Welsh Journals

10. LOCAL BUS SERVICES IN WALES: CHANGING SUPPLY PATTERNS SINCE DEREGULATION Tony Moyes INTRODUCTION The Act deregulating bus transport in Great Britain was passed in 1985 and came into force on 26 October 1986. At the time, interest in its possible effects was considerable. By 1989 a series of reports on the immediate effects of the Act had been completed (Hyde et al., 1987; Cloke and Bell, 1988; Gomez- Ibanez and Meyer, 1990; Pickup et al., 1991). Indeed, stemming from the offi- cial Wales case-study, a preliminary review of the first two years of operation of the Act in parts of Clwyd and Powys appeared in an earlier issue of Contemporary Wales (Bell and Cloke, 1989). The authors of the monitoring reports felt that insufficient time had elapsed to come to firm conclusions about the Act, partly because of the volatile condi- tions to which it gave rise; commercial bus services could be introduced and withdrawn at short notice. The various reports also pointed to bewildering differences in responses to the new opportunities and constraints from place to place on the part of both operators and local authorities. By 1995, White could identify broad trends in the local bus industry emerging at the Great Britain scale particularly a regrouping of operators, and cost cutting but acknowl- edged continuing regional differences, some but not all of which might have resulted from deregulation (White, 1995). As will be seen, Wales emerged as having had a far higher increase in the supply of local bus services than other parts of Britain, and yet it does not seem to have brought commensurate rewards to operators. This paper seeks to explore why. BACKGROUND The main objective of the 1985 Transport Act was clear: to end a 55-year-old regime of legislation which had discouraged bus operators from competing with