The axe fell in many places when the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government came to power in 2010. According to a report by Parliament’s cross-party Transport Select Committee in 2011, the cuts made to support for bus services in England “created the greatest financial challenge for the English bus industry in a generation.”
The impact is obvious to anyone. More than half of all bus routes across our region were axed in the intervening years as subsidies vanished and commercial operators withdrew unprofitable routes. Between 2014 and 2023, with its government bus grant gutted, no bus services were funded by Cumbria County Council.
Jump to 2024 and the new Labour government began to build back support for bus services. This extra funding allowed Cumberland’s Labour-led council to invest in local bus services for the first time in a decade. An even bigger government funding pot this year – totalling £5 million – has allowed Cumberland Council to embark on the biggest boost to bus services in a generation.
I was pleased to play my part in calling for and voting through those funding increases, but I want to pay particular credit to the officers and political leadership of Cumberland Council for their work. Cllr Denise Rollo, with the backing of all Labour councillors, has made this a political priority for the council. And officers have carried out an extensive piece of work to engage with the public – nearly 3,000 people – identify gaps in the network and come up with plans to fund routes which fill as many of those gaps as funding will allow.
I’m delighted that the plans include many of the routes I and local Labour councillors have been calling for, connecting communities across West Cumbria which haven’t seen a bus in years. I’m also really pleased that the council will be launching a capital programme of bus stop upgrades and I’ll be sharing my suggestions for our area.
We finally have a government and a council which recognises the importance of buses to local communities and is committed to investing in local services. What we need now are bus operators to step up and bid to deliver these subsidised services. We can’t have a situation where national and local government agree to fund services, communities demand services, yet bus operators don’t come forward to run them.
I’ll be writing to a wide range of local and national bus operators calling on them to step up and come and deliver these new services in Cumberland. But I’m also asking members of the public to step up too. To make these services viable, people need to use them.
Help me to demonstrate the strength of local support for these new services by taking the pledge to Back the Bus today: joshmacalister.uk/backthebus
Josh MacAlister MP 