Marking 40 years of deregulated buses

Sunday 25th October 2026

To mark tomorrow’s 40th Anniversary of bus deregulation here’s an article I wrote earlier this year for the Omnibus Magazine (the bi-monthly magazine of the Omnibus Society) explaining why deregulation worked so well in Brighton and Hove as well as a number of other British towns and cities. It perhaps also explains why deregulation manifestly didn’t work in other places most of which are now first in the queue for implementing the now available alternative of politically led and publicly controlled ‘franchising’, thanks to previously unheard of generous funding from Government.

Bus deregulation is a bit like Brexit. It has divided opinions in a very binary way. You either believed sweeping away 50 years of regulation released pent up innovation and potential for growth or subscribe to the idea such freedoms heralded an unwelcome era of privatised ‘bus bandits’ making unjustified profits with little interest in the needs of passengers. Opinions became ever more entrenched as the decades have passed with the famous generalised comparison usually cited of consistent growth in regulated London from the early 2000s alongside year after year of mileage cuts and withdrawn services across Britain outside of the Capital.

Of course, as always, the truth lies somewhere in between those two extreme characterisations and the choice between regulation and deregulation is not binary at all. As has been seen in many exemplar areas, where local authorities and motivated managers, at locally based and locally controlled bus companies, work together towards a common objective of growth, then you can achieve a virtuous circle of consistent investment in bus improvements and increasing numbers of passengers.

It’s easy to forget, and indeed many involved in the industry today are too young to have had direct experience of regulation, just how stifling the pre 1986 regime was for those wanting to provide the best possible service for passengers with potential for growth. Some changes of emphasis were made in the 1980 Act but there was little incentive to improve frequencies or try out new bus routes as incumbent operators as well as British Rail and other bodies had a statutory right to object, as they usually did, and the onus was on the licence applicant to prove the desired improvement would not have a detrimental impact through any abstraction from existing services.

In today’s contactless, ‘tap and cap’ digital ticketing world, complete with political inspired fare capping by the Prime Minister, it seems impossible to think that in those pre deregulated days every change to every individual fare and ticket price had to be applied for and justified in a bureaucratic Traffic Court hearing in front of a Traffic Commissioner.

The loss of passengers in the 1960s and especially the 1970s and early 1980s became unsustainable. As a new fresh faced entrant into the industry in the early 1970s I recall thinking if the annual decline in passengers continued unabated during a career I hoped would span the next 40 or so years then it was touch and go whether there’d be any passengers left by the time I retired.

Something had to be done. The old regulated regime may have worked in the 1930s and through to the early 1960s but growth in car ownership as well as changing retail, leisure and social habits meant it was no longer appropriate for the 1980s. Directors at the National Bus Company had recognised this with its subsidiaries embarking on the Market Analysis Project in the early 1980s to identify viable networks which local authorities could supplement with additional financial support to fund extra services. This was enacted alongside reorganisations of the companies whereby mergers of the 1970s to create larger subsidiaries to save overheads were reversed and instead new smaller units led by enthusiastic locally based managers in tune with the local market began trading.

Midland Red, Western National, Bristol Omnibus, Hants & Dorset, East Kent/Maidstone & District were just some of the companies split up as well as Southdown where I’d been appointed Assistant Traffic Manager in 1982. By 1985, when we recreated an autonomous Brighton & Hove operation within Southdown, it had become obvious the Conservative Government’s intention was not only to deregulate the industry but privatise the state owned companies in small units to encourage competition, so it was decided to formally split Southdown into two operating and one engineering company, one of which was the Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company which I had the privilege to lead initially as General Manager.

Those early years were an exciting time to be involved in the industry. Establishing a ‘new’ bus company (it was actually a resurrection of the dormant Brighton, Hove & District company which had merged into Southdown on NBC’s formation) was a tremendous opportunity to bring in a new approach to providing great customer service as well as enhance staff relations while the upcoming need to register a commercial bus network to commence on Deregulation Day on 26th October 1986 (the date is etched in my memory) enabled us to look afresh at which bus routes had the potential to grow and those which were never going to be financial winners.

