A new law promises to protect UK bus drivers. No one is counting who gets hurt
Key Points
- DfT confirmed on 2 June 2026 it holds no national data on assaults or abuse against bus drivers.
- London is the exception: TfL recorded 818 assaults and hate crimes on drivers in 2024, up more than 20%.
- A Unite survey found 82% of drivers abused in a single year, with most incidents going unreported.
- Peers added a clause forcing operators to report assault data; the government removed it before the Act passed.
- The Act's response leans on staff training and local byelaws rather than a national count.
The Department for Transport told Parliament this week that it does not know how often bus drivers in England are attacked.
Asked by a member to set out the number of physical assaults and verbal abuse incidents against drivers over the past five years, Transport minister Simon Lightwood replied that the Department holds no such data, that employers carry responsibility for staff safety, and that incidents reported to police are logged under Home Office recording rules.
The answer was, on its face, an administrative shrug. It is also an account of a decision the government made on purpose.
What the Department does not collect, others do. In London, where Transport for London publishes figures under freedom of information rules, the picture is not ambiguous.
There were 818 physical assaults and hate crimes against bus drivers on duty in 2024, up from 679 the year before, a rise of more than 20%, with a further 431 incidents reported by drivers by the middle of August 2025.
Assaults on London bus drivers rose by 18.5% between 2020/21 and 2023/24, part of a wider pattern in which transport workers across the capital face around 200 violent incidents a week.
The drivers themselves describe a significantly worse situation. A survey of its bus driver members by Unite, the country’s largest union, found that 82% had been subject to abuse in a single year, that more than half did not report incidents to their employer, and that 79% believed abuse had increased.
The union’s renewed campaign followed the death of Keith Rollinson, a Stagecoach driver fatally assaulted in Elgin, and its repeated calls for a specific offence of assaulting transport staff.
Against that backdrop, the government’s chosen instrument to address the issue is the Bus Services Act 2025, which became law on 27 October 2025 and mandates training for drivers and station staff on recognising and responding to anti-social behaviour and crime, including violence against women and girls.
It also extends byelaw powers to local transport authorities and to TfL, allowing authorised officers to remove people from vehicles and issue penalties. These are the measures Lightwood pointed to in his answer.
The measure he did not mention is the one that fell out along the way.
During the bill’s passage, peers inserted a requirement for bus operators to share data on assaults and violent behaviour on their buses, and the government removed it before the bill reached the statute book.
The effect is a safety regime built to respond to incidents it has decided not to count nationally. Training tells a driver how to handle an attack. Byelaws give an officer something to enforce afterwards.
Neither produces the figure the Department conceded this week it does not have, and the clause that would have started to build it is the one ministers took out.
The result is a country legislating to protect bus drivers while declining to measure whether the protection is working. London can show its numbers because it is forced to.
Everywhere else, the only people keeping count are the unions and the drivers.
