reports. The report for the year ending March 2010 can be found here http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20131113220328/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-commissioners-annual-reports

Local authorities are best placed to manage changes in their local bus network. The Bus Services Act 2017 gives them additional powers to do so through partnership working with commercial operators. It also gives Mayoral Combined authorities the automatic right to franchise their bus network and the Department for Transport can also grant these powers to other local authorities who make a satisfactory business case. The Department is also developing regulations to require bus operators and local transport authorities to provide data, in open formats, about local bus services including routes and timetable data; fares and ticket data; and real time information. We are working closely with industry to develop the regulations and it is intended the requirements will be phased in over the next few years.