New bus operator sought for four Derbyshire services

They are:

· 63 - Matlock, Clay Cross, Chesterfield.

· 110/111 - Matlock, Wirksworth, Ashbourne

· 172 - Matlock, Winster, Bakewell

· 173/178 - Bakewell, Shutts Lane, Tideswell, Castleton

All four services are part of the ‘supported bus network’ which means they are paid for by Derbyshire County Council. The bus network in the county is made up of a mix of these supported services and then mainly commercial services which are run privately by operators.

The council has today, Thursday 13 March, put all four services out to tender so that other bus operators can put bids in to run them.

The decision has been taken after a long period of reliability and service issues from the current operator.

Derbyshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Highways Assets and Transport, Councillor Charlotte Cupit, said: “This is not a decision we have taken lightly and we have tried very hard to proactively support the existing operator to improve - and we know residents have been frustrated with this.

“However, it is not acceptable for passengers to be left at bus stops missing vital appointments, unable to get updates on services, and then missing parts of routes, which has been the case. I share residents’ frustrations and know some have lost faith in using these services due to the reliability issues.

“We’ve therefore been left with no choice but to take this decisive action to try to improve things. We hope residents will support us in taking this action and get back on the bus.

“Council taxpayers money is being used to pay for these services, and whilst we haven’t been paying for services which haven’t run, we’ve reached the end of the line and have made this decision to try to put these services back on a sustainable and reliable footing we can all trust.

“We are now looking for new operators for all four of these services. We expect that the current operator will continue running them until someone new can take over, which we hope will happen in the next couple of weeks.

“We also hope that by not running these services, the current operator will be able to concentrate on the services that they run commercially (without county council funding), as we understand there are also problems with reliability on these buses. We do know that the existing operator has tried hard to improve their performance and serve residents, which is what we all want to do – and we will continue to support all operators in delivering this.”