A fresh injection of cash to help bus services across Hampshire is to be spent on better lighting and CCTV at shelters, real-time passenger information and infrastructure improvements at colleges.

Some £13 million is set to be spent on a raft of measures aimed at improving local bus services across Hampshire during 2025/26.  

The £13,049,411 grant provided by the Department for Transport (DfT) will mean Hampshire County Council can fund priority schemes and initiatives that make bus journeys on main routes faster, more frequent, reliable, and greener.

Stuart Jones, a member of the Hampshire Enhanced Partnership Forum (EP), proposed three points for Hampshire County Council to consider incorporating into the bus service improvement plan (BSIP).

One was to use some of the funding to get more resources and catch up on the backlog on the bus route improvement plan, of which, according to Mr Jones, over two-thirds still need to be delivered. He also called for more clarity on where money would be spent.

Cllr Adrian Collett said that despite the funding ensuring the viability of existing services and keeping the modal shift going in “the right direction”, “we’re not succeeding in plugging the gaps where the services don’t exist that people desperately need”.

He said: “I recognise there are choices to be made here, but we need to find ways of plugging the gaps. It’s all very well getting good statistics on the number of people using buses, but if all we’re doing is increasing the frequency on routes so people already have a choice, then that’s not quite such an achievement.”

In response to Cllr Collett’s comments, county council officers said that one proposal in the report allows communities to fill their own gaps. 

An officer said: “We’re putting forward a pot of funding that allows communities, whether it is a parish council, a town council, communities groups or existing community transport operators, to come forward with proposals that we can receive and then fill those gaps themselves.”

Cllr Malcolm Wallace mentioned that under the BSIP, there is a share of £75,000 for ‘disability awareness initiatives’.

Cllr Wallace, who has been contacted by the Waterside Changemakers, a group which campaigns to help disadvantaged people in the county and is fighting against the county council’s plan to cut disabled bus passes before 9.30am and after 11pm on weekdays from April 1, said those residents would prefer to have been able to get on the bus before 9.30am rather than have a disability awareness initiative.

The cuts are said to affect 17,884 disabled residents and save £73,000 for the administration.

Council officers added that the conditions of the BSIP funding are “quite strict”.

“If we’ve cut a service, this cannot be used to refund that service this way. That’s just simply out of the scope of this funding.”

He added that the £75,000 for ‘disability awareness initiatives’ is a one-off funding. 

“So if we were to refund £75k for one year, we’d have to continue then to do it there on and thereafter forever and so forth, and that’s kind of causes the problem and why we’re looking more to go for the proposal that we have on the table at the moment.”

Commenting on the BSIP funding, Councillor Nick Adams-King, cabinet member for Hampshire 2050 and corporate services, said: “Our ambition is to have a high quality, efficient and dependable network of bus services across the county. But with Hampshire’s finances under significant strain, Government funding, money from developers, and investment by bus operators is absolutely crucial to our ability to link communities and improve connections to essential services.”

The 2025/26 BSIP funding will specifically support: