Bus Fare Cap will be £2 from January

[nikos]

The problem is that day tickets are not as low as £6 when you move out of urban areas. Since the introduction of the single fare cap a few years ago the price of many day tickets which extend out of the urban areas to smaller towns and villages have increased significantly.

Here in Nottinghamshire, outside of the city and the urban area around Mansfield, day tickets are now quite expensive. The only day ticket available on my local route is the Stagecoach Dayrider Gold which now costs £11.60.
The £3 fare cap has resulted in many return journeys requiring just one change of bus costing £12. The £2 cap will at least reduce that to £8. Before the introduction of the original £2 single fare cap the day ticket was just £7.90. Therefore many journeys in rural areas requiring a change of bus are now actually more expensive than before the fare cap was introduced as a result of the increase in price of day tickets.

Agree with your points. It seems like return fares and day riders need to be capped and lowered to actually have an impact on cost of living.

A trip to a local hospital can take two buses; that's £8 at the £2 single cap. London has somewhat mitigated that with the Hopper fare - £1.75 - but the £2 fare for most people in urban cities isn't that cheap when multiple journeys are required. It's window dressing when most journeys are return or require a change. £7.00 is the price of a dayrider for multiple operators (an individual bus company dayrider is £6) in Sheffield. If I wanted to go to hospital I'm not benefiting from the cap at all and will not be an outlier.

Given that pensioners and the young already have subsidised fares in a lot of cases - this policy is helping only a slim segment of the working commuting population. It isn't actually 'cutting the cost of living for everyday passengers' in any way that makes sense. It's infrequent travellers who will most benefit.

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

Er fine, but you are making the big mistake of assuming that the future will be the same as the present.

You think that a) they're going to get rid of the Procurement Act 2023 that has only just been introduced and, more importantly, b) row back from an evidence based means of spending public money for a more opaque way of awarding contracts based someone's perception?

The future may not be the same but it won't be that.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 26 Jul 2026 ==

The problem with procurement is that it doesn't allow you to discard the well known bull*hitting bid writers with a long history of over-promising and then under-delivering. Ah, but that was last time, this time we really will employ abc and deploy xyz to meet the contract specification. It's too late once they are in place, the alternative providers have closed down and poor service delivery drives passengers away. It takes a lot more effort to winkle someone out once they are in place.

The thing is that if you don't deliver xyz to meet the contract specification... then you get penalised.

As I've said above, you cannot award a contract based on previous good conduct which is what was being suggested. You might be able to discount a tenderer on the grounds of poor performance (although it is unlikely) but if you base the evaluation of the award on previous good performance, then that is a defacto barrier to anyone else and is therefore unfair. The Procurement Act 2023 (which only came into force in Feb 2025) makes it quite clear about the requirements of fairness in managing a tender process.

 

[Dwarfer1979]

It would cost me £2.40 to get to the nearest big supermarket and the same to come back. One mile each way. That £4.80 return is the same as an unlimited travel day ticket for the entirety of the Smart area in Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle. One of those feels incorrectly priced.

It has, for several years, been a practice to price the local zone day ticket at the price of 2 trips as a targeted way of making the bus cheaper for heavier users - Brighton & Hove were one of the innovators in this as a way of simplifying fare offerings. So to answer your question the day ticket price is lowered as a promotional tool. Some operators retain a return ticket option for those who know they are only making a return trip due to concessionary fare reimbursement calculations (a return is counted as 2 trips, so price is divided by 2, whilst a day ticket is counted as 3 or 4 trips, so price is divided by 3 or 4).

There is, and it has been extensively discussed on the forum, a reasonable argument that short journeys should be made by other means. That is fine for the able bodied. I can walk there and back no problem, what I can no longer do is carry heavy bags of groceries. Yet I feel I am being mugged off by paying £2.40 for such a short journey home, so I don't. Delivery to my door can be cheaper, certainly cheaper than a return. That is not helping the service survive. Similarly it is £2.40 single to / from my nearest rail station (1.5 miles), the same to the doctors (2.75 miles), the same into town (4.5 miles) and for a single journey up to 5.8 miles after which it jumps to the capped £3.00 fare.

The matter is that the main cost source is simply in providing the journey (bus & driver) so the initial price is quite high but after that travelling a distance is proportionally less expensive - you are paying a bit of fuel required for a longer trip but principally you are paying extra due to the loss of the opportunity to sell your seat again further in the trip.

Agree with your points. It seems like return fares and day riders need to be capped and lowered to actually have an impact on cost of living.

A trip to a local hospital can take two buses; that's £8 at the £2 single cap. London has somewhat mitigated that with the Hopper fare - £1.75 - but the £2 fare for most people in urban cities isn't that cheap when multiple journeys are required. It's window dressing when most journeys are return or require a change. £7.00 is the price of a dayrider for multiple operators (an individual bus company dayrider is £6) in Sheffield. If I wanted to go to hospital I'm not benefiting from the cap at all and will not be an outlier.

Given that pensioners and the young already have subsidised fares in a lot of cases - this policy is helping only a slim segment of the working commuting population. It isn't actually 'cutting the cost of living for everyday passengers' in any way that makes sense. It's infrequent travellers who will most benefit.

