I'll freely admit I don't know the ins and outs of how bus passes are funded, but I also know my sympathy for the idea that high fares aren't the fault of bus companies but pensioners using buses is very limited by my own experience.
In my local area, we have two operators. Arriva Buses Wales, a subsidiary of a massive multi-national conglomerate, and Llew Jones, a small coach business from Llanrwst. Arriva's record is to whack up fares, remove return fares, buy out competition to get rid of them and announce routes are unprofitable and bin them with no notice. Llew Jones on the other hand can somehow run buses with fares half the price of Arriva. On the parts of their routes where they parallel Arriva routes people actively go out of the way to use them rather than Arriva.
My heart isn't bleeding very much for these poor hard done by big bus company monopolies.
You mean like Pennine Motor Services who closed partly because of a 20% cut in ENCTS reimbursement (as well as competition)? Or the complaints of Peter Shipp of then family owned EYMS?
Still, you could have Padarn Bus or KMP who survived because they fiddled concessionary passes...?
A good summary of how ENCTS was funded and how it changed is this from TAS
It costs approximately £1.3 billion per annum to provide the statutory free local bus travel concession in England. This is a significant increase since the concession was introduced. Over the years there has been a lot of debate about the adequacy of the funding for first the discretionary and then, after 2001, the statutory, bus concession schemes. This became particularly acute after changes in 2009 to the mechanism for calculating the allocations to local authorities.
The most recent change followed the decision to wrap up funding for the statutory concessionary bus pass with the Formula Grant from April 2011. Towards the end of 2010 the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) consulted on how the transfer of responsibility for concessionary travel would be taken into account in authorities' funding allocations from 2011/12.
Between 2008 and 2011 the Department for Transport provided a special grant, totalling just over £650 million, to local authorities to pay for the statutory concession. However, the majority of funding was provided by CLG through Formula Grant. Since 1 April 2011, all funding has been through the Formula Grant.
So the funding was insufficient at the start.
When it was then rolled into the formula grant, it comes out of the single pot of money given to local authorities so hence why other services have been cut to support the statutory ENCTS funding. And the Formula Grant has subsequently been reduced as well!
And how do you know that your notional Hartlepool tourists haven't paid ? They might have fewer paying tourists than Cornwall, but they will also have fewer bus pass tourists than Cornwall.
Really?
Pass holders voluntarily keeping their pass in their pocket..... I find that hard to believe.
I'm sorry, but if the single fare is hefty, as in the Cumbrian case, then the reimbursement will be proportionately large.
Clearly you missed this that another poster has provided...
"I worked for an operator in Cumbria, and now work for an operator who claims commercially from 2 other authorities. The reimbursement rate in Cumbria IS 58% of the adult single fare for the journey taken. If the operator sells return tickets in addition to single tickets then the reimbursement received is discounted by 10%, and if the operator sells day tickets it is discounted by 20%. There is no discount for weekly/monthly/termly/annual passes. No averages of fares sold to calculate a rate per concession, no DfT reimbursement calculator, it is as simple as that, 58% of the shadow fare for the journey taken. If the concession passenger is travelling from Dalston to Carlisle as an example, which I believe was £6 single during 2019, the operator received £3.48 from Cumbria CC for that passenger trip.
As a result some operators do have very expensive single fares, meaning quite a handsome return from the council and buses that are largely concessionary passengers only. This is where the high average concession reimbursement comes from compared to other areas who take an average of cash tickets sold across single, return (return price divided by 2), day (day price divided by 4) and week (weekly price divided by 12) to work out an average ticket price then discount that by 58% (as an example) to get a rate per concession. The RPC often gets multiplied by an expected number of concessions based on previous years data to give an operator a "reimbursement offer" for the year, paid to the operator in 12 equal amounts throughout the year."
ENCTS has pushed the single fare up because of the way in which reimbursement is worked out.
The idea was that you would have more ENCTS passengers and that they would use empty capacity and so it would be of virtually no cost to the operators - the reimbursement being for revenue foregone.
As TAS provided to the House of Commons:
"The subsidy for concessionary fares lies with the user (passholder) and not with the service provider (operator). Operators are not subsidised by concessionary fare schemes. Legally, any bus operator accepting an ENCTS pass for travel should be left ‘no better off and no worse off’ as a result of accepting the pass for travel. As such, the operators are reimbursed by the local authority for revenue forgone and additional costs incurred such as extra resources to meet increased demand from passholders and administrative costs.
Under ENCTS it is left to each TCA to calculate and advertise its own reimbursement factor, that is, the percentage of the full fare which the operator receives. This is the opposite of the situation in Scotland and Wales where a nationwide reimbursement factor applies. The percentage reimbursement differs widely across England and is the subject of much debate. It is, however, notable that as local authority budgets have been stretched, the reimbursement factors have fallen."
The reality is that has changed. Reimbursement no longer covered costs and so services were either cut and/or single fares increased to get the reimbursement up, thus disadvantaging less-regular bus users.