Hampshire County Council welcomes national funding to improve bus travel
It's after a noticeable increase of 1.7 million bus journeys in the past year
Hampshire County Council is welcoming national funding to improve bus travel after the Government's announcement of the Local Authority Bus Grant.
The council's received £27.2 million of capital funding from the Department for Transport, and £24.9 million over a four-year period starting next year.
Funding is planned to be targeted on a range of improvements aimed at boosting bus use across the county.
Councillor Lulu Bowerman, Cabinet Member for Highways and Passenger Transport at the County Council, welcomed the announcement: "This long-term funding gives us the certainty to work with bus operators and community partners to improve bus services – which is already paying off as Hampshire’s bus passenger journeys have increased by 6.8% over the past year.
"It means we can plan ahead with confidence and invest in improvements that will make bus travel more frequent, cleaner, and more reliable, bringing real benefits for residents.
“A better transport network makes it easier for people to choose greener travel, helping to cut congestion and tackle climate change.
"We are using the available funding on improvements which will encourage more people to take more bus journeys, so services become financially self-sustainable in the long term.
"The more people who use the bus network, the better it becomes for everyone – it strengthens our local economy, enables young people to reach education, training and jobs, and gives older residents more opportunities to stay independent and connected to their community.”
The funding will be helping to improve things like bus priority lanes, expanding bus timetables on busy services, infrastructure at sixth form colleges, real-time and on-bus passenger information, a fund for rural bus shelters and a community transport fund and toolkit.
The council say there's been a rise in the number of bus passenger journeys in Hampshire.
Figures from the Department for Transport stating a rise from 24.9 million in 2023/2024 to 26.6 million journeys in 2024/2025.