Yellow school buses should be offered for all primary school children living over one mile from school, a cross-party commission has recommended.

Chaired by former minister David Blunkett, the Yellow School Bus Commission found that the number of primary school children getting to school by car has nearly doubled to 41% over the past two decades, with only 5% travelling by bus, due to safety fears.

However, rolling out a yellow school bus service to primary schools would reduce car journeys by 20%, removing up to 3% of all car traffic on the roads between 08:45 and 09:00.

This estimated reduction of up to 130M car journeys per year equates to 55,000t of CO2 emissions per annum.

Further benefits of such a service would include reductions in accident costs and truancy rates as well as job creation in the bus industry, altogether valued at £70M per annum, which would offset the £57.6M cost to the Treasury in lost tax and duty that would result from less driving on the school run.

In most cases secondary school pupils would not require a dedicated bus service, as they already use public buses in many locations.

But a service should be considered for distances greater than two miles to secondary schools – or in special circumstances, where existing bus services are poor, where there is challenging pupil behaviour on the public bus network or where there is potential for linking services with primary school provision, for example.

The year-long review recommends a phased expansion of yellow school bus services for primary schools over the next five years and a financial incentive for schools that stagger their hours – ‘the key to delivering efficiency’. ‘Our hope is that Government – nationally and locally – will feel able to take forward the recommendations in this report,’ Blunkett said.

A spokesman for the Department for Transport said: ‘Ministers will now consider the recommendations contained in the report, the value for money aspects of these and their wider implications, so that they are in a position to provide a serious response to a serious piece of work.’