National embarrassment for Lancashire County Council as bus lane named biggest drain on driver money in UK

Preston comes under the spotlight as Lancashire makes The Times

Hello and welcome to The Lancashire Lead.

When Preston makes the national or world news, it might be due to the Preston Model, Wallace and Gromit, Spud Bros or Tom Finney. Now the city is famous for something different entirely.

That’s because the Corporation Street bus gate is the most lucrative in the entire country, and that fact has been published in The Times.

Opposition politicians have pointed out that while there is an argument to encourage people to use public transport more, if a bus gate is so successful then maybe it isn’t working as intended.

Or perhaps it is. There’s a reported £650m backlog of potholes on Lancashire’s roads that seem to be getting worse, not better.

We unpick the reaction to Preston making unfortunate national headlines this week.

Lancashire briefing

💷 An Ormskirk community group could get £100,000 from a council to repair and promote historic town centre ginnels, understood to reflect medieval street patterns. West Lancashire councillors are being recommended to approve the grant to Ormskirk Community Partnership. Cash would be spent on practical work to enhance the historic alleys and to promote Ormskirk’s history to the public. The Ormskirk Ginnels Project could be formally launched this July at the town’s annual gingerbread festival. But a number of town celebrations are expected this year, which includes Ormskirk Clock Tower’s 150th anniversary and the 740th anniversary of its market. So there could be various opportunities to promote the ginnels. Other groups such as Ormskirk Heritage Hub and Ormskirk and District Family History Society could be involved too. They take part in heritage open days every September.

🏠 A plan for 250 homes in Carnforth has been refused by Lancaster councillors, after fears that it threatened a football club’s activity and wider community needs. There were also concerns the plan failed to consider reopening a nearby Lancaster Canal marina and that residents’ cars from the new homes would add to local congestion. Carnforth Rangers FC was among a number of objectors to the plan by government agency Homes England, for up to 250 houses at the Lundsfield Quarries site, off Kellet Road. Now, Lancaster City Council’s planning committee (on Monday, March 23) has refused the application, against planning officers’ advice. Homes England wanted outline planning permission for 250 homes and bought the land after developer Redrow Homes failed to deliver an earlier scheme some years ago, council planning papers said.

🚧 Furious residents have claimed a town is losing its historic buildings to make way for ‘metal retail units’ – as a landmark structure faces partial demolition. Some people living in Nelson and The Victorian Society have raised concerns about a planning application for Trafalgar House, near Nelson Town Hall. PenBrook Developments wants permission to demolish the back, redevelop the front for new uses and build a 23-space public car park on cleared land. Trafalgar House was originally built as Nelson Technical School and later used by Nelson & Colne College and Lancashire County Council. But it has been empty for years. PenBrook is a joint company created by Pendle Council and developer Brookhouse Group for various Nelson Town Deal projects. These include demolishing and redeveloping Pendle Rise shopping centre and creating a new Nelson & Colne College campus in the nearby ACE office block.

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National embarrassment for Lancashire County Council as bus lane named biggest drain on driver money in UK

Corporation Street.

By Paul Faulkner

Councillors in Preston have repeated a call for a controversial bus-only zone in the city to be scrapped after it was found to have generated more money in fines than any other such restriction in Britain last year.

The Times reported that the ‘bus gate’ covering a stretch of Corporation Street, near the city centre, raked in almost £1.55m in penalty charge notices (PCNs) for Lancashire County Council during 2025 – an average of just over £4,200 per day.

Based on responses to Freedom of Information requests to local authorities nationwide, the paper said the figure – raised from 47,176 individual fines – made the facility “the most lucrative” bus gate or bus lane in the country.

In second place was a restriction on Bridge Street in central Manchester, which yielded £1.1m for Manchester City Council, with 33,790 PCNs, followed by High Street in Oxford which brought in almost £750k for the city council there thanks to 30,231 fines.

Drivers falling foul of the Corporation Street set-up – which bans through traffic from the short section of the route between Heatley Street and Marsh Lane – boosted County Hall’s coffers by a total of £3.35m in the first 18 months after enforcement began in June 2024.

During that period, the regulation was breached more than 100,000 times – a tally that will include any motorists who got caught out on more than one occasion on the road, which connects the university quarter to Ringway.

At Lancashire County Council’s budget meeting last month, the Liberal Democrat group called on the Reform administration to scrap the bus gate on Corporation Street and a new bus lane on part of New Hall Lane – both of which were approved when the Conservatives were in control of the local authority.