The county will receive £23.5M over four years to bring down the cost of travelling by bus and encourage more people to make the switch from cars.

Further Superbus networks are promised next year. Government says that the networks will also feature bus priority measures to speed up journeys, but Cornwall is not thought to be planning to introduce any new bus infrastructure.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet portfolio holder for transport Geoff Brown said: “One of the issues for our residents is the cost of using buses to get around. So we put forward a case to the Department for Transport to help us encourage people to use the buses by reducing bus fares.”

Details of Cornwall’s bus investment were released following Chancellor Sajid Javid’s speech to the Conservative party conference on Monday. He announced that a new national bus strategy will receive £220M previously allocated to buses in the recent spending round.

Government has also pledged to create Britain’s first all electric bus town – the location of which is still being decided – and has allocated £20M for new express bus lanes in the West Midlands.

Contactless payment is to be introduced on every city bus, support will be offered to local authorities who want to create London style franchised services and £30M is promised to authorities in the next financial year to help them improve or restore bus services that have closed.

The Chancellor remarked that buses “haven’t been given the attention they deserve from politicians, but they are still the backbone of the public transport in most of the country”.

Reacting to the announcement of a national bus strategy, the Campaign for Better Transport’s chief executive Darren Shirley said that while the funding and projects for one year are welcome, “there needs to be a long term funding settlement for buses to give local authorities and bus operators the ability to plan for years to come.” He added that Government should also set a deadline for all new buses to be zero emissions (electric or hydrogen) by 2025.

Urban Transport Group chair Stephen Edwards said: “We welcome the recognition that bus funding badly needs an overhaul – in particular it needs to be simpler, devolved and greatly enhanced if we are going to turn decline into growth.”