An Evaluation of Urban Bus Deregulation in Britain A Survey of Management Attitudes - Progress in Planning S.

The UK bus and coach industry was subjected to massive change by the Transport Acts of 1980 and 1985, which progressively dismantled the apparatus of discriminatory regulation dating from the statute of 1930, and returned the parastatal companies to the private sector while ending the producer subsidy that had expanded after 1968. There is a general agreement that the success or failure of this policy cannot be judged in the short run, while the flow of time brings exogenous factors to bear such that statistical comparisons become increasingly meaningless. In this research a general overview of the purpose and process of deregulation and privatisation is followed by a report of a research programme designed to examine the extent to which these have forced managers to accept a consumer satisfying paradigm of the industry, as a proxy for the extent to which the intended benefits of the legislation have been achieved. The research proceeded by way of structured interviews of managers with a background questionnaire sent to informed observers.