Marking 40 years of deregulated buses

Sunday 25th October 2026 To mark tomorrow’s 40th Anniversary of bus deregulation here’s an article I wrote earlier this year for the Omnibus Magazine (the bi-monthly magazine of the Omnibus Society) explaining why deregulation worked so well in Brighton and Hove as well as a number of other British towns and cities. It perhaps also explains why deregulation manifestly didn’t work in other places most of which are now first in the queue for implementing the now available alternative of politically led and publicly controlled ‘franchising’, thanks to previously unheard of generous funding from Government. Bus deregulation is a bit like Brexit. It has divided opinions in a very binary way. You either believed sweeping away 50 years of regulation released pent up innovation and potential for growth or subscribe to the idea such freedoms heralded an unwelcome era of privatised ‘bus bandits’ making unjustified profits with little interest in the needs of passengers. Opinions became ever…