Reeves unveils free summer bus travel for children in England
Rachel Reeves will make bus travel free for every child aged five to 15 in England this August, in a £100m bid to ease family budgets.
Rachel Reeves has unveiled a summer bus policy that will make travel free for every child aged five to 15 in England throughout August, in a move the Treasury says is backed by more than £100 million. The offer, part of the government’s wider Great British Summer Savings package, will cover participating local buses, allow unlimited journeys and require no registration.
For families, the budget test is straightforward: every qualifying child will be able to ride without paying a fare for the whole month. A household with one child making repeated trips to clubs, parks, shops and relatives will save the full cost of each journey; a family with more than one child will see the benefit multiply across August. The exact cash saving will depend on local fares and how often children travel, but the scheme is designed to remove bus costs entirely during the school holidays.
The chancellor paired the fare-free offer with targeted cuts to agri-food tariffs on products including biscuits, chocolate, dried fruit and nuts, as ministers look for ways to soften pressure on household bills. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government wanted to make life easier for parents over the summer and help families feel less squeezed. The package adds to recent measures including support for energy bills, a minimum wage increase and frozen rail fares and prescription charges.
The policy lands on a bus network outside London that has been shrinking for years. Department for Transport figures cited by the Transport Select Committee show bus journeys in England outside London fell from 4.6 billion in 2009 to 3.6 billion in 2024, a drop of 21.7%. The National Audit Office said there were around 1.8 billion bus journeys outside London in 2023-24 and described buses as essential for getting to work, education, shops and medical appointments. That weak backdrop matters: the free summer scheme may find room on some routes, but capacity is uneven and the busiest services could still feel the strain when school holidays begin.
The announcement also sharpens the long-running argument over youth transport. The Transport Select Committee has called England’s concessions a “patchwork” and wants a universal free bus pass for all under-22s. Ruth Cadbury, the committee chair, has said poor or non-existent buses especially hurt young people who need them for school, college, university and first jobs. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has also called for free bus travel for school-age children as one of the practical steps needed to tackle child poverty, saying children face “Dickensian” levels of poverty.
London already offers free bus and tram travel for children aged five to 10, and free bus and tram travel for 11 to 15 Zip Oyster card holders. Outside the capital, the West of England Combined Authority ran a school-holiday free travel scheme in 2025 for around 150,000 children aged five to 15, while places including Kent, Leicestershire, York and Barnsley have tried local youth discounts or free travel.
When August ends, the free journeys will end with it. That makes the scheme a sharp but temporary cost-of-living intervention, and a test of whether short bursts of free travel can build lasting habits or simply offer one month of relief before families are pushed back onto regular fares.
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