Subsidy warning over fear of 'empty buses'

Taxpayers in North Yorkshire could be left to subsidise "empty buses" if plans to franchise services go ahead, councillors have warned.

North Yorkshire Council leader Carl Les said he did not believe franchising was a "silver bullet" for the county's transport issues and worried about the financial impact.

He spoke at a meeting where Mayor David Skaith and members of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority approved a £3.5m investment to examine the potential benefit of taking buses under public control.

Skaith has said he wants to move away from a model that "allows private operators to extract profit from our region".

Speaking on Friday, Conservative councillor Les asked why the authority was pressing ahead with the work before the results of rural bus pilots were known.

"Clearly, you believe that franchising is the silver bullet. I'm not convinced about that, but we can disagree," he told the mayor.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, he said having dealt with public transport in rural areas for many years, he knew it was not easy to create demand.

"Our experience is that we have subsidised a lot of empty buses running around the county, which is why we have rowed back on those subsidies."

Les asked who would ultimately pay if new routes were introduced but failed to attract sufficient passengers, and wanted an assurance that council taxpayers would not pick up the tab.

Labour's Skaith said the funding question was "a point for another day further down the line", but argued that one of the advantages of franchising was the ability to use money generated by profitable services to support less commercially viable routes.

"That is fundamentally the model of franchising, and that's the model I think we can start exploring," he said.

North Yorkshire Council deputy leader Mark Crane also expressed concerns about the economics of franchising in rural areas.

"What you will find by franchising is that you will probably lose money across the whole board," he said.

"In the more rural spots, it's very difficult to run a bus system that a number of people are willing to sit on and travel on."

Skaith has issued a formal Notice of Statutory Intent to Prepare an Assessment of a Proposed Franchising Scheme, with up to £3.5m allocated to carry out that work.

The work will also allow the authority to consider the results of the Department for Transport-funded Rural Bus Franchising Pilot Study, which is expected to report at the end of October.

Under franchising, the public authority would have significantly greater control over how the bus network operates.

In his statement following today's vote, Mr Skaith said the existing bus network was not working for too many residents.

"Bus services across York and North Yorkshire just aren't working for our residents," he said.

"Too many people are cut off from training, jobs, leisure and being able to get where they need to go.

"We need to move away from a system that allows private operators to extract profit from our region, so we can reinvest that to support more services."

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