West Berkshire Bus Service Survey 2025

Tell us your experiences.

Consultation status Results published

Start date: 2025-06-23

End date: 2025-08-31

Results date: 2025-11-03

Category: Roads, Transport and Parking

Ward:

Activity closed. Results published.

Background

The National Bus Strategy "Bus Back Better" was launched by the Conservative Party led government in March 2021. It set out their vision for delivering better bus services in England.

To be eligible for funding linked to this national strategy, we submitted our Icon for pdf Bus Services Improvement Plan 2021 [3MB] (BSIP) to the Department for Transport (DfT) in October 2021 and established an Enhanced Partnership with local bus operators in April 2022.

Upon submission of our 2021 BSIP we received £2.6 million to make improvements to buses by March 2026 (originally March 2025) and received further monies in May 2023 and June 2025 to continue with this work.

Part of the National Bus Strategy work was to set targets to show the impacts the Enhanced Partnership is having on local public bus service. One of these is targets is customer satisfaction.

You can find out more about the targets and monitoring process by visiting our Enhanced Partnership webpage.

Why we want your views

We're asking for your views on the current bus service in West Berkshire, including how satisfied you are with the service overall and how satisfied you are with various aspects of the service, e.g. value for money, punctuality, frequency of service and passenger waiting environments.

Your views are important as they can lead to direct improvements to your bus services. We've secured approval from the DfT to use BSIP funding to give grants to parish and town councils to improve the bus shelter offer in the district. Six parish/town councils have received funding to introduce improvements to bus shelter provision, and these improvements should be seen at locations across the district shortly.

How to take part

Our survey closed at midnight on Sunday, 31 August 2025.

If you have any questions about the survey, please email transport@westberks.gov.uk

Our Transport webpages provide information about bus service provision across the district.

What happens next

Your feedback will help us focus our resources and inform future schemes. Once your responses have been reviewed and analysed, the results will be shared on our Enhanced Partnership (for local bus services) webpage.

What you told us

We received 700 validated survey responses. Compared to last year, a higher percentage of respondents stated they had used the bus within the past three months (78.4% in 2025, 77.6% in 2024), this increase could be because there was a decrease in the number of non-bus users who responded, compared to 2024.

For the most part satisfaction has increased since 2024, however, the results have indicated that respondents feel bus services are now not such good value for money, which is likely an outcome from the National Single Fare Cap rising from £2 to £3 in January 2025.

In this year's survey we asked respondents to rate, from very good to poor, the following aspects of the bus services: age/quality of buses, accessibility (getting on/off bus), security (how safe do you feel on the bus?) and bus drivers (friendliness/professionalism). Results show that 75% of respondents selected good or very good, the lowest score was for age/quality of buses and the highest was for accessibility with 83.73% of respondents selecting good or very good for customer satisfaction with bus drivers only slightly behind with 83.72%.

A more detailed breakdown of the 2025 survey results can be found within the Bus Service Improvement Plan October 2025 progress report will be available on our Enhanced Partnership (for local bus services) webpage.

What we did

The feedback you have provided will be used to help focus resources, inform how future funding will be allocated and report against the targets set by the West Berkshire Enhanced Partnership and will assist with reporting to the Department for Transport (DfT). A more detailed overview of the survey results will be made available in the target progress reports on the Enhanced Partnership (for local bus services) webpage.