(11 Mar 2017, 3:24 pm)markydh wrote I've just checked the last financial report for Busways as a whole and it made a post-tax profit in 15/16 of £9.03 million, which was actually an £800K increase. Cleveland Transit was £2.5 million. Greater Manchester Buses South was £9.46 million. I mention the latter because it's various depots see heavy investment year on year. To put that into context, Busways has less than half the number of vehicles GMBS has, yet generates almost as much post-tax profit.

Interesting; I've just done a search on the Companies' House site for GMBS, albeit I can only decipher Pre-tax profits. That seems to show gross profit of £12.526m (is £3m+ a bit much for tax?). Point being, profits have nose dived over the last two years. Turnover has actually increased, but I suspect that's more to do with fare increases and the transfer of the GMBW (ie. Wigan) accounts to the main company. It all points to a big increase in costs
My point about "rumour v fact" is that the Statement blames the drop in profit on a repayment of an internal loan, the continued stagnation of the Economy and cuts in LA funding. However, the "rumour" is that the drop in profits is due to the cost of "Roadworks in the city" estimated at £8 million. As such, the company has been "instructed by Perth" to cut services across GM to recover that money. 

As regards the seemingly large investment - you'll note that it isn't continuing into 2017/8 - this is presumably due to a combination of trying to stop a voluntary "LEZ" becoming compulsory, and decision to get rid of MANs (of all ages) as quickly as possible. A more subtle variation of the latter could be a bid to generally replace single-deckers with double-deckers to allow for across the board cuts in headways, whilst maintaining peak hour capacity. That would save the most money "on paper", but with punctuality worsening by the day, especially outside the city boundary, and the reduced flexibility for day-to-day maintenance (virtually all buses out from 0700-1800), I suspect it will only accelerate off-peak passenger loss.

The whole situation is complicated by mixed messages about the Bus Services Bill, of course. On the one hand, we had the Second Reading in the Commons last week, with some very surprising and encouraging comments from certain GM MPs (of all three main parties), with a rumour of a further announcement this coming Friday. OTOH, there is a suggestion that the fallout from Brexit will delay the whole process until after the Mayoral Elections - which in turn could put the whole Bill in doubt, although the source of this suggestion hasn't explained how.