In the regulated world, frequencies of the former routes would be consistently cut to release resources to keep less remunerative routes afloat. The old principle of cross subsidy between routes was alive and well but it had the impact of making the best routes, with the most potential, increasingly unattractive and the routes with no potential struggled on. No wonder passenger numbers fell every year. The new approach saw us reverse this trend and improve frequencies of those routes with potential and let the local authorities take on the financial liability of the poorly used routes by inviting tenders for their continued operation.

Looking back now it’s testament to the skills of my colleagues who oversaw network development, that those routes we registered as the first commercial network in 1986 are still the ones that are successfully growing forty years later with frequency uplifts and regular intakes of new buses ensuring a high profile operation to attract more and more passengers.

We’d had the benefit in Brighton and Hove of working alongside the municipally owned company, Brighton Borough Transport, in a coordinated urban network under the Brighton Area Transport Services Agreement (BATS) for many years so once deregulation came along, it was no surprise that as managers who knew and trusted each other, we both tended to stick to operating the routes we knew well rather than start wasteful competition between us, which I’m sure the competition authorities would have liked to have seen.

However that didn’t mean we didn’t experience competition in the area with new operators attempting to gain market share from time to time including one particular onslaught along the coast road between Newhaven and Brighton which after various iterations and ownership changes even led to competitive cross city routes for a time. But these interlopers had their work cut out simply because of the market share we’d built up with an emphasis on encouraging passengers to buy what we used to call ‘off-bus’ tickets. This became all the more pertinent when the Go-Ahead Group (which had purchased Brighton & Hove from the management buy-out team in 1993) also purchased Brighton Buses (as Brighton Borough Transport had become through its own employee buy-out) in 1997 and merged it with Brighton & Hove to form one all encompassing bus company for the conurbation.

That same year East Sussex County Council was reorganised along with Brighton Borough and Hove Borough Councils to form a new Unitary Authority for Brighton & Hove which quickly established its desire to encourage residents and visitors to the area to use public transport with active restraint on car use through substantial parking charges and rigorously enforced on-street parking management and control which, when effective, can be just as good as a congestion charge.

With Go-Ahead’s philosophy of backing its locally based managers and leaving them to get on with the job of developing the local market for buses we soon saw consistent growth in passenger numbers as frequencies of those same core routes improved alongside annual investment in new buses, attractive ticket deals (including in the early 2000s a simple to understand flat £1 fare in the city) with high profile and locally based marketing campaigns as the council introduced a network of bus lanes and priority measures and jointly funded, with the bus company, a real time information system, which being first in the field, revolutionised the way passengers travelled.

By the early 2000s the network was 95% commercial with a consequent significant reduction in public funding compared to the early 1980s, yet passengers enjoyed a more intensive and attractive level of service including night bus routes.

None of the foregoing would have been possible under the old regulated regime.

The idea the so called prized regulated regime in London would consistently see reductions in passenger numbers year on year (as it has for over a decade) alongside (Covid pandemic aside) consistent growth in passengers in areas such as Brighton & Hove seems to be unthinkable to critics of deregulation. Yet that is the situation, and what a difference looking back to those worrying days when I joined the industry in the 1970s to realise that far from there being no passengers left, by the time I retired in 2013 we had successfully doubled the number of passengers since the mid 1990s giving the city the highest bus use per capita outside of London.

And it’s thanks to deregulation.

Roger French

PS Apologies to email subscribers and online viewers earlier on Saturday morning for all the typing errors in yesterday’s blog – somehow the first draft slipped through into publication without any proofreading. My thanks to all who let me know of errors they’d spotted especially my good friend Tony who spotted 24 of the 30 typos. The favourite was Rubble Motor Services along with Midland Fred North! Hopefully today’s blog is error free after being proofread – twice.

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