Franchising. A Modern Day Epic

I went to see The Odyssey at the cinema the other day. I came out captivated by storytelling, epic tales and sagas. A human skill, IMO, that we are losing…rapidly. About 15 years ago, I read both The Odyssey and the Iliad and the love was still there.

So, I wanted to write an article, a story, without any AI assistance, writing guides, prompts or drafts. No Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity. Purely my hands, my rusty brain and my keyboard.

This probably sounds crazy coming from a CEO peddling an AI business, but whilst AI is great, some things are better done by a human hand!

Imperfection is the new perfection… right

My Epic Begins

So my story is below, a twisting tale of an Odyssey. The often long, arduous and relentless journey of procurement, bidding and tendering

But with less monsters

Let’s look at the structure of Homer’s epic and Odysseus himself… The famous parts of the poem, the Cyclops, the Sirens, the whirlpool, are not narrated forward. They arrive in later on as a flashback, told out loud by Odysseus himself at a dinner party.

A stranger washed up on a beach. No ship, no crew, no proof that any of it happened. He is sitting in the hall of a king who has the one thing in the world he needs, a vessel and a crew to take him home.

So he tells him a story. And at the end of it, the king gives him the ship.

You start with nothing, you sell a vision and if your vision is good enough, you are rewarded with the prize you desire.

Is that not a competitive bidding process?

• A stranger with no local track record, in front of the person holding the resource, turning a narrative into an award.
• An evaluator is being asked to believe a story about a future that has not happened yet.
• The bidder with the best evidence does not always win. The bidder who makes the evidence mean something does. The bidder with the best story wins!

Lets pause on that.

Bus franchising here in the UK is causing a great many capable public authorities to leave the harbour, whilst most of the sector still sit in the great hall, discussing something else

When Regulators becomes Operators

For almost half a century the job of a local transport authority (outside London) was to be the shore. Set the policy, subsidise the routes the market would not run, stay above the fray.

The Operator ran the buses and when the buses ran late, the Operator explained why.

Franchising ends that. The authority specifies the network, sets the fares, carries the revenue risk and pays an Operator to drive. The Authority is not the shore any more. It is the ship.

On 27th October 2025 the Bus Services Act 2025 received Royal Assent and section 1 does something quiet and enormous! It deletes the requirement for the Secretary of State’s consent before an authority can even begin a franchising assessment.

The old heading, in the Transport Act 2000, ‘Consent of the Secretary of State and notice’, is struck out and replaced with three words: ‘Notice of assessment.’ It came into force in January this year.

Permission became paperwork.

Worth a point here, because most coverage gets it wrong, the restriction confining franchising to mayoral authorities had already gone, by regulations made in November 2024. What the Act removed was the permission. The National Audit Office counts seventy nine local transport authorities in England and the harbour gates are now open to all of them.

The cost of crossing an ocean

Greater Manchester went first and is still the only authority to have completed the crossing. Close to six years from declaring the intention in December 2017 to the first franchised bus in September 2023. Another sixteen months to the final tranche in January 2025. 577 routes, around 1,600 buses, £134.5m of forecast net transition costs.

And on the thing passengers actually notice, it worked.

On time punctuality across the network was 75.8% in March 2025, against 71.6% a year earlier, when only around a fifth of the network was franchised. That is a real improvement and Manchester should be given kudos for it.

Here is the part that does not make the press release.

Transport for Greater Manchester’s 2024/25 accounts carried a disclaimer. The auditors couldn’t form a view at all. £88m of lease liabilities and £122m of right of use assets had to be corrected, because the lease treatment applied to the franchised fleet… was wrong. The statutory accounts missed the June deadline and were not published until October, with the work still going on.

Six years of preparation and the organisation had still not finished working out how to put 1,600 buses onto its own balance sheet.

They got the buses running before they got them onto the books.

That is not incompetence. That is what it looks like when an organisation built to write contracts starts running machinery. Specify a network and you inherit its accounting, its risk, and its scoring. Manchester’s own committee papers carry the tell, a note in brackets that the punctuality measurement source has also changed.

You do not just take on the buses. You take on the definition of whether they are late.

