Questions have been raised over how Hampshire County Council will invest £14 million in government funding to support bus services in the region.

In November, the government announced that from the £955m national bus funding scheme, Hampshire County Council was awarded £14 million, aiming to support, improve, and protect “crucial” services until 2026.

At full council on February 13, Cllr Malcolm Wallace asked the council how it planned to spend the money. He was told traffic lights prioritising buses, more real-time information displays, and improved bus stops were all part of the plan.

Leader of the council, Nick Adams-King, who is the cabinet member for Hampshire 2050, said the 2025/26 bus grant comprises two parts; the bus service operators grant, a funding of around £1.1m, and the bus service improvement plan (BSIP) of £13 million.

According to Cllr Adams-King, the operators grant will continue to support the subsidised bus network, predominantly serving Hampshire’s rural communities and market towns where bus services are not commercially viable.

The BSIP element, split into £7.5m of capital funding and £5.5 million of revenue funding, will be targeted at a “range of interventions to stimulate the expansion of the commercially provided bus network consistent with the aims of the government’s national bus strategy,” he said.

The funding is anticipated to deliver similar initiatives to the previous round of the BSIP, including pump priming enhancements to commercial services, support for commercial services where passenger numbers have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, bus priority schemes to speed up bus services and improvement liability.

It will also be focused on:

Given the recent cuts to rural bus services, Cllr Wallace inquired how the funding schemes would deliver the “best outcomes” for Hampshire residents.

Cllr Adams-King said the funding to support those services is “a quite small element of this”.

He explained that the £14 million is split between different elements of the BSIP funding. Therefore, the “headline figure of almost £14 million does have different subsections of it, and it’s very much for us to use it as innovatively as we can”.

He added: “The important piece is around the roll-out of demand responsive services, which I think are an answer to many of those rural areas where there have been cuts in the recent past. It is those areas where we need to find ways by which we can create sustainable public transport.

“Running large buses in rural communities where there are not many people using them is simply not economical for us.

It probably isn’t right for us to use the pump priming money to create routes that we know might eventually fail.

“We’ve held some very interesting and useful sessions with a number of community transport providers and bus companies to begin to join up that network  much better.”

The county council and bus operators are currently developing the BSIP’s programme for the 2025/26 funding. It will be subject to approval by the Hampshire Enhanced Bus Partnership Board and by an executive member decision next month.