Transport Focus’s work on Bus Service Improvement Plans and Enhanced Partnerships 

Transport Focus has drawn on our extensive experience and insight to offer support to all LTAs. We aim to help them do the best they can for passengers – and people who don’t travel by bus but would like to – in their area.

Guidance documents 

We produced a series of guides and toolkits to support LTAs in developing their Bus Service Improvement Plans:

Briefing sessions 

We hosted a series of briefing sessions on Bus Service Improvement Plans and Enhanced Partnerships. In these online sessions we shared our insight and experience on a particular topic and then opened up to question, answer and comment from industry colleagues.

One to one advice 

We continue to offer meetings to discuss plans with our bus policy advisor. If you are an LTA or operator who would like to discuss your BSIP please contact Mike Bartram at mike.bartram@transportfocus.org.uk.

Statutory consultee in Enhanced Partnerships 

LTAs are expected to have regular, ongoing engagement with a wide range of stakeholders as they develop their Enhanced Partnership proposals. A formal consultation process must be followed with a number of statutory consultees. Transport Focus is one of the statutory consultees and expects to formally review each LTA’s proposal. By the end of 2022 we had responded to over 50 of these statutory consultations and we are continuing to do so in 2023.

Bus Centre of Excellence 

The National Bus Strategy has established England’s first Bus Centre of Excellence (BCoE) enabling the delivery of a long-term programme of activities and support. A working group has been set up to oversee the delivery of the BCoE. Transport Focus is a member of the group and will use its insight and expertise to ensure that passenger priorities are at the heart of the programme.

Measuring bus passenger satisfaction 

Listening to passengers and measuring how satisfied they are will be crucial in Enhanced Partnerships. We know that LTAs want to understand how different initiatives impact on satisfaction and compare how they perform against other areas.

Transport Focus has years of experience in measuring passenger satisfaction through the Bus Passenger Survey which ran until autumn 2019. Since then, we have explored new ways to do this with pilots taking place in several areas during 2021 and 2022.

The new survey aims to be responsive, turning round results quickly, and will be able to be scaled up or down to meet the requirements of each LTA. We are working towards having a new survey ready to roll out from early 2023 onwards.