You wait for £94m then an extra £16m comes along...

GREATER MANCHESTER TO GET MORE CASH FROM GOVERNMENT FOR BUSES

- JOSEPH TIMAN

GREATER Manchester will get an extra £16m for buses from the government next year.

The city-region received £94.8m to spend over three years from the same pot of funding, but the cash which has helped subsidise bus fares is still set to run out in 2025, as it stands.

The government says the new funding has come from the savings made by scrapping the new high-speed railway line to Manchester.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the Northern leg of HS2 would be cancelled at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester earlier this month, promising that ‘every penny’ of the £36bn saved would be spent on smaller transport projects.

Setting out plans for ‘Network North’ in his party conference speech, he listed a series schemes – some of which had already been announced before – that would benefit from the HS2 funding. But he later admitted that these were ‘illustrative’ examples of what the cash could be spent on with local leaders set to decide how to invest any extra funding allocated.