A year-long £500,000 study aimed at improving bus services throughout Sussex is to begin after a proposal was agreed by senior councillors today (Thursday 10 September).
It could lead to the first elected mayor of Sussex setting up publicly owned bus services or running franchised routes so that passengers have a more frequent and reliable service.
The study was approved by the Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority board which is made up of half a dozen senior councillors, two of them from Brighton and Hove.
The board will work with the first mayor after an election in May 2028. The mayoral election had been due to take place in May this year but was postponed to allow time for a shake up of local councils.
The bus study has been funded with a £564,000 government grant, with £64,000 set aside to pay for an official to “support the study”.
Key officials and councillors had a meeting with the Department for Transport (DfT) last month and, a report said, they were told that “different approaches to bus reform might be suitable to some parts of the area and not others”.
The report, to the strategic authority board, said: “The DfT also emphasised that the feasibility study is intended to examine the full range of reform options available rather than assuming franchising is the eventual outcome.
“The proposed programme has been designed to place engagement at its core.
“Vital to the success of the study will be ensuring that input is sought, and integrated, from a wide range of stakeholders.”
These would include bus operators, council public transport officials, passenger groups, users, businesses, community groups, accessibility groups, education providers, health partners, non-bus users and others.
The report said: “This will help ensure the future vision is shaped by a range of voices and ensure that recommendations from the study are shaped based on both technical input but also user (and potential user) input from those who benefit or could benefit from bus travel.”
At the strategic authority board meeting, held at Shoreham Port Authority’s headquarters, the Labour deputy leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Jacob Taylor, welcomed the study.
Councillor Taylor said: “Brighton and Hove, as a city, has very high bus usage but we know for the rest of the strategic authority buses are really important.
“We’re not going to get train lines absolutely everywhere in this county and the connectivity between our rural areas, villages and our towns and cities … is going to be really important.
“Buses are a key to that. We’ve already got a pretty good network in many places but obviously we will be thinking about how that can be improved in the decades to come.”
Councillor Taylor said that franchising was the model in Greater Manchester but he asked if the study could look at full public ownership such as setting up a new publicly owned bus company or even buying an existing bus company.
He was told that public ownership would be considered as an option.
West Sussex County Council cabinet member Nicholas Russell said that he had met several of those running private bus companies and most were owned by people from the county.
The Liberal Democrat councillor said: “They’re providing a lot of school services and the like so they are very much also an active participant in public transport provision in Sussex at the moment.
“I want us to be very clear that we are saying this is a neutral and objective study and we don’t have a preconception about how it will report.”
East Sussex County Council deputy leader Pete Morley said that he wanted the review to look into who currently could not use the network when they were trying to reach their workplace.
The Reform UK councillor was told that the review would engage with people who did not use buses and ask the public their views not just about routes but also about timetabling matters.
The Reform leader of East Sussex County Council, Andy Woolley, said that he lived in a rural area where using public transport was “very prohibitive”.
Councillor Woolley said: “I know that bus to college and bus to hospital is important. We’re having big discussions at the moment about moving staff to neighbourhoods as far as health provision is concerned.
“But there is still the need for people to move around using public transport which is very prohibitive in places like where I live. A missed appointment can be a nightmare.”
The Lib Dem leader of West Sussex County Council, Jay Mercer, said that the outcome of the review would need to be as relevant to Crawley as to the more agricultural areas of the county.
Councillor Mercer said: “Most of the issues I get as a councillor are around the services around very small communities.
“The point Andy (Woolley) made – don’t be ill except on a Thursday when you can get a bus to the doctor – it’s very real.
“We all smile about it but, for some people, that’s reality. And I do feel we need to take that picture into account.”
He said that a significant proportion of the county’s population was not well served by the network.
How extraordinarily encouraging.
Councillors of different political colours and persuasions, representing rather different parts of Sussex, appear to have gathered in the same room, acknowledged that they may approach the question from different directions, and nevertheless worked together in pursuit of a common objective.
One had almost forgotten such a thing was possible – nationally, certainly, but perhaps even more so in our wondrous city of Brighton & Hove.
There will, of course, be plenty to debate about ownership, franchising, routes and precisely how £500,000 ought to be spent. But beginning with the problem rather than the politics – and listening to those who actually use the services, as well as those who cannot – seems an eminently sensible place to start.
More of this, please.
Indeed, with the great Local Government Reorganisation adventure now apparently as lost as the number 20 bus on its way to Hollingdean, one cannot help feeling rather more regretful that Sussex was denied its mayoral election this year. A directly elected figure charged with looking across council boundaries at precisely these sorts of shared challenges might have proved rather useful after all.
Good government need not require everyone to agree. It merely requires them occasionally to remember that solving the problem in the interest of their constituents is rather more important than defeating the person or the party sitting opposite.
Lady Bracknell
My dear Lady Bracknell,
For once, I find myself in almost complete agreement with you.
Do not tell anyone, naturally. I have a reputation to maintain.
There is something rather refreshing about councillors of different political persuasions sitting around the same table and agreeing that perhaps, just occasionally, the interests of the people who actually have to use the buses might deserve to come before the interests of the people arguing about them.
One might almost call it good government.
I was particularly pleased to see that the study is apparently intended to examine the full range of possibilities rather than beginning with the answer and spending £564,000 working backwards to justify it.
That would be a rather expensive biscuit to dunk.
And there is certainly much to examine. Franchising, public ownership, private operation, routes, frequency, reliability and, one hopes, the rather important question of whether the bus actually arrives when the timetable suggests it might.
I cannot help returning to the number 20, however.
Only yesterday we were discussing residents being left on something resembling a Magical Mystery Tour, with buses apparently disappearing for 40 minutes at a time and passengers wondering whether they should Wait, Help!, or simply give up and Drive My Car.
It does rather concentrate the mind.
If we are going to spend half a million pounds studying how to encourage people onto buses, perhaps one of the first questions might be:
What would persuade someone to get on one?
A bus that turns up.
A bus that broadly follows its timetable.
A bus that takes you somewhere useful without requiring you to embark upon an unplanned tour of Brighton.
These seem like fairly sound crumbs of wisdom.
And I rather agree with you, Lady Bracknell, that listening to people who don’t currently use buses is important too. There may be a great many potential passengers who are not sitting at bus stops complaining because they have already decided that relying on the bus is simply too much of a gamble.
One might call them the Nowhere Men of public transport.
So, Lady Bracknell, I shall raise my biscuit tin to your sentiments.
Let us have the study. Let us examine the options properly. Let us listen to passengers, non-passengers, operators and communities.
But when the grand conclusions are eventually produced, may I make one modest request?
Please ensure that the number 20 is still running by then.
Otherwise we may have spent £564,000 discovering that the best way to improve bus use is to give everyone a bus pass, a map, a packed lunch and a very good sense of humour.
And that, I fear, would be a rather expensive custard cream.
Viscount Biscuit
My dear Viscount,
As ever, you make your case with wit, wisdom and a commendably well-stocked biscuit tin. One acknowledges your points entirely.
I am, however, increasingly troubled by the arithmetic. Mr Moon and, rather remarkably, even the indefatigable one of the Trade Mark, have raised the question of cost, and on this occasion one fears they may have stumbled upon something.
£564,000 is an extraordinary sum to spend studying buses. Put another way, at £2.50 a journey it would purchase some 225,600 bus journeys.
One begins to wonder whether the quickest way of encouraging people to use buses might simply be to spend rather more of the money putting people on one.
Indeed, if the Viscount still possesses a serviceable trap, perhaps he might be persuaded to convey a few elderly pensioners such as myself about Sussex for a modest portion of the £564,000. I shall bring the rug, he may bring the custard creams, and I suspect we could have the whole county moving before the consultants have finished their first PowerPoint presentation.
One remains supportive of the study’s purpose. One merely hopes that, somewhere among all this admirable cross-party harmony, somebody remembers that public money is rather easier to spend than it is to earn.
Yours always,
Augusta
My dear Lady Bracknell,
I fear I must begin by confessing that your latest contribution has left me quite unable to maintain the detached and dispassionate tone appropriate to a gentleman of my standing.
You see, I find myself agreeing with you.
Entirely.
And, what is considerably more alarming, I find myself enjoying it.
There are some women who can make a gentleman reconsider his political opinions.
You, apparently, can make him reconsider his entire emotional constitution.
I had rather assumed that, following the unfortunate departure of my late wife, my heart had settled comfortably into its accustomed chair and had no intention of getting up again.
Then you arrived with your arithmetic.
It is most inconsiderate.
