Derbyshire misses out on £2.8m grant to improve rural bus services

DERBYSHIRE has missed out on a £2.8 million grant aimed at improving bus services in rural areas of the East Midlands.

This is part of a larger £20 million fund, launched last week by the Department for Transport, to support on-demand bus services such as minibuses which can be booked via an app.

These services are designed to help people in rural communities to have transport links at more convenient times.

Despite submitting a bid for the Department for Transport’s funding, Derbyshire County Council was unsuccessful.

A council spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that although we did submit a bid into the Department for Transport’s Rural Mobility Fund, it was unfortunately unsuccessful this time. We will be interested to see how the pilot schemes go, and welcome the fact that funding has been received by neighbouring authorities to carry out this work.”

Leicestershire will receive

£1.3 million and Nottinghamshire is getting just under £1.5 million.

The scheme is part of a wider national shake-up of public transport, which is backed by

£3 billion of investment. The changes include simpler bus fares with daily price caps, so people can use the bus as many times a day as they need without facing mounting costs; more services in the evenings and at the weekends; integrated services and ticketing across all transport modes, so people can easily move from bus to train and all buses to accept contactless payments.

Trentbarton welcomed these changes last week and said: “The new strategy creates a once-in-ageneration opportunity to provide faster, more reliable journey times and transform services to provide even greater value for money for our customers.”

Transport Minister Baroness Vere said: “Buses are the lifeblood of our communities. The funding will give local authorities the opportunity to trial services that work better for communities.”