Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme information: FOI release

Information requested

I recently saw a post from the First Minister saying that the free bus scheme had hit a figure of 250,000 for young people in Scotland. Can you please provide the following information:

1. How much has this cost to provide these 250,000 bus journeys?
2. What budget did this come out of?
3. What is the breakdown by region?

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested. The reasons why we don’t have this information is explained below.

In answer to your questions:

1. From the launch of the Young Persons’ Free Bus Travel Scheme on 31 January 2022 to 21 October 2025, the total cost of reimbursing operators for the over 250 million journeys (please note you misquoted the figure as 250,000), is £538,739,717.81. Please note that as operators have up to twelve months to claim for journey reimbursement, this figure may be subject to change.

2. There is a specific allocation of funds in the transport budget to deliver concessionary travel each year.

3. We do not hold this information. This is because reimbursements for concessionary travel are made to the service operators and are not broken down by local authority area. This is mainly due to the fact that many services pass through multiple local authorities on their end to end journey and we do not have a mechanism for allocating the reimbursement for the overall journey to the individual boundaries for local authorities.

About FOI the Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.