Free bus travel for the over 60s in England

alared

You may be right about a minimum existence of £124-05 for a person to live on,probably means tested.
But surely if this is the minimum for a pensioner then it must be the same for everyone,including yourself.
Maybe there are things you can claim for if you are only managing on £60-50 a week.

I`m afraid we are digressing from the subject of free bus passes.
Good luck and I hope you find employment soon.

harryhound

There is a parallel thread on bus passes running here:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=854009

LittleVoice

harryhound wrote: »

It is better to teach a person to fish, than give them a fish to eat.
.

Thanks for trying to teach - but it doesn't help in finding busspassheaven's "clarification of the latest rules" which your earlier post suggested was there. What you seem to have found are people's views on what the rules were before 1 April 2009.

Perhaps you were suggesting that there would be clarification in due course?

Altarf

Here are fuller details of the changes - http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/regional/buses/concessionary/informationlocalauthorities/eligibleservices/servicechanges

And the two main topics, coaches and tourist buses -

Services on which more than half of the space can be reserved

What is this exclusion designed to do?
It is intended to exclude long distance intercity services, which typically are coach services, from the concession.
Under the existing criteria, it may be possible for some sections of coach routes to qualify for concessionary travel. Because previously travel was restricted to a local authority area, this was not an issue. However, with the introduction of England-wide concessionary travel, we have reassessed the criteria.

Why not just exclude coaches?
Referring to the vehicle type has been rejected as the same service can quite conceivably be run using either a "coach" or a "bus".

Why shouldn't coach services be included in the statutory concession?
The mandatory concession is intended for local bus services. There is a separate half-price coach concession which is not affected by these changes.

What if a coach service also provides an important local service?
Although the Department believe that these services lie outside of the scope of the mandatory concession, a local authority has the ability to offer concessionary travel on a discretionary basis on any services affected by these changes.

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Services operated primarily for the purposes of tourism or because of the historical interest of the vehicle

What is this exclusion designed to do?
It is intended to exclude tourist and sightseeing buses, which charge premium fares and may have commentaries or other such services. It will also exclude services that are only run because the vehicle is of historical interest.

What about local services that stop at locations popular with tourists?
The exclusion is not designed to exclude these services. The Department's view is that this exemption would not in any way exclude normal local bus services that charge standard fares but which happen to stop at tourist or historic venues.

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So you can't use a National Express (or similar) long distance coach, and "normal" buses in tourist areas are not affected. Not much change there then.

harryhound

I think the previous definition of a coach as a bus that did not get the subsidy for travelling less than 15 Km between stops, was more sensible than a definition of "more than 50% of the seats are bookable", the current definition. Unfortunately National Express, which in reality runs a business model similar to Mc Donalds (ie read carefully as you get on, the buses are likely to be owned and operated by some other company) had taken the subsidy for routes such as Brighton to London, even if they published the route as via somewhere nobody has ever heard of, where the bus crosses the M25.

Interestingly on bus pass heaven there is an explanation from an insider (?) that in exchange for the subsidy "National Express" had to replace the "over 50" discount card, that like the "Senior" rail card has to be bought up front, with the blanket 50% discount by age.

It is a murky world when the government starts handing out other peoples' money.

crossleydd42

It looks as if the website https://www.buspassheaven.co.uk has done just that - gone to Heaven!!