Bus fare cap a no-go

PROPOSALS for a £2 cap on bus fares in Dumfries and Galloway have failed to get into second gear.

A pilot scheme to introduce a cheaper flat rate for bus travel is being prepared by the Scottish Government, and this region was invited to apply for funding to get the wheels moving.

But councillors couldn’t get on board with the idea due to a lack of assurances around finances and doubts about the continuation of the scheme in future years.

The South West of Scotland Transport Partnership (SWestrans) committee recently discussed the finer details of the Scottish Government’s £2 bus fare cap pilot scheme.

One regional transport area was to be chosen to establish a 12-month pilot from this month, and the government would stump up £10 million to operate the one year term of the pilot.

However, bus operators in Dumfries and Galloway had concerns about the reimbursement rate and tight timescales for the scheme.

Kirsty Dunsmore, a council policy and projects officer, explained the situation to councillors at the recent Swestrans board meeting.

She said: “At the moment there’s no confirmed reimbursement rate.

“If we were to accept this and decide to go for it, it would mean that we can’t provide any confirmation to operators in terms of what we could do for the reimbursement rate.

“And operators have told us that there’s no capacity within their services at the moment for them to be able to provide additional services.”

She continued: “We’re conscious that after the pilot period there’s no commitment from Scottish Government to then progress this business as usual.

“So one of the things that we flagged within the report as being a potential disadvantage is that passengers would get used to that £2 flat rate almost in terms of that’s what they would become accustomed to and that’s what would encourage them to use the bus.

“But then almost at the end of the pilot they could go back to their usual rate. So there is a bit of a risk there.”

Simon Bradbury, the council’s strategic transport and safety lead officer, told councillors that he and his colleagues pressed Transport Scotland for “some additional reassurance” around the reimbursement rate in late November.

The response was that operators would be “no better or worse off by the scheme”, but Transport Scotland couldn’t give any assurances on what the rate would be.

Annandale South Councillor Sean Marshall argued that going down this fare cap route would be detrimental in the aftermath of the massive changes to the region’s bus services in August.

He described the region’s bus operator network as “very fragile” at the moment, and added: “It’s quite clear from the number of disadvantages that this has probably came at the wrong time for us.”

It was unanimously agreed at the Swestrans meeting not to submit an expression of interest in the fare cap scheme.