Andrew Stephenson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andrew Stephenson on 2016-10-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to (a) educate bus passengers about over-staging and (b) help them to report cases of over-staging.

Andrew Jones

The destination printed on a bus ticket should not have any effect on the amount of reimbursement that the bus operator receives for carrying concessionary passengers.

This is because reimbursement paid to operators is not based on the full commercial adult fare for a typical journey, but on the average equivalent full fare – taken from a “basket of fares” – that each concessionary traveller would have paid in the absence of the scheme.

Reimbursement payments are also subject to audits of ticket sales data and, if required, ‘on-bus’ surveys of patronage.