The Conservatives have said councils they control after next month’s English local elections would remove 24-hour bus lanes unless there is a “genuine requirement”, in a pledge aimed at motorists as the party prepares for polling on 7 May.

The party said it wanted “bus lanes that make sense” and described some existing all-day restrictions as “24/7 enforcement traps”. It also said that, if returned to national government, it would require specific written ministerial permission before any new 24-hour bus lane could be introduced.

The proposal was announced on Friday as part of a wider six-point package for drivers. Alongside changes to bus lanes, the party said it would reverse a planned fuel-duty rise, put £100m into pothole repairs, end what it called blanket 20mph schemes, tackle the backlog in driving tests and scrap the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

The announcement comes less than two weeks before local elections across 136 English authorities, with 5,013 council seats being contested.

In a statement, the Conservatives said councils they run would only keep or introduce bus lanes where there was a clear operational case for them. The party has not yet published detailed criteria for what would meet its “genuine requirement” test.

Opposition parties moved quickly to attack the plan. Labour said the Conservatives had left roads riddled with potholes and allowed the driving-test system to fall into disarray. Reform UK accused Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch of borrowing its policies, while the Green Party said the package amounted to a pro-car “fantasy”. The Liberal Democrats linked their criticism to wider complaints about fuel prices and the cost of charging electric vehicles.

Bus lanes are largely a matter for local authorities, which enforce restrictions under the Traffic Management Act 2004. Current Department for Transport guidance says councils should consider whether bus-lane restrictions are needed only during peak periods, and should judge that against local traffic conditions and priorities.

The same guidance also states that raising revenue “should not be an objective” of civil enforcement, and says authorities should not set targets for income from penalty charge notices. It adds that places generating large numbers of fines should prompt a review of signage and road layout.

Friday’s pledge is an extension of a line previously taken by the Conservatives in government. The party’s “Plan for Drivers”, published under Rishi Sunak in October 2023, said bus lanes should “only operate when bus services are running” or when traffic is heavy enough to delay buses. The Conservatives repeated in their 2024 general election manifesto that they wanted reforms to make better use of bus lanes.

The latest move also sits uneasily with the party’s own local record. The BBC has previously reported that Conservative-run Norfolk County Council introduced a 24-hour bus lane in 2021, while a Conservative-controlled authority in West Northamptonshire later removed one and reverted it to pre-Covid operating hours.

Norfolk’s own project documents said at the time that “24 hour bus lanes ensure journey time consistency for public transport at all times of the day” and would help give passengers confidence to choose the bus over the car. West Northamptonshire Council, by contrast, said bus lanes on Weedon Road and St James Road had “since reverted” to their earlier operating times.

There is also evidence in favour of round-the-clock operation in some places. Transport for London said in December 2021 that a trial making 85km of bus lanes operate 24 hours a day had improved bus journey times and reliability, with “no significant impact” on other traffic. TfL said the affected roads had carried about 1.15 billion journeys a year before the pandemic, making the scheme one of the capital’s larger bus-priority measures.

Department for Transport guidance broadly supports dedicated bus lanes in principle, saying they can deliver faster and more reliable services.

The row comes against a wider debate over the future of bus services. The Labour government has been pursuing a more pro-bus, locally led approach through its Bus Services Bill, announced last year, which ministers said would give local leaders more power over routes and protect socially necessary services. In the same announcement, the government said about 300 million miles of bus services outside London had been cut between 2010 and 2024.

Official figures show there were 3.7 billion local bus passenger journeys in England in the year to March 2025, up 1% on the previous year, while bus service miles rose 2% to 1.0 billion.

For the Conservatives, however, Friday’s announcement appears designed to sharpen a pre-election pitch to drivers in areas where car use is high and control of transport policy sits with county, unitary and metropolitan councils. The party is defending ground in a large set of local contests next month, including in eastern county areas where it faces pressure from Reform UK.

Whether the pledge would produce widespread change in practice remains unclear. The party has not said how many Conservative-run councils currently operate 24-hour bus lanes, nor has it set out what evidence would be required to justify keeping them in place.