Essex County Council has awarded the Colchester Park and Ride bus contract to Stephensons of Essex for £2,561,085, running from 26 September 2026 to 2030.
A different company will run the Colchester Park and Ride buses from Saturday 26 September. Essex County Council has awarded the contract to Stephenson’s of Essex for four years at a cost of £2,561,085.
The award is set out in an Executive Director Decision, reference 321/02/07/26, signed on 2 July 2026 by David Gibson, the council’s Executive Director for Place and Customer. The council published the decision record on its own register. It was exempt from call-in, so no committee voted on it.
The existing agreement for buses at the site ends on 25 September 2026. The council’s own published timetable for the route, valid from 5 January 2025, names Arriva as the operator.
What the contract covers
The decision report sets out the terms:
- four years, from 26 September 2026 to 25 September 2030
- a total cost of £2,561,085
- an option to extend for up to three further years, to 25 September 2033
- a gross cost contract, so the council keeps the fare and parking income
- the council, not the operator, sets the timetable, the fares and the vehicle specification
- the council also leads the growth and marketing strategy for the service
That last point matters for passengers. A change of operator here is a change of bus and driver, not a change of price list. Any change to the timetable or the fares would be the council’s decision.
As of today the council has not published a new timetable for 26 September. The PDF still on the Travel Essex page for the site is the January 2025 one. We could not confirm today whether the timetable changes on the day the contract does.
The money, and why the taxpayer is still paying
The service was originally expected to pay for itself from 2026/27. It does not. The decision report gives the council’s medium term budget for the site.
| Year | Expenditure | Income | Forecast deficit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026/27 | £950,000 | £370,000 | £580,000 |
| 2027/28 | £992,000 | £381,000 | £611,000 |
| 2028/29 | £993,000 | £393,000 | £600,000 |
| 2029/30 | £1,001,000 | £405,000 | £597,000 |
Every one of those deficits is covered by Department for Transport bus grant rather than by council tax. The report notes a risk in that. The grant has been awarded for three years only, up to and including 2028/29. Colchester Park and Ride is still forecast to lose £597,000 in 2029/30, the fourth year of the new contract. If no further grant is announced, the report says, “funding will need to be reprioritised”.
The tender itself came in cheaper than the deal it replaces. The daily rate for the first year is £64.03 lower, a cut of 3.18%. On the roughly 305 operating days a year the council uses for its sums, that is about £19,500 less in year one. The daily rate then rises by around 5% a year.
The report also offers a more optimistic figure. Ticket volumes have been growing strongly, and if that continues through 2026/27 the deficit could come in at about £480,000, which would use £100,000 less grant.
How many people actually use it
The equality impact assessment attached to the decision gives passenger journey counts for the site.
Use has recovered, but not to where it was. The council records 257,524 journeys before the pandemic, 182,336 in 2024/25 and 197,364 in 2025/26. That is a recovery to 77% of the pre-pandemic figure. The same document quotes 2024/25 as 183,336 in a later section, a thousand higher than the figure in its monitoring section, so treat that year as approximate.
For April to August 2026 the assessment breaks the journeys down by ticket:
- 52,726 adults
- 13,139 under-19s
- 6,579 older person’s concessionary passes
- 5,838 group tickets
- 1,455 disabled pass holders
The council’s own case for the service is a price comparison. A Park and Ride day costs £3.20. Long stay parking in the city centre, the assessment says, “can cost in the region of £10 per day”. Our guide to parking in Colchester has the city centre tariffs.
Who Stephensons are
Stephensons of Essex Limited is registered at Companies House under company number 01815977. It was incorporated on 14 May 1984, under the former name Stephenson’s Coaches Limited, and its registered office is Monometer House, Rectory Grove, Leigh-on-Sea.
The contract was competed openly. The tender notice on Find a Tender, published on 1 May 2026, put the estimated value at £2.6m and closed to bids on 2 June. Bids were scored 70% on price, 15% on quality, 10% on social value and 5% on climate.
One clause in the decision is worth keeping. The contract requires the operator to move from diesel to electric buses “when ECC assesses that the option is available and offers value for money”. No date is attached to that.
Why the contract runs to 2030
A four-year term was a deliberate choice, and the reason is local government reorganisation. The report expects Park and Ride to become the responsibility of new unitary authorities from their creation in 2028, if reorganisation goes ahead.
A three-year contract would have forced a fresh procurement decision in early 2028. The new authorities, the report says, “would not be ready to lead this procurement at that time”. So the council signed for four years instead, and the decision on what happens in 2030 will fall to whoever runs Colchester by then.
The report also records that the council does not own the Colchester Park and Ride site, which is why closing the service would not have released the land for anything else.
What it means for you
- If you use the Park and Ride, nothing you pay changes on 26 September. The council sets the fares, and the published fares are unchanged: £3.20 adult, £1.10 child, £2.00 student with ID, £5.40 for a group of up to two adults and three children, £2.70 off peak between noon and 3pm on weekdays.
- A hospital appointment letter still gets you the £1.70 fare. So does an older person’s or disability concessionary pass.
- The site opens 06:30 to 19:30 Monday to Friday and 07:00 to 19:30 on Saturdays. There is no Sunday service. The car park is locked after the last bus, so you cannot collect a car later.
- Parking without using the bus costs £3.00 a day and must be paid before you return to your vehicle.
- If the buses look different from Saturday, that is why. The route, the stops at the hospital, the railway station and the High Street, and the fares are the council’s to change, not the new operator’s.
- Colchester United home match parking dates for the season are listed on the council’s Park and Ride page, starting with Exeter City on 17 October.
Since October 2025 the Park and Ride service has also formed the north-east leg of Colchester’s Rapid Transit Service, which the report says benefits from bus priority signalling in the city centre. For everything else moving around the city this week, see our Colchester roadworks and travel page and our train times to London.
Sources: Essex County Council Executive Director Decision 321/02/07/26, “Colchester Park and Ride Services 2026 to 2030 Award”, and its appended Equalities Comprehensive Impact Assessment, both published on the council’s decisions register; the council’s Colchester Park and Ride page and its published timetable; the Find a Tender notice; and the Companies House register.
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