Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many bus routes have been registered in Derbyshire in each of the last five years.
The Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain only publish data on a Traffic Area wide basis. The North Western Traffic Area includes the counties of Derbyshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire, and the metropolitan boroughs of Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Between the 2019-20 and 2023-24 reporting years the Traffic Commissioner annual reports detail the following:
Applications Processed | ||||
| Live local bus registrations | New | Variations | Existing registrations cancelled |
2023-24 | 1665 | 541 | 1014 | 752 |
2022-23 | 2028 | 420 | 1569 | 617 |
2021-22 | 2679 | 487 | 1952 | 560 |
2020-21 | 2847 | 258 | 2393 | 254 |
2019-20 | 3177 | 548 | 1875 | 577 |
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 Derbyshire and Greater Manchester was presented as two services when it should have been counted as a single service. This has now been rectified.