In October 2024 the incoming Labour government announced it would raise the bus fare cap from £2 to £3, while promising to “explore more targeted options” for “groups who need it most – such as young people.”
Eighteen months later, DfT has published Better Connected: A Strategy for Integrated Transport – a 90-page document naming disabled people, older people, women, rural residents, low-income households, care-experienced young people, and children travelling to school as groups requiring particular attention.
Students – a growing proportion of whom are making daily journeys to campus that would have been unthinkable a decade ago – don’t appear at all.
The strategy in brief
Better Connected is organised around eight priorities – simplifying payments and information, providing safe and dependable journeys, making travel accessible and affordable, creating healthier communities, aligning transport and development, championing data and technology, empowering local leaders, and optimising decision-making.
The headline commitments include Project Coral, which promises contactless tap-and-go payments across bus, tram, and rail by 2030 with automatic fare capping; a rail fare freeze until March 2027 – the first in 30 years; continuation of the £3 bus fare cap until at least March 2027; and substantial devolution of transport powers to mayors and local transport authorities through the Bus Services Act 2025.
The document is, in many respects, sensible and welcome. The vision of being able to tap a bank card at St Albans and tap out at Sevenoaks for a single calculated fare – rather than wrestling with the baroque complexity of current ticketing – would be transformative for anyone making multi-modal journeys.
The commitment to working with Google to integrate live bus location data into Maps addresses a real information gap. The focus on accessibility, including an Accessible Travel Charter and Law Commission review of transport accessibility legislation, responds to longstanding concerns from disabled passengers.
But the document’s framing of who uses transport, and why, reveals assumptions about the shape of contemporary life that no longer hold for a substantial proportion of the population in education.
The student-shaped hole
The closest Better Connected comes to acknowledging higher education is a single sentence noting that local transport authorities “play a vital role in making transport work for education, from school journeys to post-16 training.” The framing is revealing – education means children going to school, perhaps stretching to apprentices and FE students, but not the 1.9 million undergraduates and 600,000 postgraduates moving around England’s towns and cities.
The strategy’s “Spotlight on: Transport in different settings” section discusses spatial planning, proximity to public transport links, and building at “high and ambitious densities to support its use” – but the existence of universities as major trip generators, often located awkwardly between urban and suburban settings, goes unmentioned.
One case study is tangentially relevant: the Newcastle Free Travel scheme, which offers care-experienced young people and young carers free travel across the region. It’s presented as an example of targeted support for vulnerable groups – but care-experienced young people represent a tiny fraction of the student population. The scheme is valuable precisely because it recognises that transport costs can be a barrier to education.
What we know
The gap between Better Connected‘s assumptions and contemporary reality is well-documented. The HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey (SAES) 2025 reveals that 37 per cent of students now live at home with their family during term-time, up from 23 per cent in 2015.
Among those living at home, 50 per cent commute 10 miles or more to reach campus. But long commutes aren’t confined to students living with family – 27 per cent of students in university halls and 40 per cent of those living alone (away from home) also travel 10 or more miles. These are students who have nominally “moved away” but have been priced out of accommodation close to their institution.
The SAES data gives us a more nuanced typology than the residential/commuter binary. In 2025, only 39 per cent of students fit the traditional residential model – living away from home and rarely returning. A further 29 per cent are “full commuters” living at home and travelling to campus regularly, 16 per cent are “social commuters” living away but returning home frequently, and 15 per cent are “live at home students” who rarely attend campus at all. The sector is operating three or four different models of higher education simultaneously, with infrastructure designed for only one of them.
UCAS data reinforces the picture. In 2024, 30 per cent of UK 18-year-olds applying through UCAS said they planned to live at home during their studies – up from 21 per cent in 2015. The socioeconomic gradient is bleak — over half of the most disadvantaged applicants (IMD quintile one) plan to live at home, compared to fewer than one in five in quintile five. When asked what matters in choosing a university, “close to home” has risen from ninth to fourth most important factor since 2022.
The cost of getting there
A student attending campus three days a week under the £3 fare cap – assuming two single bus journeys per day – faces a cost of £198 per 11-week term, or £330 if their timetable requires five days. These aren’t trivial sums for students whose maintenance loans already fall short of living costs by several thousand pounds a year.
The NUS Scotland Cost of Survival survey found that 21 per cent of students had missed class and a further seven per cent had missed placement specifically because of the cost of public transport. NUS UK’s Move It survey found that transport costs had affected 32 per cent of students’ ability to afford food.
Transport costs interact with time in ways that compound disadvantage. Our polling has found that students with part-time jobs spend significantly more time travelling than those without – an average of 7.6 hours per week for those working 31-40 hours, compared to 3.4 hours for those with no job. For students already managing caring responsibilities, long commutes, and paid employment simultaneously, the compound burden can become unmanageable.
