Bus Services

(asked on 15th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of changes in the demographics of bus users (a) nationally and (b) in York; and what assessment his Department has made of the opportunities and risks such usage presents.


Answered by
Trudy Harrison Portrait
Trudy Harrison
This question was answered on 25th October 2021

The table attached shows the average number of local bus trips (trip rates) by age and gender: England, 2019 and 2020 from the National Travel Survey. These statistics are not available for York due to small sample sizes.

The Department’s annual bus statistics provides some additional basic demographical information for passenger journeys made by all passengers and by concessionary passengers including elderly, disabled and youth concessionary passengers. However, comparable statistics for the equivalent period have not yet been released.

In 2018/19, there were 9.1 million older and disabled concessionary passes in England, which was a decrease of 3% since 2017/18. This can be partly explained by changes in the population eligible for the state pension. However, the projected increase in the older age population offsets this impact. 90% of these total passes were for older people, and 10% were for disabled people. In 2018, women were 2% more likely to hold an older person’s concessionary pass than men.

Since the pandemic, those who hold an older person’s bus pass have been generally slower to return to buses, and DfT has urged local authorities to continue to pay concessionary payments at pre-COVID levels. This is to ensure that bus services could continue to operate through the outbreak and into recovery as concessionary reimbursement forms a significant revenue stream for bus operators. This has meant that, over this period, spending for concessionary travel has remained at a similar rate to 2019/20, with the Government supporting council spending of around £1 billion a year so older and disabled people can travel on buses up and down the country for free.

Reticulating Splines