1. Review of the concessionary transport scheme

When a child or young person does not have a statutory entitlement to free home to school transport, sometimes we are able to offer transport through our concessionary seats scheme. We currently provide concessionary transport for 569 children.

The scheme allows parents to apply for available bus seats and pay a subsidised daily fare. We currently charge £1.63 per return journey as a contribution towards the running cost of the service.

Around 60 of the 569 children take up spare seats on an existing bus journey provided for statutorily entitled children and therefore their transport does not require any additional funding by us. However, around 500 children receive transport that does require us to fund additional bus or transport services. We pay over £250,000 per year to provide this additional transport. Many other councils do not provide a scheme of this type.

There are two elements to the review of the concessionary transport scheme:

1. To help meet the costs of providing the concessionary scheme, it is proposed to increase the daily fare, so that it is in line with commercial public transport rates. The Go North East U19 return fare is currently £2.80 per return journey and we propose to introduce the same level of fare for our concessionary scheme from the start of the next academic year, in September 2023.
2. We are also proposing to phase out some of the concessionary scheme routes which are currently paid for by us. This may lead to less concessionary seats being available to purchase in future years for children who do not meet the statutory entitlement criteria. This will not be in place for the next academic year as it will take longer to plan and will require further discussion with affected individuals and schools.

Please note, if your school funds and provides its own concessionary transport scheme, it is not included in this review. You will know your child is part of a school administered service if you receive the transport invoice from the school, not us.