Forty years ago today – on 26 October 1986 – the Transport Act 1985 deregulated bus services outside London. Road service licences gave way to registration: any operator could run a commercial service, provided it registered the route and timetable with the traffic commissioner, normally 42 days in advance. London kept a franchised model.
The pendulum swings back
Four decades on, the direction of travel has changed. Greater Manchester’s Bee Network brought franchised buses back to an English city region in September 2023, and completed the switch in January 2025. The Liverpool City Region’s first franchised services began in St Helens in September 2026, and West Yorkshire has signed the first contracts for its Weaver Network, due in spring 2027. The Bus Services Act 2025 has opened franchising to every local transport authority in England, while many others continue to work through enhanced partnerships.
What hasn’t changed
Deregulated, partnered or franchised, a bus network still depends on everyone working from the same timetable. The regulatory model decides who specifies the services, who carries the revenue risk and who answers to passengers. It does not decide whether the data has to be right.
Under deregulation, the operator’s registration is the reference point; under franchising, the authority’s contract is. Either way, the same timetable has to reach the scheduling system, the registration, the Bus Open Data Service, AVL, journey planners, real-time displays and printed publicity – and agree everywhere. When it does not, passengers see conflicting departure times, and nobody can say with confidence which version was right.
Changes of model bring their own risk. As networks move from one arrangement to another, responsibility for the timetable changes hands, and franchised, partnership and cross-boundary services can run side by side. Those are exactly the moments when a single, version-controlled record matters most – the point we made in One Timetable. One Truth., where we described the timetable as a contract between authority, operator and passenger.
Better Data. Better Journeys.
That is why our Timetable Management Platform does not take sides. It works for an operator meeting its open-data obligations, for an authority specifying franchised services, and for both parties to an enhanced partnership – because in each case the job is the same: one controlled record, validated, version-controlled and published consistently to every system that needs it.
Politics and regulation will keep changing. The need for consistent, dependable data will not. Whichever side of the debate you are on, come and talk to us on stand 154 at Euro Bus Expo next week, or email hello@elydium.co.uk.