BRITISH BUS DEREGULATION

When the British government published its proposals to deregulate the bus industry in a White Paper in 1984, considerable debate ensured. The measure has proved neither as good as its proponents expected nor as bad as its opponents feared simply makes reaching a conclusion on the merits of bus deregulation more difficult. The layout of this paper is as follows. In the next section we describe the background to the decision to deregulate the British bus industry, and the changes that were involved. The next two sections look at the theoretical arguments for and against bus deregulation. We then turn to a brief review of what actually happened, before reaching our conclusion. -from Author