THE possibility of offering a free city-wide bus service before Christmas will be debated by councillors next week.

Worcester City Council has customarily offered free car parking in the busy run-up to Christmas in a bid to bring more visitors and shoppers, but bosses have been weighing up its options of introducing subsidised bus travel next month following a call by Labour councillors to forgo tradition and use the subsidies to pay for free or cheaper bus travel.

Councillors will meet in the Guildhall on Tuesday (November 15) to vote on whether to introduce free buses throughout the month, on certain days or not at all.

On average, there are 5,000 bus trips every Saturday, according to the council, where the total cost of covering tickets would be at least £14,000 a day but could rise.

But while the call from Labour councillors urged the council to look into offering free buses throughout the month, the council’s ‘preferred option’ is to offer a free bus service on the Saturday (December 3) of the city council-run Christmas Fayre.

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The council said the biggest risk of running a free bus service would be the uncertainty over passenger numbers – and what a peak in interest would cost – because if the promotion proved popular in the run-up to Christmas, more people would be using buses meaning the cost would be greater to the council.

A cap on the number of free fares each day or restricting the promotion to some routes – both of which have been considered – could lead to a rush on tickets with free trips only provided on a first-come-first-served basis.

Worcester News: BUSES: There is a debate over how many days the city council could offer free bus rides to shoppers.BUSES: There is a debate over how many days the city council could offer free bus rides to shoppers.

The big dilemma for the council is that money is already tight in the Guildhall – with the council’s current predictions showing a £776,000 gap in funding this year which is set to be plugged again by last-resort ‘risk’ reserves – and £50,000 of Covid recovery funds set aside last year to help pay for free parking was consumed by the hole in the council’s predicted income, of which car parking is a significant earner for the authority.

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The money the council earns from car parking has taken a significant hit since Covid – and is still yet to recover – and was made worse by the card payment fiasco in September which saw thousands of drivers unnecessarily charged several times for parking in the city as well as pay for trips they had never made.