Rollout of bus franchising in the Liverpool City Region will be accelerated by a year and completed by the end of 2027, Mayor Steve Rotheram has said.
That revised timetable was first outlined in Mr Rotheram’s manifesto ahead of the mayoral elections in May and is confirmed in an updated Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) for the area that was published in June.
Upon Mr Rotheram’s decision in October 2023 to progress with franchising, plans called for completion of rollout by November 2028. A diagram depicting that is still present in the BSIP with an annotation that the original timeframe “is currently being revised for a 2027 delivery date.”
A Liverpool City Region Combined Authority spokesperson says that its officers are “currently working on plans to deliver this accelerated timeline” and that further details will follow “in the coming months.”
As described in Mr Rotheram’s manifesto, the five-stage rollout of bus franchising in the Liverpool City Region will still begin with St Helens in 2026.
Long a critic of the deregulated regime – which he says is “ideological folly” – Mr Rotheram has also committed to delivering a “24/7 service” by the end of the current decade.
A bus rapid transit (BRT) scheme between Liverpool city centre and Liverpool John Lennon Airport and to stadiums housing Everton FC and Liverpool FC is to be delivered “by 2028” and the region’s bus fleet will be decarbonised by 2035. A BRT network centred on Birkenhead is also planned.
Perhaps most notably, Mr Rotheram adds that a body called Transport for Liverpool City Region will “work towards setting up a not-for-profit [municipal] bus operator.”
Such a step is contingent on changes pledged by the Labour government to permit such work, although it is not known whether promised simplification of the franchising procedure by Labour is critical to the accelerated rollout of reregulation in the Liverpool City Region.
Separately, the release of £108.1 million of City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS) funds into the LCRCA bus network has been proposed in a move that the Combined Authority says will “supercharge” provision.
More than £32 million of that is slated to go on a new multimodal transport interchange in St Helens, while other money will be spent on “dozens” more battery-electric buses and route improvements. Reinstatement of bus lanes also forms part of the plans.
Mr Rotheram says that the investment will “lay the groundwork” for improvements associated with franchising. The CRSTS-related proposals will go before a meeting of LCRCA on Friday 19 July.
