App-only bus discounts leave smartphone-free pupils facing higher fares

In Derbyshire, Adele Kightley’s 11-year-old daughter faces paying an extra £546 a year to get to school. The county council’s b_line card caps single fares on trentbarton buses at £1.50 for people aged 18 and under, but users must register the card with an app to qualify for the discount. Kightley said her family chose not to give their daughter a smartphone and instead gave her a brick phone when she started secondary school this month. She said a child cannot get the same trentbarton young person discount by showing the student card to the driver and paying by cash or card.

Trentbarton said its ticketing machines are not configured to read the council-issued cards. A spokesperson for the bus company said it was “working at speed on developing a new physical card to provide the discounted b_line fare for under-19s.” In the meantime, the spokesperson said, all young people, whether they have a smartphone or not, will continue to receive a range of discounts off adult fares however they pay.

The East Midlands combined county authority said it sympathised with parents who did not want their children to have smartphones. It said it would consider how young people accessed discounted fares as it developed the region’s fares and ticketing strategy.

Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of the campaign group Smartphone Free Childhood, said the increasing use of digital-only passes was penalising poorer households and undermining efforts to restrict children’s screen time. She said a large movement of parents and schools was trying to delay smartphones for children, but in many parts of the country bus companies were making that harder by charging smartphone-free children up to twice as much for the same journey. More than 200,000 parents have signed up to the group’s “parent pact,” which promises to delay getting a child a smartphone until at least 14, Greenwell said. She added that essential services were still being designed around the assumption that every child has a smartphone, and that for lower-income families in particular, owning a smartphone could effectively become the price of accessing cheaper bus fares.

Other regional operators, including Stagecoach and Compass, also require children to have a smartphone to access the best discounts, according to The Guardian. Kightley said she and her husband decided not to give smartphones to their children because of evidence that they are harmful to developing brains. When their younger child starts secondary school, she said, it will cost them nearly £1,100 a year more than it would if they had access to the discount through the app.

A law banning the use of mobile phones in English schools came into force in June. Some schools prohibit pupils from bringing smartphones on site. However, the Department for Education said the legislation did not cover phone use during travel to school and that app-only fare discounts were a matter for individual bus operators. Greenwell said the government’s stance was sending mixed messages. She said bus fares should not be a barrier to schools choosing policies where smartphones are not brought on to site, and that government and bus companies had a clear opportunity to fix the issue so every child could access the same fare whether they carried a smartphone or not. Stagecoach and Compass were contacted for comment.

Editor's Summary

An app-only discount scheme for young bus passengers in England has left children without smartphones facing sharply higher fares, according to The Guardian. Parents and campaigners say the arrangement penalises lower-income families and conflicts with efforts to keep phones out of schools, while bus operators say they are working on alternatives. The Department for Education says app-only fare discounts are a matter for individual operators.