HOW could a Scottish council get more people using buses, improve the network, cut costs, and grow revenue all at the same time?
Scottish Borders Council may have found the answer: By running bus routes themselves.
Since 2024, the local authority has brought around half of bus routes across the Borders in-house, making it the largest operator in the region.
“The impact has been great,” Jenny Linehan, Scottish Borders Council’s executive member for transport, told The National.
“We've grown council passenger numbers from 2000 to nearly 12,000 annually. When we're all trying to make that effort to achieve net zero and to relieve the pressure on our roads, it's really, really good.”
And there are more numbers which tell a story of success:
- If the council had awarded private contracts to run the in-house services (following a tender exercise in early 2025), its costs would be around three times higher than they are now.
- All local bus services have been maintained or extended without increasing the council’s £1.3m annual bus subsidies budget.
- Although routes are still being subsidised, revenue growth on the buses is reducing costs.
- The Galashiels town service, as an example, has doubled in passenger numbers since the first months of operation.
Bus services brought in-house have included the 80 and 81 services for Kelso Town Centre, Morebottle, and Yetholm; the 54 and 74 Galashiels service; and the 90, 91, and 93 services covering Peebles, West Linton, and Biggar.
Last month, the council launched a new 44 route linking Hawick, Lilliesleaf, Midlem, and Selkirk to Borders General Hospital in Melrose. The route will be run as a pilot until next March, with the NHS consulted to ensure it matches shift times.
The route expansion suggests a healthy bus operation, but Linehan said that getting to this point has not always been smooth sailing.
“The cost is there will be other areas, perhaps some services, that will have been restricted to make other services better,” she said.
“Usually those services have not been performing terribly well, but the constituents see that as a cost in that their service isn't coming through three times a day, it only comes twice a day. But by freeing up that one other service, we're able to add a service [elsewhere].”
Linehan went on: “The biggest challenge is change. People are always reluctant to change, and as with any success story, there's always a few people who will gripe and say ‘but this doesn't work for me’.”
However, Linehan said, doing the groundwork beforehand meant that the council could argue “this is based on data, on the information that you've given us”.
The councillor said the secret of the success had been an extensive network review conducted in 2024, something which had not been done “since the Second World War”.
The review used a series of data sources – including mobile phone signals – to work out where people wanted to travel and when. This allowed the council to respond directly to demand, and put bus routes where people need them.
It also made some long-term problems easier to solve, Linehan explained, pointing to the “mega issue” of the interchange between trains and buses.
“You’d get a lot of people who were very frustrated because by the time the bus was arriving, the train had just left and vice versa,” she said. “We had a lot of very pissed off people, frankly.
“It sounds so simple to achieve and people go, ‘well why don't you just fix it?’
“That's fine, but we have to notify bus operators, and if we change one timetable that then affects all the other timetables, and then we have to tie it in with ScotRail, who are an enigma in their own. It’s much easier to deal with that [with the buses] in hand.”
Public control over formerly private services is not, perhaps, the direction you would expect a Tory-led council to be going in. But for Linehan, it is not about political affiliation.
“Conservative or not, the most important thing is to take advice from those who actually know what they're talking about and direct policies that support the people,” she said.
“We had to bring services in hand because operators couldn't afford to run. The only way we could ensure that there was a service still running is by actually ensuring that we put that service there.”
But, she cautioned, the Borders system might not work for everywhere.
“It depends on the individual area, it depends on the economics of that area,” she said. “Glasgow and Edinburgh would be totally different. In terms of their operators, they know when the demand is and where the demand is.
“It's pulling that information together that makes the difference.”
