Leicestershire's buses are the worst in the country for arriving on time.

New data published by the Department for Transport (DfT) shows that bus services in the Leicestershire County Council area - including Ashby and Coalville - arrived late for 37 per cent of their scheduled stops in 2018/19, which are the latest figures available.

And the true number of tardy services could potentially be much higher, as the DfT only defines a bus as late as if it arrives at a stop five minutes and 59 seconds after the timetable says it should.

Passengers do not fare much better in the Leicester City Council area, where around a quarter of services (26 per cent) are late, leaving the city eighth on the table of local authority areas in the country.

Across England, non-frequent buses – defined as buses scheduled to pick up and drop off at five stops or less every hour – arrive late on 17 per cent of occasions.

Alice Ridley, from Campaign for Better Transport, said: "These figures show how bus cuts and rising fares were hitting communities hard, long before the pandemic.

"For many, buses are the only means of accessing jobs, training, shops and services, and connecting with others to avoid loneliness.

"The Government must now protect and improve bus services, which are crucial to a sustainable, fair recovery.

"Travelling by public transport must be affordable and convenient to avoid car journeys escalating and non-drivers being excluded."

She added: "It's also vital that we ramp up the proportion of zero-emission buses, which currently stands at just two per cent. We're calling for all new buses to be zero emission by 2025 and all buses on the road (bar heritage vehicles) to be zero emission by 2035.

"The upcoming National Bus Strategy must be sufficiently ambitious to address all these points."

Arriva which runs bus services in the Leicestershire County Council area was contacted for a response.

Rob Hughes, Operations Director at First Leicester said;" I think it is important to raise that the report by the DfT does not segment reliability figures by each bus operator which can be slightly confusing and misleading when analysing a single percentage.

"Our main network of bus services only operates within the city and only ventures into the county in a couple of instances for small sections on two routes.

"As a long established business serving local communities with public transport provision in the city for over 100 years, we know that reliability is a key requirement in encouraging people to use buses, which is why we monitor our reliability stats on a daily basis and can confirm that presently 96.7 per cent of all our journeys are departing on time."