Buying in the dark

In February, Liverpool City Region awarded the contract for the system that will manage its franchise agreements, monitor performance and calculate what each operator gets paid. We have seen a recent release by Transport for Wales just this last week.

In Liverpool, four tenders submitted, three at final stage, all SMEs. The winner (big congrats from me by the way) has two decades of delivery in Australia and New Zealand, but, from what I can find, this is its first UK contract.

None of that is a negative! Twenty years is a real record and four bidders is a healthy competition. The interesting number is elsewhere, or more interesting is that there are four numbers.

The first number went out in October 2025 at £1,140,000 and was terminated two weeks later. The second number was estimated at £816,000. The third number, the award notice, in February, said £1,392,000. The fourth number, contract details notice, three weeks after that, said £1,032,000.

All numbers VAT inclusive… all still live on Find a Tender today… Nothing published reconciles them and the contract start dates do not match each other either.

That is what buying looks like in a category you have never operated. You cannot scope precisely what you have never run and an authority that has never run a payment engine is being asked to specify one before it has processed a single period.

The costs aren’t settled either. The DfT puts the price of taking one authority into franchising at £13m to £22m.

Oxfordshire County Council, weighing its options last October, costed around £880,000 to set up and £420,000 a year to run, over 45 months, with a potential £20m depot on top. Numbers may be defensible, the DfT’s range assumes a whole network at Manchester’s scale, but they cannot both be the right number to plan against, and seventy nine authorities are about to find out which.

Oxfordshire looked at its own arithmetic and stayed ashore. On 21st October its Cabinet rejected franchising and went for an Enhanced Partnership instead, citing the costs and the logistics. Which is worth pondering, because seventy nine authorities now have the option and nothing says they all take it. The port being open is not the same as the fleet sailing.

As noted earlier, a few days ago Transport for Wales published its own tender, a bus contract management system, £2m+ value, to carry around 700 routes into roughly 120 franchise contracts across four regional phases, completing franchising transition by 2030.

Operational by June 2027. The notice states the aim plainly, ‘The central aim is to automate as much of the contract management process as possible, reducing manual intervention and minimising risk of error.’ That is not a technology preference. That is an authority that has done the sums on 120 contracts and worked out that people with spreadsheets will not survive the crossing.

The scar and the story

As with all good stories (although I doubt the above will be made into a Hollywood blockbuster, with Matt Damon, stranded at a bus stop, trying to get the number 41 home after a day of work)

We end at the beginning, so back to Homer and then I’ll stop.

Homer and the epic poems from ancient Greece have lasted three thousand years because underneath the beautiful story telling there is something rooted that does not move, no matter how hard you try.

Bids are the same and about to be much more so. Anyone with a free AI subscription can generate the narrative now.

But almost nobody can generate the evidence. The documents and bidders that win from here will be the ones where the story is carried by something rooted, a real number, a real depot, a real scar on the leg from a boar.

And beautiful story telling is what joins it all together

Over the next few years, a good quantity of the seventy nine authorities will leave the harbour, needing exactly that. Needing technology, knowledge, data. Prepare your epic, so when the time comes, you can captivate an authority and win the prize

That is the problem we built economAIcs for. You will be hearing more from us.

The numbers, in one place

Sources

• Bus Services Act 2025, section 1
• Transport Act 2000, section 123C as amended
• Franchising Schemes (Franchising Authorities) (England) Regulations 2024, SI 2024/1224
• National Audit Office, Local Bus Services in England, HC 949, 27 June 2025
• GMCA Bus Franchising Re-Procurement Strategy
• GMCA Overview and Scrutiny Committee, 23 July 2025, Delivering the Bee Network
• TfGM Auditor’s Annual Report 2024/25
• Liverpool City Region, terminated tender notice
• Liverpool City Region, tender notice
• Liverpool City Region, contract award notice
• Liverpool City Region, contract details notice
• Oxfordshire County Council Cabinet, 21 October 2025, Future Bus Regulation Options, Annex 1
• Transport for Wales, Bus Contract Management System

I tried my best and double checked every figure in this piece, but it will be far from perfect. So, if (or when) you spot a mistake, have a different view or just want to comment, please, shout out! I love and welcome any conversation on public transport.