This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Bus plans set to miss out on top funding bracket
26/03/2022
It looks like funding won’t be heading here to help revitalise bus services
by Andy Mitchell, Local Democracy Reporter
Oxfordshire County Council’s hopes of revitalising bus services look likely to be held back with its funding application not deemed to be “transformational”.
The authority asked for £56.1 million to fund its Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) to pay for measures to give buses priority over traffic at pinch points, six new mobility hubs, the reintroduction of rural services and new electric buses.
However, the Future Oxfordshire Partnership, a committee involving the six county, district and city councils, this week heard that the county is not set to be among the 16 authorities considered for “all or substantially all” of the cash requested from the Department for Transport (DfT).
Phil Southall, managing director of Oxford Bus Company and chair of the Oxfordshire Strategic Transport Forum, said the decisions had not been officially published but that the county was awaiting an imminent decision on which of the other three groups its bid will fall into.
It is expected that 24 of the 79 applicants are set to benefit from improvement, where “some of your schemes are funded but not all of them”.
The next group down will see 36 bids earmarked for additional support to “have another go at a later date” due to being “deemed to not be as ambitious as (they) could be”.
There are set to be three bids that are deemed “not credible or deliverable”.
Mr Southall said: “Unfortunately, the chancellor reduced the funding available from £3 billion to £1.2 billion.
“There are 79 local transport authorities nationwide and that money is oversubscribed by at least eight times so the Department for Transport is now having to allocate that money on the basis that it wishes.
“It is not in the transformational category which is very disappointing.
“The most likely scenario is the improvement category, that could still be a good outcome but we do need a first-thing-is-first mindset, making sure we deliver the things we say we are going to deliver with firm foundations to build on.
“The pessimistic scenario is we get additional support and that in effect is an offer just to make your plan better for next time.
“That would be a significant setback for the bus and wider transport ambitions across the county and would require a much better strategic positioning of the bus offer to central government from Oxfordshire.”
Asked what missing out on the top group means for the plans, Mr Southall added: “The DfT deliberately did not set a budget (limit for applications), it asked authorities to be as ambitious as they wanted to be.
“Some authorities asked for £700-800 million, particularly the ones in urban areas. If you are not one of those transformational areas, as I understand it, the DfT will come back to you on specific schemes and interview on the deliverability of them.”
He warned that the scope for funding could be subject to how much “trickle down” of remaining funds happens once the money has been allocated to the 16 transformational projects elsewhere.
Published: by Banbury FM Newsteam