£2 bus fare cap is ‘sticking plaster’

Transport campaigners have welcomed the £2 fare cap for buses in Glasgow and West of Scotland but said that it was “little more than a sticking plaster” on a broken system.

The bus fare cap comes into force today (7/9/26) where passengers will pay £2 per journey with participating operators and the remainder of the fare is topped up by the public purse.  There is already a £2 fare cap in the Highlands & Islands, Orkney and Shetland but prices are still unrestricted in the rest of Scotland.

The Scottish Government have pledged to bring forward a ‘Better Buses Bill’ in the current parliamentary session, but it is unclear when this will be or what exactly the Bill will seek to change.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a £2 fare cap for all of England from January 2027.

Owners of McGills bus company, the Easdale brothers, are billionaires and were on the Sunday Times Rich List in 2026. Stagecoach founder Brian Souter was on the Rich List in 2020.

Friends of the Earth Scotland’s Senior Transport Campaigner Emily Donnelly said:

“The Government has rightly recognised that private bus companies have raised their ticket prices beyond reasonable levels for too long. The bus fare cap is a welcome intervention that will ease pressure on the pockets of millions of ordinary people.

“However, it is little more than a sticking plaster on a broken bus system that is failing communities and the planet.

“A fare cap is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough to address the decline we are facing after forty years of Thatcher’s failed experiment of selling off public buses and deregulating services. A fare cap appears to bring prices down, but in reality it means massive transfers of public money to the pockets of the millionaires who own Scotland’s bus companies. We are spending a fortune patching up just one of the symptoms of a broken system.

“Cheaper tickets make little difference to people where buses don’t turn up, services have already been cut, or a route doesn’t exist in the first place. Transport has long been Scotland’s most climate polluting sector, which only adds to the urgency to ensure our most used form of public transport is a quality alternative to relying on cars, in a country where more than a quarter of people do not have access to a car.

“The only way to deliver genuinely affordable, accessible, and sustainable public transport run for communities – not for commercial interests – is by bringing bus services back into public ownership. Ministers’ plans for legislation on buses must put the resources in place to make that a reality.”