Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many bus routes were closed in Worcestershire between 2010 and 2024.

The Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain only publish data on a Traffic Area wide basis. The West Midlands Traffic Area includes the West Midlands conurbation, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire. Between 2009-10 and 2023-24, the Traffic Commissioners recorded that 3,992 existing registrations in the West Midlands traffic area were cancelled. An existing registration being cancelled does not always mean a bus route was closed. For example, a registration could have been cancelled and replaced with another registration that covers much of the same route, or the route continues to be served by different operator.

It should also be noted that prior to 2019-20 the total number of live local bus service registrations included an element of double-counting as services running across multiple local authority areas were recorded multiple times, e.g. a service running between the West Midlands and Staffordshire was presented as two services when it should have been counted as a single service. This has now been rectified.