Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the trends in the (a) quantity and (b) frequency of bus services in (i) Jarrow Constituency (ii) South Tyneside and (iii) Tyne and Wear since 2010.

The department does not hold any data on the quantity and frequency of bus services for Jarrow Constituency and South Tyneside, the lowest level geography available is upper tier local authority, in this instance Tyne and Wear.

Data on vehicle miles on local bus services by local authority including Tyne and Wear is available for the years 2013/14 to 2016/17 in the data table BUS0208 in the Annual Bus Statistics for each respective year at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/bus-statistics#published-in-2018 .

Bus operators must register their services with a traffic commissioner in the traffic area in which the service operates. The Traffic Commissioners’ annual reports provide information on the number of live local bus registrations in the North Western Traffic Area as at 31 March of each year; this information can be found here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/traffic-commissioners-annual-reports. The report for the year ending March 2010 can be found here: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20131113220328/https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-commissioners-annual-reports

Local authorities are best placed to manage changes in their local bus network. The Bus Services Act 2017 gives them additional powers to do so through partnership working with commercial operators. It also gives Mayoral Combined authorities the automatic right to franchise their bus network and the Department for Transport can also grant these powers to other local authorities who make a satisfactory business case. The Department is also developing regulations to require bus operators and local transport authorities to provide data, in open formats, about local bus services including routes and timetable data; fares and ticket data; and real time information. We are working closely with industry to develop the regulations and it is intended the requirements will be phased in over the next few years.