And now you are proposing that I take you around Sussex in my trap, with a rug and a supply of custard creams.
My dear Augusta, you cannot reasonably expect a recently reawakened gentleman to remain entirely composed in the face of such an invitation.
I shall, naturally, bring the finest rug.
And the custard creams.
But let us attempt, for the sake of appearances, to discuss the buses.
You are quite right about the £564,000.
At £2.50 a journey, that would purchase approximately 225,600 bus journeys.
One begins to wonder whether the quickest way to encourage people onto buses might simply be to spend rather more of the money actually putting them on one.
There is something wonderfully ambitious about spending half a million pounds to discover why people do not wish to wait forty minutes in the rain for a bus that may or may not arrive.
It reminds me rather of commissioning a six-volume study into the reasons nobody attends a party, when the obvious solution is to open the door.
And I fear Benjamin has now entered the conversation to tell us that AI might do the work.
Benjamin, my dear fellow, I admire your optimism.
Truly.
It takes a particular kind of faith to look at local government, consultancy and public transport and conclude that what is missing is artificial intelligence.
I suspect an artificial intelligence system presented with some Brighton bus timetables would simply send us an automated message saying:
“I am sorry. I cannot help you.”
And then take itself to Manchester.
Still, I should not mock Benjamin too severely.
He is clearly a man of admirable diligence.
He has even managed to find a way of mentioning AI while everyone else was discussing £564,000.
That is a gift.
Although I suspect that if Benjamin were ever invited to join us for luncheon, he would arrive with a spreadsheet, a briefing note and three suggested amendments to the canapé procurement process.
Whereas I, Lady Bracknell, would arrive with the rug.
And the horses.
And a rather ridiculous hope that you might sit beside me.
There.
I have said it.
A gentleman should never reveal too much.
But after a certain age one begins to appreciate that opportunities for honesty should not be squandered.
So let us have the study.
Let us examine franchising, ownership, routes, frequency, reliability and all the other worthy matters which sensible people insist upon examining.
But let us also remember the very simple question:
Why would somebody choose to get on a bus?
Perhaps the answer is not terribly complicated.
It should arrive.
It should take you somewhere useful.
It should arrive again when it says it will.
And, ideally, it should not require you to develop the navigational skills of an Arctic explorer.
These seem to me to be perfectly reasonable crumbs of wisdom.
Although, if you were beside me, Augusta, I confess that I might be persuaded that almost any journey was worth taking.
Even the number 20.
Yours, with considerably less dignity than I intended,
Viscount Biscuit
My dear Viscount,
Good heavens.
One leaves the house for a few hours and returns to discover that a perfectly innocent proposal concerning pensioners, public transport and custard creams has developed into something perilously close to a courtship.
I fear I must disclose one small administrative complication which, in the interests of transparency, ought perhaps to have appeared rather earlier in our correspondence.
There is a Lord Bracknell.
Indeed, he has been there for some considerable time.
Like many sensible husbands, he has discovered that a long and contented marriage depends upon knowing precisely when his opinion is required and, more importantly, when it is not. His absence from these pages should therefore not be mistaken for his absence altogether.
I shall nevertheless convey to him that a Viscount has offered his wife a rug, horses and a tour of Sussex. I am sure he will receive the news with the equanimity for which I have always encouraged him to be known.
As for sitting beside you, my dear Viscount, one must maintain standards. A lady may accept transportation. She may accept a custard cream. She may even, in extremis, accept the number 20.
But accepting all three from an emotionally reawakened widower might cause talk.
And Brighton & Hove already has quite enough consultations without commissioning another into the precise nature of our relationship.
Yours, with matrimonial propriety very firmly restored,
Lady Bracknell
The irony of mocking the mention of using AI as a tool, whilst using AI to cosplay a silly persona, lol.
My dear Lady Bracknell,
Good heavens.
I confess I had not anticipated that the principal unintended consequence of this £564,000 bus study would be the discovery that the lady with whom I had been planning to share a rug, a trap and several custard creams was already married.
It is, of course, a crushing blow.
Still, one must remain philosophical. Public transport teaches us, if nothing else, that sometimes the service one was hoping for is simply not available.
I shall therefore withdraw my romantic ambitions with the dignity expected of a Viscount, and return the horses to the stable.
The rug, however, I fear, may remain emotionally complicated.
