Bus passengers across England are paying “massively unfair” fares of up to £6 for a single journey, four times the amount Londoners are charged to traverse the capital, Guardian research has found.

Analysis of a snapshot of five-mile bus trips in local authorities across England found that while a single bus ticket in London costs £1.50, passengers elsewhere pay far more despite often experiencing worse services.

The research showed the most expensive fare for a five-mile journey was in Hampshire, where a single ticket from Winchester The Broadway to Matterley Farm, Tichborne, costs £5.65.

The operator, Stagecoach, defended its high fares by saying almost half of adult passenger journeys are made by customers travelling on a weekly ticket.

Q&A What is the London versus … series? Show Hide London plays a crucial economic, political and cultural role in the UK. It is home to one of the world’s busiest financial centres, the royal family, parliament and some of the best museums on the planet. But that domination has come at a cost. To many living outside it, London has become more of a distant city-state than a capital, increasingly disconnected from the rest of the country. In the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, voters can elect representatives who put their countries first. Londoners sometimes argue they deserve a special deal. After all, London paid an average of £12.7bn a year more in taxes than it received in public spending in the decade up to 2014, subsidising most of the rest of the country. And while life in London might be easy for the oligarchs who have bought up Mayfair, it is a struggle for many. Yet while rail passengers in the north of England and Cornwall still judder to work on 35-year-old Pacer trains, Londoners will soon be able to get around even quicker on the £17.6bn Crossrail. This series explores how the rest of England has been left behind. It will expose how some of the poorest people pay the most for public transport, the north-south divide in health and how cultural institutions have been ravaged by cuts. Finally, it will look at the case for more devolution in England and ask what can be done to bring the country back together at a time when it has never seemed more divided. Helen Pidd



Prices were also notably high in Cumbria, where the Stagecoach journey from Ambleside to Grasmere costs £5.65.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that outside London bus operators have created a “fragmented, incomplete, overpriced, fragile” network of services that can be withdrawn at any time with no consultation, where single fares in some of the most disadvantaged areas cost up to £4.40. Buses are “fundamentally not run in the public interest”, he said.

He said: “How do you best illustrate the transport divide north v south? It’s as simple as the price of a bus ticket and the price of daily travel. It’s massively unfair... Why did everyone else get bus deregulation and London did not?”

In Hampshire, there are 33 competing bus providers. In Greater Manchester, there are 47, including school operators and cross-boundary operators. None are under any duty to coordinate with each other and can charge whatever they like.

Anyone with an operator’s licence can apply to set up a bus service in most of England. They simply need to pay £60 to the government and give the local authority 28 days’ notice before applying to the traffic commissioner, which regulates and licenses buses. To cancel the service, they must give just 28 days’ notice to the local authority and a further 42 days’ notice to the traffic commissioner.

It is time-consuming to provide an area-by-area comparison of bus fares because some of the main companies do not publish prices for single or return tickets, preferring instead to advertise only daily or weekly passes. To compile the fares, the Guardian spent days calling individual bus companies or interacting online with live chat services.

First Bus, one of Britain’s largest bus operators with a fleet of more than 5,700 buses, does not print its single fares. “We have been working with rail industry colleagues to review the practicalities of publishing all single bus fares; however we estimated that there were 1,000,000 times as many bus single fares as there were rail fares and therefore the ability to publish every single bus fare in a way that is comprehensible for customers, will take time to implement,” a spokeswoman said.

In many areas return fares no longer exist, forcing passengers to buy a day pass. Sometimes there aren’t even single fares. In Kent, anyone asking for a single ticket on the Stagecoach service from Deal to St Margaret’s At Cliffe during the morning rush-hour must buy the Dover & Deal dayrider ticket for £4.30.

The fragmented system was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, when the Conservative government deregulated the bus industry across Britain, except in London. Department for Transport (DfT) statistics show that the number of passenger journeys in England have dropped by 4.2% outside London since March 2005 and soared by 23.5% in the capital over the same period.

With the decline in passenger numbers have come requirements for local authorities to step in and subsidise “socially necessary” services that are commercially unviable. In 2017-18, central and local government support paid out £2.18bn in subsidies to private bus companies in England, of which £1bn or 46% was for concessionary travel.

Local bus fares in England increased by 71% between March 2005 and March 2018, according to DfT statistics. Yet in London prices of single tickets have arguably improved in value: in 2005, a single zone-one fare for Oyster card users was £1. Fourteen years later it is £1.50 to travel anywhere in the whole city.

Just eight English local authorities retained municipal bus services after deregulation, including Nottingham – where a five-mile journey costs £2.20 – and Blackpool, where there is a maximum single fare of £2.80.

In the rest of England, five big bus operators have cornered an estimated 70% of the market: Stagecoach, FirstGroup; Arriva; National Express; and Go-Ahead.

A spokesman for Stagecoach said it could not compete with London’s £1.50 fares. “The cost of operating London’s bus network is £700m more than the income TfL receives from fares. If London operated like the rest of the UK where fares reflect the true cost of running services, pricing would be far different,” he said.

Stagecoach’s regional UK bus operations reported an operating profit of £122.9m last year. Profit levels are “a red herring”, insisted the spokesman. “The profit margins in London’s franchised system are broadly similar to those in the regions. Margins are reported in a different way because in London buses are leased (linked to contract length) whereas in the regions they are bought outright by operators. When this difference is stripped out, the margin is broadly the same.”

Last month Labour said it would spend £1.3bn a year to reverse recent cuts to local bus services and regulate bus services by putting local services into public ownership and offering free bus travel to under-25s.

In Greater Manchester, Burnham wants to take advantage of a new law that enables combined authority mayors to take up bus franchising powers or work in partnership with local bus operators.

“The cost of bus transport is too high and priced badly, in that it’s cheap for people who can afford weeklies but punishing for people who have to live day to day,” he said. “The ticketing regime really punishes ad-hoc users. I think you want a London system that doesn’t do that, that encourages easy use.”

Luke Raikes, senior research fellow at the IPPR North thinktank, said: “Our city regions need a London-style transport network and the only way to have one is with London-style bus regulation. And that’s why mayors must use their new powers to re-regulate their buses. Our analysis of the bus companies’ alternative proposals shows they simply can’t compete with a London-style publicly-run network. Greater Manchester and the northern city regions can lead the way but regulation is the best option for towns and villages across the country too.”

Additional reporting by Lizzie Deane

• This article was amended on 6-7 May 2019. An earlier version said setting up a bus company simply entailed giving a local authority £60 and 28 days’ notice before applying to the traffic commissioner. Rather, these steps are for starting a bus service – but only once an operator’s licence is in place – and the £60 goes to the government. To cancel the service, 28 days’ notice must be given to the local authority plus 42 days’ notice to the traffic commissioner; only the latter was mentioned in the earlier version. Finally, a reference to Manchester has been expanded to make clear that a new law gives combined authority mayors the option not only to take up bus franchising powers but also to work in partnership with local bus operators. An earlier version mentioned franchising only.