The accountability gap
Student transport sits in the gap between departments – and between levels of government – in ways that make it structurally invisible.
The Office for Students (OfS) has recognised the issue, at least nominally. Commuter students now appear on the OfS Equality of Opportunity Risk Register as a distinct group experiencing inequality of opportunity, and a growing number of Access and Participation Plans identify them as a target group. But OfS regulates providers, not transport. It can require universities to have strategies for supporting commuter students, but it can’t set bus fares, determine routes, or mandate concessions. The Department for Education expects universities to close continuation and attainment gaps for disadvantaged students, but has no direct relationship with transport authorities.
At the local level, the disconnection is just as stark. Local transport authorities design routes, set fares, and write Local Transport Plans without any requirement to consult universities or consider student travel patterns. Universities have no formal relationship with transport authorities – they aren’t statutory consultees, and their students aren’t represented in the data that informs transport planning.
The result is an accountability gap that no one owns. If a student drops out, the university’s continuation rate suffers and APP scrutiny follows. But if they dropped out because transport costs made attendance unaffordable, or because the bus route was cut – none of that is captured in any DfT metric, and no transport authority faces consequences.
What could help
Better Connected contains tools that could address student transport needs – if students were recognised as a user group.
Project Coral would be a substantial improvement for students making multi-modal commutes. The ability to tap a card and have fares automatically calculated and capped across bus, tram, and rail would eliminate the current complexity of different operators and incompatible ticketing systems – if the fare cap is set at a level students can afford.
The strategy’s commitment to developing a transport poverty measure – identifying “where poor transport connectivity and affordability can most affect people’s access to employment, education, healthcare and key services” – could capture student needs if “education” is interpreted to include higher education.
The devolution of transport powers to mayors and local transport authorities creates opportunities for targeted interventions – as Greater Manchester’s £2 cap and London’s £1.75 Hopper fare show. But devolution without guidance means a postcode lottery: students in one region may benefit from enlightened local leadership while those elsewhere face £6-a-day travel costs with no concession. The Buses Act gave local authorities power to design fare structures, but doesn’t require them to consider students.
The Solent Mobility Credits scheme, highlighted as a case study in Better Connected, offers £50 per month in travel credits to people on low incomes to access jobs, education, and essential services. The pilot has shown powerful outcomes: 97 per cent of participants reported improved wellbeing, and over half said it helped them find or stay in work. There’s no obvious reason why a similar scheme couldn’t be extended to students.
What joined-up would look like
If government were serious about connecting transport and education policy, students would need to be named in transport strategy documents as a recognised user group. Better Connected names disabled people, women, older people, rural residents, and care-experienced young people; 2.5 million people in higher education represent an equally significant transport constituency. DfT’s transport poverty measure would need to include access to higher education – not just “education” in the schools-and-training sense – and data would need to be collected on how many students are in the area/use their services,
Universities would need some role in local transport planning – whether as statutory consultees on Local Transport Plans, or through formal partnerships with combined authorities. The Greater Manchester Student Partnership, which has successfully lobbied for improved bus services and fares, offers a model; but it relies on local initiative rather than systemic expectation.
The 16-25 Railcard – a government-backed product that already exists – would need to feature in strategies about rail affordability. Better Connected mentions expanding eligibility for the Disabled Persons Railcard; the same logic could apply to a student-specific product integrated with Project Coral.
UCAS and Discover Uni would need to include transport cost information in the data provided to applicants. Students currently choose institutions with no standard way to compare the true cost of getting there – a significant gap given that “close to home” is now the fourth most important factor in university choice.
And OfS APPs would need to require providers to report not just what they’ve done to support commuter students internally, but what they’ve done to influence local transport provision externally.
The long game
Better Connected is a strategy document, not legislation. Its commitments will be implemented – or not – through a combination of secondary legislation, spending decisions, and local authority action over the coming years. DfT has committed to publishing an “opportunity mission toolkit” to help local decision-makers evidence the social value of transport. Whether this includes higher education access remains to be seen.
The disconnect between transport and education policy isn’t new, but it’s becoming more consequential as the student population shifts. When 37 per cent of students live at home and 45 per cent are either full or social commuters, transport is no longer a peripheral concern for higher education – it’s a determinant of who can participate, and on what terms.
Better Connected builds infrastructure that could help. But is it really too much to ask that Jacqui and Heidi go for coffee? Until someone better connects the dots between DfT and DfE, and between local transport authorities and universities, that infrastructure will serve everyone except the people who increasingly need it most.