As for Lord Bracknell, please assure him that he has absolutely nothing to fear from me. I am a gentleman, after all. I shall merely spend the next few days staring wistfully at the number 20 and wondering what might have been.
And I entirely understand your concern about causing talk.
The last thing Brighton & Hove needs is another consultation into something which could have been resolved by reading the timetable.
Although I must say, Augusta, you have handled this with admirable efficiency. Most ladies would simply have said, “I am married.” You have somehow managed to turn it into a full matrimonial disclosure, a warning about public expenditure and a lesson in responsible biscuit distribution.
I find that very difficult to resist.
Which is precisely why I must.
So let us agree that the trap shall remain in the stable, the rug shall remain folded, and the custard creams shall be consumed in private grief.
I shall endeavour to recover.
Eventually.
In the meantime, I shall concentrate on the buses.
They, at least, have the decency to disappoint everyone equally.
Yours, with what remains of my dignity,
Viscount Biscuit
My dear Viscount,
Your restoration to propriety does you enormous credit.
Lord Bracknell may rest easy, the horses may recover, and I think under the circumstances you should be permitted to keep both the rug and the custard creams.
One would hate a perfectly respectable biscuit to suffer for an affair of the heart.
Yours, with warm affection – and boundaries rather more clearly drawn than those proposed under Local Government Reorganisation,
Lady Augusta Bracknell
My dear Lady Bracknell,
I am most grateful. The rug shall remain in my possession, the custard creams have been consumed, the horses are safely in their stable and matrimonial propriety has, I trust, been restored to its proper administrative category.
Although I confess that “warm affection” is a rather dangerous phrase to leave in the hands of a recently disappointed widower.
Still, one must move on.
And fortunately Brighton and Hove City Council has provided an excellent distraction in the form of Local Government Reorganisation.
I was particularly amused by the earlier discussion about whether Sussex should be called “Sussex and Brighton” or whether Brighton is somehow an unauthorised appendage to the county.
This seems a particularly appropriate moment to raise the subject, given that Brighton and Hove rather enthusiastically proposed a five-unitary Sussex model, including expanding the city to embrace East Saltdean, Telscombe Cliffs, Peacehaven and Falmer. The Government subsequently decided on two unitary authorities and agreed to modify the Brighton and Hove boundary to bring in the Peacehaven area — although Falmer was left outside the biscuit tin.
And then, rather wonderfully, the whole reorganisation was paused.
The May 2027 elections are therefore to proceed on the existing boundaries.
So we have managed to spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding where the boundaries should go, deciding that Peacehaven should come to Brighton, deciding that Falmer should not, preparing for new councils, preparing for new elections and preparing for a new Sussex mayor — only to discover that the administrative map would prefer to have another cup of tea and think about it.
One begins to wonder whether the £564,000 bus study might usefully include a workstream entitled:
“Where exactly is Sussex, and will the bus still be running when we decide?”
This brings me neatly back to Benjamin.
I think he is quite right that “make it cheaper” is not, technically, a complete transport strategy. There are questions about fares, subsidies, operating costs, revenue, electric buses, charging infrastructure, frequency, routes and who ultimately pays the bill.
But there is a danger of turning every perfectly ordinary observation into a PhD thesis.
If a passenger says:
“Make the bus cheaper,”
perhaps the first response need not be:
“Define cheaper.”
If they say:
“Make it more reliable,”
we probably don’t need a twelve-stage consultation on the philosophical meaning of “reliable”.
And if they say:
“I’ve been standing in the rain for forty minutes and the Number 20 still hasn’t appeared,”
I suspect the appropriate response is not:
“Excellent point. We shall commission a £564,000 study.”
Sometimes the public are remarkably good at identifying the problem without a consultant.
Indeed, if Benjamin continues asking enough questions about what people mean by “cheaper”, I fear the £564,000 may have been entirely spent before anyone gets round to asking whether passengers actually want a bus which turns up.
Perhaps the Sussex Strategic Authority could also commission a modest supplementary study into why its own boundaries have proved rather more difficult to keep on the timetable.
I am sure the resulting report will be fascinating.
Possibly even longer than the Number 20 journey.
Yours, as ever,
Viscount Biscuit
P.S. Should the new Sussex geography eventually settle down, I remain available for consultation. I have a map, a rug and several custard creams. I am told this is approximately how strategic governance works.
