Mayor Says North Yorkshire Bus Services are "Broken" As Franchising Assessment Approved

A £3.5 million assessment into bringing local bus services under public control has been approved by the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority.

Local bus networks could undergo a major transformation as officials explore bringing services under public control.

Publicly controlled bus franchising will face a £3.5 million assessment over the coming months. Transport officials issued a Notice of Statutory Intent to Prepare an Assessment this week.

The evaluation builds on the Rural Bus Franchising Pilot Study, which examines networks across coastal communities and the Vale of Pickering, with findings due at the end of October 2026.

Mayor of York and North Yorkshire, David Skaith, said:

"Bus services in York and North Yorkshire are broken. There is no get around that. And across North Yorkshire, since 2010, we've seen the largest reduction in bus driven miles of anywhere in the north.

Bus service has been systematically degraded through over a decade of austerity, and I'm sorry to say potentially local leadership has not seen as a priority.

Across all six of North Yorkshire area committees I've visited this month, every single meeting, bus services has been raised time and time again. Countless rural communities have been left stranded by poor services or no services at all, left to the whims of private operators who care more about the shareholders dividends than social economic benefits of buses.

Council after council and community after community, I've heard the same story.

This isn't a problem that I've created. It's a problem I inherited and it's a problem that I am determined to fix."

The Mayor thinks a shift in the operating model could improve connectivity for isolated areas.

He said:

"The model of private ownership and public subsidy has failed our region and it's, more importantly, failed our residents.

It's time to take an end to this stick and plaster approach to bus services in our region. We have seen in Greater Manchester that publicly controlled or franchised bus service can bring more significant economic benefits and connecting communities and rebuild trust in public services.

This is why I am now prepared to use the mayoral powers available to me to sign a statutory notice of intent to begin the franchising assessment process.

This doesn't commit me or the cabinet to introducing the scheme, but it gives me and the cabinet a fully-formed assessment and business plan onto which make an informed decision at a later date."

The Mayor says that under a franchising arrangement profitable routes would cross-subsidise less commercially viable journeys.

Mr Skaith added:

"That's the power of a franchising model where you will have routes that are profitable and functioning and routes that won't and instead of money going to shareholders and private operators, they come back into the system to help support those routes that will not be fundamentally as sustainable and would need further subsidize.

That is the fundamentally the model of a franchising and that's the model that I think we can start exploring with this work today.

As long as we have the system that we have, it will rely on subsidizing, subsidizing, subsidizing and money that's generated profitable from those routes is not then currently reinvested back into where as where it could be.

That's the opportunity we have with a franchise model is to take those profits from those more profitable routes and support the routes that may never make any profitable but still equally as important for so many of our communities across the patch, who need a vital bus service to commute for education, for health and other reasons as well."

Financial risks have sparked warnings from some officials regarding the proposed changes.

North Yorkshire Councillor Mark Crane said:

"We have supported bus services across North Yorkshire with significant sums of money, and I'm disappointed that you should use the phrase broken bus services.

And when we put them on, at first there is a reasonable number of people using them, but very soon it drops off. And they're expensive to run because they cover large areas and they take a lot of fuel. And what you will find by franchising is that you will probably lose money across the whole board.

We have got successful services, but in the more rural spots it's very difficult to run a bus system that a number of people are willing to sit on and travel on."

The region will act as a testbed for rural transport reform using central government funding.

Director of Transport, Clare Hoskins, said:

"We were successfully awarded funding from the Department for Transport to look at bus reform options in some of our more rural areas.

There are some really effective, tried and tested models for bus reform that have been rolled out in some of the bigger metropolitan areas. What's never really been done is properly exploring models of bus delivery in some of our more rural areas. And in the discussions that the mayor referred to with central government, we are really keen to pilot this area as a urban rural coastal trailblazer for public transport provision.

We are also issuing a statutory notice of intent to prepare a franchising assessment. That will move us along in terms of looking at different bus reform models, but it's important to note this doesn't commit us to a franchising decision at this stage. It just allows us to progress to the next stage in that process."

The newly issued notice will allow the combined authority to gather essential data from existing transport companies.

Bus Services Manager, Matt Daniel, said:

"This notice allows us to begin requesting important information from bus operators, for example, patronage and revenue data, which will help develop the franchising assessment, which is essentially a business case over the coming 12 to 18 months.

This does not commit the combined authority to introducing a franchising scheme, only the investigation of it. There is no time limit on how long the statutory notice can be active for, but obviously, we would want to progress this this work at a reasonable pace."

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