Andy Burnham' s vision for a London-style bus system in Greater Manchester has been questioned by a leading Northern Tory who says the mayor can't afford to make the plan a reality without government support.
Tees Valley metro mayor Ben Houchen predicted his Greater Manchester counterpart would try and blame the Government if he was unable to continue with a £2 maximum cap on single fares and £5 for day passes.
And he told a Conservative Party conference fringe event that Labour mayor Mr Burnham needed to "take responsibility" for paying for his bus strategy rather than picking a "massive fight" with government.
But Mr Burnham's office said the Tees Valley mayor's analysis was "incorrect" and that "Greater Manchester has already successfully introduced our new capped fares, with support from the Government".
Read more: Yellow buses, weekly fare caps and better policing: Andy Burnham's Bee Network unveiled
Greater Manchester's lower fares, brought in to get people out of cars and onto public transport, are being funded with the help of central government funding through the Bus Service Improvement Plan.
The fare structure will be reviewed annually to make sure it is financially sustainable due to "the considerable uncertainty over public transport funding going forward".
A new franchising system for buses, where companies bid for contracts to run routes chosen by local leaders, will start in Wigan and Bolton next September and be rolled out across the city-region by the end of 2024.
The London-style system known as the Bee Network will be paid for by a mixture of local and national funding as well as - local leaders hope - increased takings from passengers buying tickets.
Asked about Greater Manchester's bus franchising - replacing the current deregulated system where operators choose their own routes - Mr Houchen said lots of metro mayors around the country were closely watching what was happening in the region.
The Tory mayor said he hadn't taken a decision on franchising in his North East patch "because we want to see how it plays out in Greater Manchester, they can spend all the money having all the legal fights with the bus companies shaping it and if it's the right thing to do we'll look at it at the time".
He told a Transport for the North event in Birmingham that he "always gets in trouble" whenever he's asked about the Greater Manchester mayor.
Bus services across the North face a crisis. Find out more in The Northern Agenda podcast
But he added: "I think whether he says this publicly or not, I don't know, I don't read the Manchester Evening Gazette, is that I think some of this has also been projected towards government.
"Fundamentally, Andy doesn't have the money to be able to do what he wants to do for bus services.
"And he certainly doesn't have the money to do what he wants to do on capping bus fares, which is why the announcement he's made very recently was to try and put pressure on the government to give effectively a mass subsidy to be able to do so."
Mr Houchen said that in Greater Manchester "you've got a politician with a level of power to try and introduce franchising, but you've got a mayor that doesn't actually have accountability and responsibility for raising the money to deliver on his policies".
He said 'fiscal devolution' - where mayors have the flexibility to raise or lower their own taxes to pay for major projects - would result in a more "responsible, mature" system of local decision-making.
He added: "And until that devolution matures, what will end up happening is in a year's time, Andy will have a massive fight with the government, for example, if he's not able to cap bus fares because he can't afford to do it out of his local pot and the government will say 'you wanted to do it, you're the mayor, you need to take responsibility'.
"And that's why this issue of having quite significant amount of power over bus franchising but not the ability to fund it, there is a divergence about how he projects himself for the community and what he's able to actually deliver, which like I said, we'll probably come back to at some point, I suspect the car will hit the wall and all the usual politics will fall out from that."
In response, a spokesperson for the Mayor of Greater Manchester said: “Greater Manchester has already successfully introduced our new capped fares, with support from the Government.
"This comes ahead of the first franchised buses arriving on Greater Manchester streets in September 2023, which forms a key part of our integrated Bee Network. Ben Houchen’s analysis is incorrect.”
Last month the new Transport Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said "people up and down the country deserve a clean, reliable and affordable public transport system" as she announced 50 state-of-the-art electric buses in Greater Manchester.
She added: "That’s why we’ve provided Greater Manchester with over £1 billion to level up transport and power the local economy."
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