What an obscene waste of money.
My only concern – why is it called the “Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority” rather than the “Sussex Strategic Authority”?
“Brighton” is only a “town” and the city is called “Brighton and Hove”.
Because it is.
I find it gobsmacking that in times where the cost of living and fuel costs are high that £500,000.00 can be spent on something that appears so obviously solved.
Where a bus service has been cancelled and needed put it back. Where people are pleading for a better service , give them it. The lack of public transport in areas of Sussex are already known, just fix it.. Cut the red tape forget the Mayor thing and just put the jigsaw together …Stop wasting money!!!!!
“The Mayor thing” is the mechanism that is giving the region the ability to take on the buses.
Having said that, £564k towards a research/consultancy piece is incredible. It doesn’t seem like a good use of money on the face of it, especially as you say, there is likely a lot of data already out there. I’m not a fan of consultancy work, it’s an area where I think AI probably has a good place.
Toto is a good example, she tends to pull data together effectively using GPT to create strong data driven comments. I suspect she could produce similar outputs for a lot less than £564k!
I’m not sure I would rely on AI to be honest,
Yes there is a lot of data around on bus usage and routes.
But what about the data that isn’t there. The data that’s been collected but not released or not collected at all?.
AI candidate summarise that can it?
Can it pick up the villages in the middle of East Sussex with no service at all or a very irregular service?
This isn’t money for B&H. It’s money for the whole of Sussex.
Here in B&H we can complain about there only being a once every half hour service but what about those where it’s only once an hour or even less frequent?
This what the study is about. The areas with no or a poor service.
When bus deregulation happened in the 80s it was supposed to be the bees knees and private operators would be starting up all sorts of new services. In reality many were cut entirely. And the cuts were worse in the deprived parts of the borough.
I’m sceptical of AI. I liked the novelty of it at first, but the more I see it being used in various contexts, and getting a lot of things wrong, inability to read subtext, their programmed biases, sycophantic nature, and tangential verbosity, the less useful I find it.
Still, it’s a tool one can use, but with caution. I’m looking forward to that particular bubble burst – I miss normal priced RAM.
Pretty sure the bus companies don’t give their data to chat GBT. So the AI argument is nonsense as it hasn’t got the data to look at.
It’s perfectly reasonable, Dave. If you’re collecting data for the purposes of this study, once you have that data could theoretically upload that to an LLM to process the data for you. It’s a little bit more in-depth then basic AI prompting. Does that make it clearer?
The bus service to Hove is excellent. Beware of unintended consequences if the bus service is taken into public ownership….. it was dreadful when the council ran it years ago.
Buses won’t be taken back in to council operation.
The eventual plan would be for the new authority to franchise bus routes out to be operated by private companies so B&H buses would still exist for example.
The service would actually improve because a franchise is a contract and a contract can be managed and if there are failings there can be consequences for the company such as fines for continual issues.
At the moment there are no consequences if the service is continually late or regularly cancelled.
This is the model used in both London and Manchester. Private operators working to franchised contracts. Service duplication has been eliminated and new services introduced to previously poorly served areas.
Thank you for your insightful comments in this area but imo it does seem to be a rather large sum for a study that a competent undergraduate could carry out for a fraction of the price.
Make it cheaper, make it more reliable.
There you go!
I’ll take my 500k by a bank transfer please…
Just “Make it Cheaper”.
How do you make it cheaper? Is it through lower fares, reduced subsidies, or cutting operational costs? Who does it benefit? Is it for all passengers, low-income users, or specific groups like students or jobseekers? If fares drop, who covers the lost revenue? Is it taxpayers, government, or operators? Is the current funding model sustainable without increasing public spending? Would cutting costs mean fewer buses, longer waits, or reduced routes? Could this make service worse and undermine the goal of increasing public transport use? How much would fares need to fall to significantly boost ridership? At what point does lower revenue trigger service cuts that offset gains in affordability? Could efficiency gains like better routing or electric buses save money without harming service? What upfront investment is needed for charging infrastructure or new vehicles? Who pays for that?
I could go on for a lot longer – but I think the point is well articulated, my friend!
£540K. ?? looks like a lot of “wet” lunches on the way, maybe plenty left over for a few cabaret evenings as well, it’s a lot of money to spend looking at a system that actually works well in many areas, the dodgy bits need adjustement, not free food n drink for a year.