For the first time since 1986, Liverpool City Region decides where its buses go and what they cost. Private companies still drive them. Here’s what changed, how it was done, and how you’ll know if it’s working.
On 6 September, the buses in St Helens turned yellow. The routes, timetables and fares were no longer set by the bus companies but by the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, and for the first time in 40 years, buses in Merseyside were back under public control.
Wirral follows on Sunday 25 October, when Go North West takes over. That date is a nice bit of symmetry: bus deregulation took effect on 26 October 1986, so Wirral gets its buses back forty years, give or take a day, after it lost them. Sefton is next, in July 2027, followed by Liverpool and Knowsley that September.
The Mayor calls it taking back control, and that’s fair. But it’s worth being precise about who has the control now. The short version: the Combined Authority. The public now owns the new buses and the depots they sleep in, private firms still drive them under contract, and if fares don’t cover the cost, the bill lands on the public purse rather than a shareholder. Whether it works will show up in three things over the next year: punctuality, fares and routes.
What does franchising actually mean?
Under the old system, each bus company decided which routes to run, how often and, within limits, what to charge. Profitable routes got buses. Unprofitable ones got cut, or survived on a council subsidy.
Under franchising, the Combined Authority plans the network and sets routes, frequencies and fares, then pays a company to run it under contract. The fare money goes to the authority, not the operator. If a bus is late or dirty, the operator answers to the authority, which has punctuality, reliability and cleanliness targets written into the contracts.
So the people driving your bus still work for private companies. Stagecoach runs St Helens and Go-Ahead runs Wirral. What’s changed is who those companies answer to, and who you can blame.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The Mayor has described the old setup as a second-class service that places profit before passengers. It’s a good line, though the picture was messier than that. For years the biggest operator in the region, Arriva, was owned by Deutsche Bahn, and so ultimately by the German government, until it was sold to the US investment fund I Squared Capital in June 2024. And one of the new operators, Go-Ahead, is itself owned by investors Kinetic and Globalvia. Shareholders haven’t left the building. They’ve just stopped being the ones who decide where your bus goes.
The real change is accountability. Before, a cut route was a commercial decision with no one to vote out. Now there’s one person whose job depends on the buses: the Metro Mayor. When people complain that Liverpool’s investment stops ten minutes from the centre, in places like County Road, Anfield and Garston, whether a decent bus reaches them used to be a commercial call. Now it’s a political one.
How did we lose control in the first place?
Until 1986, buses in Merseyside were run by the public sector. The Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive, set up in 1970, ran the county’s buses and trains as one system.
Then came the Transport Act 1985. Outside London, it broke up the passenger transport executives and threw bus services open to competition, with effect from 26 October 1986. Any operator could register a route and run it. The theory was that competition would drive fares down and services up.
In Merseyside it didn’t work out that way. Some services were cut back and fares shot up. Two years in, a study for the metropolitan councils found Merseyside fares had doubled and passenger numbers had fallen by 32.5%, the worst drop of any big city region. Transport researchers who studied the first year reached a similar figure, about a third, and put roughly half of the loss down to fares. The rest they blamed on an unstable network: routes changing, buses unreliable, and timetables nobody could keep track of. For a while there were full-blown bus wars, with rival companies racing each other to the stop.
It’s worth being fair to the other side of the argument here. Some in the industry argue the fare rises began in April 1986, before deregulation, when the metropolitan county councils were abolished and subsidies were squeezed, and that bus use was already falling before 1986. Both things can be true: the subsidy cuts pushed fares up, and deregulation broke the network into pieces. Either way, Merseyside’s bus passengers paid for it.
Three decades later, the Bus Services Act 2017 gave mayoral combined authorities the power to take buses back. Greater Manchester went first. Liverpool City Region consulted in 2023, and the Mayor made the decision to franchise that October.
How do you take back a bus network?
The Combined Authority didn’t seize anyone’s buses. It did two things: it bought its own fleet, and it took the depots, by force where it had to.
The buses. Rather than inherit the operators’ vehicles, the authority decided to buy the fleet itself, so that whichever company wins a contract runs the authority’s buses. It started with more than 100 electric double-deckers, then ordered hundreds more from Wrightbus in Northern Ireland and Alexander Dennis. The authority puts the total at £150 million for 560 buses.
