“You’re regularly told that ‘this bus has changed my life’.”

Drew Smart is one of the founders and Chairman of the Glenfarg Community Transport Group (GCTG). He’s speaking from the front seat of one of the nine community buses the group now own and run, a sight that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

For decades, the story of Glenfarg felt like one of slow, managed decline. Once a bustling stop on the Great North Road, the Perthshire village was bypassed by the M90 in the 1970s. One by one, the railway station, hotels, library, post office and pub closed their doors. When the last commercial bus service was withdrawn for the second time in three years, it felt like a decisive blow.

“People in the village were feeling a bit down in the dumps,” explains Douglas Fraser, co-founder and Trustee of GCTG. “There was an air of inevitability that things and services were just going to be withdrawn.”

For a community with an ageing population, this wasn’t an inconvenience, it was an existential threat. As older residents lost their licences, many found themselves cut off from essential services like healthcare or just being able to go out shopping. “You had isolated people who were stuck in their houses,” says Douglas. “They were losing their independence and were moving out of the village.”

The community takes the wheel

In 2023, residents decided to act. They set up Glenfarg Community Transport Group with the aim of making a local bus service accessible to everyone. The group started with a borrowed 16-seater minibus and a £100 grant to cover the fuel.

What followed was remarkable. Within just two years, GCTG had built a full-scale, professionally run bus service operated entirely by the community. It now runs nine buses, employs 26 local drivers, and enables more than 2,100 passenger journeys every week.

Their two core routes – the 55 and 23 – provide a reliable, hourly service linking Glenfarg to Kinross, Perth and Tillicoultry. They have become a vital link in the local transport ecosystem, connecting with national services at the Kinross Park & Ride. Running from 7am to 7pm, six days a week, it gives residents something they hadn’t had for years: a reliable service they can depend on.

The group also responds directly to community requests and changing needs. Volunteer bus drivers run social trips to museums, shopping centres and concerts, and provide an affordable school bus service.

For GCTG, it’s not about running a bus service, but a people service. As Drew puts it: “We’re not really about buses and we’re not about numbers. It’s really the stories that are behind those buses and the numbers”. Older residents who feared they would have to leave the village can now get around and not have to leave their homes. Young people can travel independently, getting to school and sports clubs.

But it is in the daily journeys that the community bus service reveals its soul. Drivers are local, and they know their passengers by name. Every journey brings its own quiet acts of care.

“They’re not just bus drivers,” says Drew. “They’re friends and they’re social workers, occasionally we have a singing bus driver. They’ll chat and watch out for people. If people aren’t on the bus or if they haven’t seen somebody for two or three days, they’ll be looking out for them.”

Smiling, driver George Hutt adds: “I like the community spirit. People talk to each other, not like on the big buses. For the older people it might be the only other people they’ve spoken to all day. Sometimes it’s very quiet, other times it’s like a party.”

Building community wealth

This is Community Wealth Building in practice.

It stands in stark contrast to commercial models. The previous commercial service sent profits to shareholders outside the area; when those profits weren’t high enough, the service was cut, risking the viability of the community itself.

Glenfarg’s community bus service turns that around, starting with investing in the viability of the community. It is designed, owned and operated by the local community, for the community.

Money spent on the service is directly reinvested into the community’s economy, paying local drivers, renting the village hall and the local bus garage, providing a vital income stream for other community assets. It is a powerful example of a circular economy, creating “a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle”, says Drew.

But Community Wealth Building is about more than money, and this community bus service delivers more than passengers. It is delivering social wealth, strengthening relationships, reducing isolation, and a renewed sense of agency.

Its success has challenged the “inevitability of decline” that had plagued Glenfarg for decades. By proving that the community could successfully run a complex, professional service, it restored a sense of confidence, possibility, and hope. This newfound belief has become a catalyst for wider regeneration, inspiring other community-led efforts to save the local shop and even build a new pub. As Drew says: “We’ve shown that we can do it.”

The network behind the success

GCTG are clear that they couldn’t have done this alone. They credit the Community Transport Association (CTA) as key to their success, giving them the knowledge, guidance and connections they needed at the start.

“One of the main catalysts for our success was being put in touch with the Community Transport Association,” says Drew. A CTA conference in Perth proved “game-changing”, linking the fledgling group with funders, regulatory experts and a mentor organisation – Community Transport Glasgow – who helped guide them through their early decisions.

CTA is a national charity supporting hundreds of similar organisations, providing the essential behind-the-scenes infrastructure that turns motivated and passionate community efforts into professional, sustainable services. They provide toolkits on complex licensing, advice on funding, connections to other operators, and advocacy at national level.

“Community transport is one of the clearest examples of Community Wealth Building in action.” says David Kelly, Scotland Director/Head of Policy and Campaigns at CTA. “When a community runs its own buses, the money stays local – it pays local drivers, builds local skills and supports the community’s own priorities, not a shareholder somewhere else.”

For Glenfarg, the support was transformative. As Drew recalls, “joining CTA was probably the best bit of advice that we were given.” With CTA’s guidance, GCTG developed the capacity to launch a legally compliant, fully scheduled bus service in just six months – a timeframe their local council believed was impossible.

Fragility beneath the success

Despite its success, the entire operation – now an essential piece of local infrastructure – is built on a precarious foundation of one-year contracts and grant funding.

“At the moment we have a one-year contract,” explains Douglas. “It could just take a change in the political wind out there, that could disappear and all of a sudden we would be out on our backside.”

This instability prevents long-term planning. Without multi-year agreements, they cannot secure loans to invest in new vehicles. Bureaucracy adds further strain: a minor timetable change can take three months to approve, and funding for electric buses often exists without the necessary funding for the charging infrastructure required to run them.

A moment of national change

As the Scottish Parliament considers the Community Wealth Building Bill, GCTG’s experience offers a real-world case study of what the legislation could mean in practice. The Bill aims to embed approaches that keep wealth and decision-making local. For groups like GCTG, this could open the door to more supportive partnerships with public bodies and more consistent funding.

As David Kelly puts it: “If the Community Wealth Bill is going to mean anything, public sector bodies need to partner with community transport. Right now groups are filling gaps that statutory services can’t reach – but they’re doing it on short-term funding and goodwill. With proper long-term investment, the impact could be transformational.”

A model for Scotland’s future

Glenfarg is a local success story. But it is more than that. It is a powerful argument for systemic change. Their routes now carry more than twenty times the passengers delivered by the previous commercial operator, for the same public subsidy. And they deliver social, economic and community benefits far beyond traditional transport metrics. 

They are proving every day that community-led services can not only replace withdrawn commercial routes but outperform them, and help rebuild the fabric of a place.

To secure this future, they need more than just praise; they need to be valued, given recognition, stability, and the ability to plan. “We need recognition that community transport is here to stay and is a viable contribution to the public transport delivery in Scotland,” says Douglas.

For Drew, the ambition goes even further. “I would like to see it being a mandated right that rural communities had a public transport system,” he says. “That all communities should have access to some form of regular public transport.”

In Glenfarg, the buses don’t just get people from A to B. They deliver confidence, connection and hope. They show, in the clearest terms, how communities can take control of essential services and create a different future: one where viability is measured not in shareholder profit, but in community wellbeing, resilience and pride.

 

Read more from our series This is Community Wealth Building and what we’re calling for to support Community Wealth Building across Scotland.