End of the road for yellow school buses

13 December 2007

A yellow school bus pilot scheme, launched by Durham County Council three years ago, will not be rolled out across the authority after it was found the operation had only a ‘marginal effect’ on pupil behaviour – and cost more than the previous service run by a local operator.

Three 68-seat yellow buses, fitted with CCTV cameras, allocated seats for pupils and operated by county council staff, were used to ferry children to and from a secondary school in Durham. Durham’s director of environment, John Richardson, has now told councillors that the service cost much more and had only brought a marginal improvement in pupil behaviour.

Richardson said the yellow buses cost £173 per vehicle per day, £53 more than the private contractor they replaced. But the buses would continue to run on another school route in County Durham, where they would be cheaper than quotes provided by private operators. The decision has been welcomed by the Confederation of Passenger Transport UK, because the scheme had ousted the previous operator, a CPT member.

The CPT argued that the local authority’s and the previous independent operator’s costs were not being compared ‘like with like’, and the matter was referred to the ombudsman in a bid to obtain detailed costs of the council’s scheme. John Burch, deputy director of operations at the CPT, who sits on the new Yellow School Bus Commission chaired by former Home Office minister David Blunkett (Surveyor, 8 November 2007), said its members in Durham were not opposed to yellow buses but were concerned that the true costs of the local authority scheme had not been taken into consideration.

‘We know that the yellow buses are not just about cost. They are about safety and improvement in pupils’ behaviour, as well as being better for the environment, because they can help reduce the number of children travelling to school by car,’ he said. ‘But our members in Durham were worried about the introduction of a larger fleet because the core of their business is school contract work.’

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