Not all of them are electric, which surprises people given the yellow buses’ green branding. One order alone, worth £57 million for 207 buses, includes just 30 battery-electric vehicles. The rest are diesel. They meet the Euro VI emissions standard and the Wrightbus models are built to be converted to battery power later, which matters, because the region’s target is a zero-emission fleet by 2035.
The depots. This is the part most people missed. Running a bus network means having somewhere to park, fuel and fix a few hundred buses, and nearly all the big garages belonged to the existing operators. The authority decided that owning them was crucial: whoever holds the depots holds the keys to who can bid for the contracts. Its plan is to own them and lease them back to operators.
In March 2025 it approved a compulsory purchase process, described as a back-up in case voluntary negotiations with landowners failed. The order, made that September, covers 22 plots across seven sites, plus land to expand the depots at Birkenhead and Speke. Six of the sites are Arriva’s, including Laird Street in Birkenhead, Hawthorne Road in Bootle, Green Lane in Old Swan, Jackson Street in St Helens and Southport. The seventh is Stagecoach’s Gillmoss depot on the East Lancs.
Stagecoach objected. The company argued it stood to lose its main depot in the city region, that it had invested £14.8 million there, and that the authority hadn’t properly considered alternatives to taking the freehold. In the end it backed down. Six objections were lodged in all, and every one, Stagecoach’s included, was withdrawn: five before the public inquiry opened in July 2026 and the last before it closed. The planning inspector recommended the order be confirmed, finding the authority had made meaningful attempts to buy the land by agreement and had the money in place to pay for it. On 29 September, the Transport Secretary confirmed the order.
So “taking back control” isn’t just a slogan. In practice, it meant the public sector arming itself with the power to force private companies to sell their garages, and the companies, faced with that, standing down. What isn’t public yet is how much the owners will be paid, or which depots have actually changed hands. A confirmed order is the power to buy, not the purchase itself. Compensation is negotiated with the authority, and if the two sides can’t agree, a tribunal decides.
What changes for you, and when?
It depends where you live.
| Area | Switch date | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| St Helens | 6 September 2026 | Stagecoach |
| Wirral | 25 October 2026 | Go North West (Go-Ahead) |
| Sefton | July 2027 | Still to be appointed |
| Liverpool, Knowsley | September 2027 | Still to be appointed |
| Halton | Not included for now | — |
Sources: Bus News, Go North West, Find a Tender, BBC via AOL.
Halton is the odd one out. It’s part of the city region, but it doesn’t pay into the regional transport levy that the other five councils contribute to, so Runcorn and Widnes aren’t in the franchised network when it first rolls out.
In St Helens, the authority promised changes from day one: more frequent services, extra evening and weekend journeys, an X3 express to John Lennon Airport, and some routes renumbered so they don’t clash with routes elsewhere. It says 5,000 more residents now live within a 400-metre walk of a bus stop. In Wirral, some routes are being extended to reach hospitals and rail stations directly. Go North West takes over 117 buses on 45 routes, largely from Arriva’s Laird Street depot in Birkenhead.
The buses themselves will gradually all look the same, in the yellow, black and grey Metro livery, the way London’s are red and Manchester’s Bee Network buses are yellow.
Fares are the quieter part of the story, because the Mayor already had a lever there. Adult single fares in the city region have been capped at £2 since September 2022, even after the national cap rose to £3, and the cap carries on under franchising, and under-19s can get a day’s unlimited travel with MyTicket. Franchising means the authority now sets every fare directly, not just the cap.
The early numbers look encouraging, though it’s early. The authority says more than 110,000 journeys were made in St Helens in the first week, and that 32% of the region’s bus network is now running on publicly owned buses.
What it can’t fix, and who pays
Franchising changes who’s in charge. It doesn’t change the roads. A franchised bus stuck behind a bin lorry on Queens Drive is still stuck, and only bus lanes and priority measures will fix that. Nor does a new contract conjure up more drivers or mechanics.
Then there’s the money. Under the old system, if a route lost money, that was the operator’s problem. Under franchising, the fare income comes to the authority and the authority pays the operators, so if passenger numbers fall short, the gap is a public one. Operators made exactly this argument before the decision, warning that taxpayers would end up responsible for the full cost of the network, and that council tax bills would rise to pay for it.
The authority’s own early analysis was candid about the trade-off. It found franchising was the best option in most respects, but accepted that a partnership with the existing operators could have delivered improvements faster, more cheaply and with less risk. At that stage it estimated the transition would cost around £20 million, possibly rising to £38 million if key risks materialised, with around £56 million for depots and £85 million for buses. The fleet bill has since grown well past that early figure.
