School travel overspend 'must be tackled'

An increase in demand following the pandemic was one of the reasons for the overspend

A £12m overspend on school transport in Surrey must be tackled “to avoid adversely impacting services”, council officers have said.

The situation has been made more difficult as “pressures anticipated for 2023/24 are significantly higher than in recent financial years”.

The main driver for the overspend has been significant inflation, policy changes and the need to maintain priority services, Surrey County Council officers added.

Closing the gap, they said, would require "a fundamentally different approach".

The council has a duty to ensure 160,000 children can get to school.

Of those, about 9,600 qualify for home to school travel assistance.

In 2021/22, 4,185 children used the scheme, up from 3,452 the year before.

Between 2017 and 2020 the figure never topped 3,000.

'Stretched and overwhelmed'

The experience of families applying for assistance in the lead up to the 2022/23 academic year was so bad, and the service so overrun, the council set up a review that came back with 50 recommendations.

One parent interviewed as part of the process said: “They must have had every parent in Surrey with children screaming at them”.

The review found that, during the peak of 2022, travel teams became “stretched and overwhelmed”.

An update on the council’s finances, discussed on Tuesday, showed the biggest cause for the Children, Families and Lifelong Learning directorate’s £17.8m total overspend was the rapid increase in demand for the travel service following the pandemic, plus the re-opening of schools, further compounded by high fuel costs and driver shortages.

Officers have said that “tackling this gap will require a fundamentally different approach, given the level of efficiencies required, to avoid adversely impacting services”.