Since 1998, the Department has provided grants to local transport authorities through the Rural Bus Subsidy Grant, Rural and Urban Bus Challenge and Kickstart schemes. The table shows the total paid (in £s) to each authority in the North East region, and the regional total, for each year since the introduction of these grant schemes.
Authority 1998-99 1999-2000 2000-01 2001-02 2002-03 2003-04 2004-05 2005-06 2006-07 Durham 654,510 899,816 604,510 771,913 1,081,482 1,308,014 1,601,018 1,326,172 989,295 Northumberland 306,850 370,808 538,043 680,503 1,300,344 1,970,099 1,425,497 1,113,527 1,113,904 Tyne and Wear 96,151 913,758 309,071 354,768 671,523 1,196,086 1,412,614 1,303,923 1,159,038 Darlington 31,912 31,584 41,659 61,742 70,668 602,155 364,605 317,201 100,726 Hartlepool 16,522 16,019 16,872 21,544 176,102 102,986 564,494 275,430 223,181 Middlesbrough 7,779 11,542 11,542 14,738 12,542 17,224 67,741 208,437 18,889 Redcar and Cleveland 30,713 56,497 68,039 77,142 82,573 84,311 162,490 148,156 184,245 Stockton-on-Tees 22,904 33,832 45,832 55,201 154,625 156,785 259,197 308,665 213,860 Total 1,167,341 2,333,856 1,635,568 2,037,551 3,549,859 5,437,660 5,857,656 5,001,511 4,003,138
The majority of local authority support for bus services is funded from the Government’s unhypothecated Revenue Support Grant and from other sources.
The Department also provides Bus Service Operators Grant (BSOG) directly to operators of local bus services. Bus routes cross local authority borders and it is not possible to allocate BSOG payments to different local authority areas with sufficient accuracy; information on payments to individual operators is commercially confidential. However, we estimate that BSOG payments to operators in the North East region now total around £24 million annually.