On the buses

The extension of free bus travel for people over 60 that came into effect on April 1 applies across England, rather than across Britain as we suggested in the leader below. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland operate their own schemes for their residents, but they do not apply across borders.

Buses, unless they are of the bendy variety and in London, rarely make news. Great political reputations are not built by restructuring fares or regulating timetables. The acres of newsprint devoted to rail and driving conditions over the holiday weekend have not been matched by interest in the local transport bill, which has been winding its way through parliament for over a year and is now awaiting a Commons second reading. But buses matter. They carry people on more than four billion journeys each year in England and Wales. In much of the country they are the only form of public transport available - which is why current threats to services are such a serious worry.

The source of the danger is an eye-catching government initiative that was imposed on councils before the costs were properly worked out. From April 1 anyone aged 60 and over can travel anywhere in Britain by bus, for free. For the determined this opens up the possibility of hopping across the country by local services without paying a penny. For others it should end confusion over which routes allow existing passes to be used. But all this comes with a catch: councils will have to pay operators the fares pensioners will no longer pay - and in some places the sums are not adding up.

Some companies are responding by threatening to axe unprofitable services and run other ones less often. The strange prospect is of pensioners being allowed to travel for free on buses that suddenly no longer run. The problem is not a lack of funds overall: central government set aside £212m to cover the forgone fares. But those councils where most pensioners travel worry they will miss out, because the compensation is not being effectively distributed. Meanwhile, pensioners are being issued with bus smartcards so councils can be billed for the journeys. But this is proving a slow and difficult business. Of the 425,000 pensioners in Greater Manchester, for example, at least 100,000 have still not been given their cards.

One underlying difficulty is the part-public, part-private way that buses are run. Five big operators run most of the services, and make big profits doing so, but they depend on a complex mix of direct and indirect grants that makes it hard to hold them to account. There is no national body to represent bus passengers and little of the protection against poor service and route closures offered to rail users. But the confusion is also a consequence of Britain's half-hearted commitment to local decision-making. Politicians of all parties pay lip service to localism - but that did not stop the launch of a national scheme which councils have been ordered to implement. The price of uniformity may prove to be poorer services.