Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the National Bus Strategy in encouraging more people to travel by bus.

Our National Bus Strategy, ‘Bus Back Better’, outlines how we will make buses more frequent, more reliable, easier to understand and use, better co-ordinated and cheaper.

The Department for Transport has established a monitoring and evaluation programme to assess which initiatives are most effective at improving bus services and increasing bus patronage. This assessment covers monitoring and process, impacts, and value for money evaluations of the initiatives funded through Bus Service Improvement Plans. It also includes a synthesis of evaluation findings across wider bus initiatives to understand the impact of the National Bus Strategy as a whole. We intend to publish interim findings from the evaluation in 2024.