Commuters are probably still reasonably served as longer period season tickets, at least within urban areas, often price out around £4 per day (£20-£25 per week) anyway though it does depend on area as some places are better than others. It is the non-frequent traveler doing complicated cross town journeys that get caught as they are using multiple buses only once or twice. £4 for a return trip seems very affordable to me but I grew up in Surrey and I was paying almost that for a single trip when I was in college to get to my Saturday job nearly 30 years ago (less than 15-minutes into the town centre, about 3 miles, so not long). It depends on what you are used to and how it compares to other costs in your local area as to whether £4 or £6 seems expensive or cheap.

 

[nikos]

Commuters are probably still reasonably served as longer period season tickets, at least within urban areas, often price out around £4 per day (£20-£25 per week) anyway though it does depend on area as some places are better than others. It is the non-frequent traveler doing complicated cross town journeys that get caught as they are using multiple buses only once or twice. £4 for a return trip seems very affordable to me but I grew up in Surrey and I was paying almost that for a single trip when I was in college to get to my Saturday job nearly 30 years ago (less than 15-minutes into the town centre, about 3 miles, so not long). It depends on what you are used to and how it compares to other costs in your local area as to whether £4 or £6 seems expensive or cheap.

I understand the price formulations they are using, but I would dispute your cost analysis.

Where I live, the buses are at less than half capacity off peak, even less off off-peak. They are only full during school days when used by children on concessionary passes at peak times. In the trip to the hospital scenario, everyone is getting off at the hospital, nobody in sufficient numbers is taking the opportunity to buy my seat again further in the trip, despite the hospital being the mid-point on the route. In the normal course of most journeys passenger numbers diminish along the route (an obvious exception to this might be a very high density area like London). There isn't the justification for the high initial price, the overall pricing structure suppresses demand.

You concur that longer period season tickets or day tickets offer better value in most cases, the £2 price cap is only helping those priced out of massively inflated day tickets outside of urban areas (a good thing), but the day tickets should never have been inflated to that point in the first instance - a jump from £7.90 to £11.60 FOR A DAY ticket is robbery and obvious price gouging.The £2 cap is a headline grabber but isn't actually a massive help to the growing cost of living (inflation disproportionately affects those on minium incomes, those less likely to be able to afford the initial outlay of a monthly ticket and in any case, modern working patterns usually shred the cost effectiveness of these tickets which are based on 28 consecutive days, you might not work on Friday, you're unlikely to use the bus on weekends etc...)

Growing up in Surrey might skew someone's perception of value, but £4 for a 2 mile journey isn't great when a grocery delivery slot is £1.50. It's returns and day tickets that need to be lowered and capped - £3 and £4 respectively I think is reasonable.

 

[duncombec]

You concur that longer period season tickets or day tickets offer better value in most cases, the £2 price cap is only helping those priced out of massively inflated day tickets outside of urban areas (a good thing), but the day tickets should never have been inflated to that point in the first instance - a jump from £7.90 to £11.60 FOR A DAY ticket is robbery and obvious price gouging.

Have you investigated the price increases for bus operators (specifically) over the same period, as to whether it really is "price gouging" or an accurate reflection of their increased costs?

As an example, I've heard figures of over 300% as the price increase for tyres alone in a similar period, and a bus uses both more tyres than a car, and has to change them significantly more frequently. That is before you take into account three years of pay rises, increased NI contributions, fare cap reimbursement (which may not actually be the same as if passengers were paying full price) the new reimbursement for Kids Go Free August (ditto), and three years of budgetary constraints for ENCTS passes (ditto). [As an aside, is it legitimate for local authorities to use BSIP/LABG funding for higher ENCTS reimbursement, and if so, has any authority actually done so?].

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

Have you investigated the price increases for bus operators (specifically) over the same period, as to whether it really is "price gouging" or an accurate reflection of their increased costs?

As an example, I've heard figures of over 300% as the price increase for tyres alone in a similar period, and a bus uses both more tyres than a car, and has to change them significantly more frequently. That is before you take into account three years of pay rises, increased NI contributions, fare cap reimbursement (which may not actually be the same as if passengers were paying full price) the new reimbursement for Kids Go Free August (ditto), and three years of budgetary constraints for ENCTS passes (ditto). [As an aside, is it legitimate for local authorities to use BSIP/LABG funding for higher ENCTS reimbursement, and if so, has any authority actually done so?].

There's a couple of things at play here...

Day Tickets

@dwarfer is right in that pricing day tickets (in a local sense) is often worked as a multiple of single fares. Hence why a day ticket may be 3* typical single fare. The price of a £1.50 delivery slot... If that's for groceries, it's being pitched below cost so not really a true measure but a loss leader.

To use an example close to home... I live outside Bath and so am in First's West of England zone. That means to get the bus into Bath costs me £3 for 9 miles. However, let's say that I need to head to the Royal United Hospital in Bath... that's another £2.60 on a local bus. So to go there and back would be £11.20. Except I can get an AvonRider ticket and that costs me £7.00. £7.00 for four buses and 20 miles or so of travelling (and it's multi-operator).

Or how about my home patch... I was from near Darlington so to do the same theoretical journey of into town and then to hospital is £8.50 for a Darlington day ticket. If I lived within those two places, my day ticket is £5.20 (Darlo) or £6.80 (Bath) - so at worst, £1.70 per journey.

One view constantly espoused on forum threads is about the baffling array of tickets. It's a fine line between having too many local tickets and then ones that cover a huge territory and have a price that reflects it. People say price gouging... which operators are making 20% margins then?

Cost Increases

Operating costs have massively outstripped inflation in the last few years. There has been above inflation pay rises in the sector, additional costs such as NI as well as fuel and other commodity costs.