Derbyshire council scraps four bus service contracts - after provider found to be continually unreliable

Derbyshire County Council has stripped Hulleys of Baslow of its contracts for four routes covering journeys to Ashbourne, Bakewell, Castleton, Chesterfield, Clay Cross, Matlock and Wirksworth.

The council says this comes “after a long period of reliability and service issues from the current operator”.

Now other providers are being given the opportunity to bid for the contracts, which the council hopes will be awarded in the next few weeks.

The routes in question are:

• 63 – Matlock, Clay Cross, Chesterfield.
• 110/111 – Matlock, Wirksworth, Ashbourne
• 172 – Matlock, Winster, Bakewell
• 173/178 – Bakewell, Shutts Lane, Tideswell, Castleton

Following this decision, Hulleys will be left running half the number of routes it currently provides, taking it from 10 down to five.

The firm, which has been operating since 1921, was contacted for comment but no response has been provided.

In late 2023, a Derbyshire Dales District Council meeting was told how children were repeatedly being left “marooned in the cold, wet and dark” due to unpredictable bus services in the area.

This included reports of a woman with a baby left waiting for a bus for more than two hours in Hathersage, where routes are operated by Hulleys but under routes it is to retain and are not funded by the county council.

Cllr Peter O’Brien said this was a “daily” issue and said services in the area were “dire”, with “as many buses are cancelled each day as actually run”.

He said this left people “left abandoned in Sheffield, in Bakewell, in Chesterfield, in Eyam, in Hathersage, in Bradwell, in Stoney Middleton, in Baslow… the list goes on”.

Cllr Charlotte Cupit, the council’s cabinet member for highways assets and transport, said: “This is not a decision we have taken lightly and we have tried very hard to proactively support the existing operator to improve – and we know residents have been frustrated with this.

“However, it is not acceptable for passengers to be left at bus stops missing vital appointments, unable to get updates on services, and then missing parts of routes, which has been the case.

“I share residents’ frustrations and know some have lost faith in using these services due to the reliability issues.

“We’ve therefore been left with no choice but to take this decisive action to try to improve things.

“We hope residents will support us in taking this action and get back on the bus.

“Council taxpayers money is being used to pay for these services, and whilst we haven’t been paying for services which haven’t run, we’ve reached the end of the line and have made this decision to try to put these services back on a sustainable and reliable footing we can all trust.

“We are now looking for new operators for all four of these services. We expect that the current operator will continue running them until someone new can take over, which we hope will happen in the next couple of weeks.

“We also hope that by not running these services, the current operator will be able to concentrate on the services that they run commercially (without county council funding), as we understand there are also problems with reliability on these buses.

“We do know that the existing operator has tried hard to improve their performance and serve residents, which is what we all want to do – and we will continue to support all operators in delivering this.”

Hulleys continues to operate:

• 6 – Chesterfield to Wadshelf (Litton)
• 55 – Chesterfield to Alfreton
• 170 – Bakewell to Chesterfield
• 257 – Sheffield to Bakewell
• 271/272 – Castleton to Sheffield