Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many bus routes were registered in (a) Hexham constituency, (b) Northumberland, (c) Newcastle, (d) the North East and (d) England in each of the last five years.

The Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain only publish data on a Traffic Area wide basis. The North Eastern Traffic Area includes: the counties of Northumberland, County Durham, East Riding of Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire; the metropolitan boroughs within South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear; and the districts of North East Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire.

Between the 2019-20 and 2023-24 reporting years the Traffic Commissioner annual reports detail the following:

A new bus registration does not always mean a new bus route has been created. 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 Hexham and Newcastle was presented as two services when it should have been counted as a single service. This was rectified in the report for 2020/21.