THE WELSH Government has said that a scheme to support bus services through the pandemic will now end in July, as Ceredigion councillors get set to discuss a report which says that further cuts to bus routes in rural Ceredigion are “highly likely in the short term” following “significant and unaffordable increases in costs”.
Rising costs, a lack of qualified drivers, changes to funding, and uncertainty over passenger numbers since the pandemic, have led to some rural villages in Ceredigion left without bus services, and most seeing a reduced service.
The Welsh Government’s Bus Emergency Scheme (BES) has provided more than £150m in funding to subsidise bus routes following the pandemic as passenger numbers dwindled.
The BES was due to end in early June after the Welsh Government extended a first planned end date of 5 April, but calls for it to continue permanently were made.
This week, Lee Waters MS, Deputy Minister for Climate Change said that the BES would now continue until 24 July before ending - to cover the end of the academic year.
Mr Waters said the three week extension will “provide further stability for the industry while we work on the transition away from emergency style funding to plan bus networks which better suit the new travel patterns we have seen since the end of the pandemic.”
A report set to go before Ceredigion County Council’s Thriving Communities Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 5 April says that while the major towns in the county are “provided with a relatively high/good level of service”, some villages are currently left “with none at all.”
A lack of providers willing to take on rural routes has hit the ability to provide services, the report said, with “no or only one tender” received to run some services.
“A point has now been reached whereby it is not how much a service might cost to provide, but a position whereby no one is interested or willing to undertake the work,” the report added.
In just the latest round of local bus services contracts at the back end of last year, which saw no tenders received for the Aberystwyth to Lampeter 585 service, costs rose £348,865 from £499,430 to £848,295 a year, for an “overall reduced level of service.”
“Not only are there significant financial risks but first and foremost there are risks regarding the council’s ability to meet it statutory obligations in terms of learner transport provision and supporting those who may have little or no means of private transport to access local centres for day-to-day purposes including work, shopping, health, leisure and social activities,” the council report said.
“There are also risks affecting the viability and sustainability of Ceredigion’s transport operators as, in the context of bus service providers especially, the future is very unclear in terms of support mechanisms and structures underpinning the industry in Wales.
“Recent procurement exercises are the latest and most significant manifestation of market failure in the local transport industry.
“The situation is by no means unique to Ceredigion but there are specific localised issues arising which mean that a number of settlements and villages who have in recent times been afforded a bus service, as regularly as hourly during the day Monday to Saturday, have, since January 2023, had no bus service at all or a reduced level of service.
“On the basis of the above it can only be concluded that a further rationalisation of opportunities to travel by bus within Ceredigion is highly likely in the short term.
“There are unfortunately, extremely limited short-term options and solutions that are readily available, never-mind, affordable, and the nature of the contributing factors also means that the local authority’s ability to directly influence is severely limited.”
The scrutiny committee is recommended to note the “acute and numerous pressures and challenges the transport industry as whole is experiencing which is exacerbated locally.”