Electric Buses Need a Plan for the Next Operating Contract

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.

Greater Manchester is entering a new stage of bus franchising. In September 2026, Go-Ahead announced that Go North West had won two Bee Network operating contracts covering 38 routes and approximately 60 buses, with service beginning in March 2027. Eighteen of those routes will operate from a new depot in Leigh. The award is a reminder that operating companies can change while the depots, charging infrastructure and grid connections supporting the passenger network remain in place for decades.

Electric-bus procurement adds a long-lived physical commitment to contracts that are often much shorter. An operating agreement may run for five to seven years. A depot building, substation or multi-megawatt electricity connection can remain useful through several such contracts. Buses can sometimes be transferred between operators, but land, cable routes, electrical capacity and installed charging equipment are tied to particular sites. Those assets need to support the passenger service even when the company responsible for driving the buses changes.

Consider an authority retendering electric-bus routes. The incumbent has used a convenient depot and financed chargers and a substantial grid connection. A competing operator submits an attractive price and a credible operating plan, but has no assured right to use the depot and electricity infrastructure. It might need to negotiate with the incumbent, find alternative premises or secure another grid connection, potentially adding years of work and substantial costs. A nominally competitive tender can become much less contestable once those obligations are included.

South Yorkshire has taken a deliberate approach to this problem. In March 2026, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority announced the purchase of five major depots, adding them to the publicly owned Leger Way depot in Doncaster. First Bus and Stagecoach will lease the acquired premises back during the transition. The authority intends to use the estate for franchised operations and electric-bus infrastructure, with its first franchised services scheduled for September 2027. Six operators reached the next procurement stage for the initial packages at Olive Grove and Leger Way.

This does not establish that every city should own every depot. London has long maintained a publicly specified, competitively operated bus network while many garages remain outside direct Transport for London ownership. Secure leases, access rights, assignable contracts and specialist infrastructure providers may preserve the same continuity, depending on the local market. The practical test is whether a qualified successor operator can obtain the depot, buses, charging capacity and operational information required to take over on the contracted date.

Remaining asset value is central to that test. If an operator finances twenty-year charging infrastructure under a five-year contract, it needs to know what happens to the investment if another operator wins the routes. The authority must also avoid paying for a useful electrical connection and then finding it cannot make that capacity available to the next contractor. Depreciation, compensation, asset transfer, warranties, software access and grid-connection permissions need to be settled before the first contract ends, ideally before it starts.

England’s January 2026 bus-franchising guidance recognizes the importance of depots, charging infrastructure, transfer arrangements and competition in subsequent procurements. The engineering of electric buses has advanced considerably. Public authorities now need procurement structures that keep the fleet and its supporting infrastructure useful as routes, contractors and technologies evolve.

My TFIE Strategy Briefing article examines the second-contract test through Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire, including asset access, residual values and operating continuity. It draws on my open report, The Bus Is Not the System, comparing metropolitan bus governance and electrification across Britain and Ireland.