DfT’s Transport Data Action Plan Sounds Right — But Bus Safety Transparency Still Lags Behind

The Department for Transport’s new Transport Data Action Plan says many of the right things.

It describes transport data as central to building a modern, efficient, safe and inclusive transport system and says better use of data should support improved planning, better services, and more informed decision-making. It also says data should be better shared, better understood, and more effectively used across the sector and with the public.

In principle, that is difficult to disagree with.

The problem is that, in the bus sector, the reality still falls well short of that ambition.

The Action Plan itself acknowledges that transport data is not yet being used to its full potential, and that barriers remain around availability, compatibility, prioritisation and investment. It also recognises that progress is often held back by limited access to good quality data.

That description is not abstract. It is exactly what repeated Freedom of Information work has been revealing across bus governance.

For some time now, I have been examining how transport authorities, combined authorities and national bodies hold, define, monitor and publish bus safety information. The pattern that keeps emerging is one of fragmentation. In some places, data exists but is dispersed across organisations. In others, responsibilities are split between authorities and operators. In too many cases, core safety information is either not centrally held, not clearly defined, or not transparently published at all.

That is why the Transport Data Action Plan matters. It gives a clear statement of what government says a good transport data system should look like. The difficulty is that the bus sector still appears some distance from meeting that standard.

Take Greater Manchester.

In one FOI response, Greater Manchester Combined Authority said it did not hold analysis, briefing papers, correspondence, mitigation measures or risk assessments relating to the reported increase in bus and coach occupant KSI casualties, directing the request elsewhere instead. In another, GMCA confirmed that it does not monitor Bee Network bus safety performance indicators and therefore does not hold any list of those indicators, their definitions, guidance on how they are collected, or governance documents explaining how safety performance is monitored. In a further response, GMCA said it does not hold incident investigation procedures, lesson-learning governance documents or operator reporting guidance for serious Bee Network bus incidents, stating that it is not responsible for investigating incidents on the Bee Network.

Those responses matter because they raise a basic question: where does visible, strategic safety accountability actually sit?

This is not simply an administrative issue. It goes to the heart of whether bus reform is genuinely being built on a transparent and data-led foundation. If a combined authority associated in the public mind with a major franchised bus network says it does not itself hold the main safety monitoring framework, does not monitor the safety indicators, and does not hold the incident investigation framework, then the public is entitled to ask how strategic oversight is being exercised and how that oversight can be scrutinised.

The contrast with the language of the Transport Data Action Plan is striking.

The DfT says data should be shared between organisations and with the public, should be trusted and of sufficient quality, and should help organisations respond to users’ needs. Yet in practice, bus safety information often appears split between different bodies, held in inconsistent forms, or absent from the public-facing governance framework altogether.

That gap matters all the more because government is moving further into bus reform, franchising, enhanced partnerships and local control. As responsibilities shift, the need for robust safety governance becomes greater, not less. If new delivery models are being developed without clear and transparent safety data arrangements, there is a real risk that reform changes the structure of bus services without fixing underlying weaknesses in accountability.

To be fair, the Action Plan is not meaningless. It does contain useful commitments. It points to the need for better standards, improved interoperability, stronger APIs, better public-sector capability, and more sustainable approaches to transport data infrastructure. It also identifies bus data, including BODS, as an area for further development. But if that agenda is to mean anything for buses, it must extend beyond timetable and service information into the more difficult territory of safety oversight, incident reporting, performance monitoring and transparency.

That is where the real test lies.

A transport system cannot credibly describe itself as data-led if key safety information is still fragmented, inconsistently defined, or effectively invisible to public scrutiny. Nor can authorities rely on the language of innovation and modernisation if long-standing questions about safety governance remain unanswered.

The DfT’s Transport Data Action Plan sets out the right ambition. But ambition on paper is not enough. In the bus sector, the challenge now is to ensure that safety data is not treated as peripheral, optional or someone else’s responsibility.

If transport data really is meant to underpin a safe and inclusive system, then bus safety transparency has to become a core part of that promise.

Bus safety, Transport data, DfT, Transport Data Action Plan, Bus reform, Transport governance, Bus franchising, Bee Network, FOI, Public transport, Vision Zero, Safety transparency

About the author:
Lee Odams is Branch Secretary of the RMT Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Bus Branch and a campaigner for stronger bus safety governance, transparency and accountability. Through extensive FOI work across the UK, he has been examining how authorities monitor, define and publish bus safety information as bus reform develops.