The sharpest critic was Robert Montgomery, a former managing director of Stagecoach’s UK bus business who once ran its operations in the region. He said the authority’s 558-page assessment contained 19 fundamental errors and that the costs of more services, lower fares and an electric fleet were unquantified or underestimated, leaving a network that would lurch from one funding crisis to the next. Even so, he conceded that franchising might well be the right answer for the region. The authority’s response was that the assessment was based on factual data and independently audited by KPMG.
Some of that money question has been answered since. The government is putting in £86.3 million up to 2029 to help the switch. Whether that is enough to cover the gap between fares and costs once all five boroughs are franchised is the question nobody can answer yet.
Will it work? Look at Manchester
Greater Manchester went first, launching its franchised Bee Network in September 2023, so it’s the closest thing we have to a preview.
The early signs there were good. A year in, passenger numbers on franchised buses were up 5%, nearly seven million more journeys, and Transport for Greater Manchester said services were costing a third less per kilometre to run than under the old system. Punctuality on the first tranche of routes reached 80%. But Manchester’s own bus director admitted to MPs that performance lagged in the later tranches, and that the network was still a work in progress.
That’s the pattern to watch here too. St Helens and Wirral are the easier start. The real test is September 2027, when the busier, more congested networks of Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley switch over.
It’s the same test The Scouser put to the Baltic Triangle: who was asked, who paid, and who it’s for. If you want to judge it yourself, a year from now, ask three things:
- Is your bus on time more often than it was? The authority is building a system to monitor operator performance across every route, so the data will exist. Whether it’s published is another matter.
- Has your fare gone up, down or stayed put? The authority now sets every fare, so it owns every increase.
- Has a route you lost come back, or has one you rely on gone? Under franchising, every cut is a decision someone made and can be asked about.
It doesn’t stop at buses
The buses are the first piece of something bigger. In July, the Combined Authority backed plans to bring Merseyrail into public control when the current contract with Serco and Transport UK runs out in July 2028. The public already owns the new trains, after more than £500 million spent on the fleet; this changes who runs the service. The handover lands on Merseyrail’s 50th anniversary, and Liverpool Council leader Liam Robinson summed up the mood with a line borrowed from the terraces: Merseyrail is coming home.
Liverpool knows what happens when nobody owns the problem. In 1956 the Overhead Railway, the world’s first elevated electric railway, closed because its private owners couldn’t afford the repairs and no public body would step in. Merseyrail now runs more or less the same route underground, and from 2028 it will be the public’s.
The national railway is going the same way. Avanti West Coast, which runs the trains from Lime Street to London, moves into public ownership on 7 March 2027, years before its contract could have run out in 2032. The Mersey Ferries and the road tunnels are already run by Merseytravel.
Add it up and, by 2028, almost every way you get around Liverpool, by bus, train, ferry or tunnel, is due to be publicly owned or publicly controlled. That’s arguably as complete a reversal of the 1980s as any city outside London has managed.
And the Mayor has his eye on something else entirely: the river. The company developing Mersey Tidal Power, a barrage that could generate power from one of the biggest tidal ranges in the country, is wholly owned by the Combined Authority. He has committed to keeping a public stake in the project, and is exploring a publicly owned energy company to sell the power it makes. It’s not a new idea, either: harnessing the Mersey’s tides has been floating around the city region for years, and exploring tidal power was written into the region’s devolution deal back in 2015. It’s still at the planning stage, and nobody is nationalising your electricity bill just yet. But after the buses and the trains, the next thing Liverpool wants a stake in might be the Mersey itself. More on that soon.
If your route changes: what to do
- Check the timetable before you travel. In St Helens, some routes were renumbered at the switch, and the same may happen elsewhere as each area moves over. Merseytravel’s journey planner and the operators’ apps carry the new times.
- Your ticket still works. The £2 adult single and MyTicket for under-19s are set by the Mayor, not the operator, so they apply on franchised buses too.
- Complain to the right people. On franchised routes, the Combined Authority sets the standards and holds the contracts, so it, through Merseytravel, is ultimately answerable for the service. Tell the operator about the problem on the day, and tell Merseytravel if it keeps happening.
- Have your say. The authority runs consultations on route changes through its LCR Listens site. Under franchising, that’s where the decisions about your route actually get made.
