A TRANSPORT quango has made a loss of more than £200,000 selling off three buses which were bought only five years ago to save taxpayers money.

The three minibuses were bought by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport from Glasgow-based Allied Vehicles in 2010 for around £80,000 each. However, it has now emerged that all three were sold to a motor trader between September and October this year for a total of just £3,750 - despite having no more than 50,000 miles on the clock.

SPT has been selling off its taxpayer-owned fleet after the vehicles were plagued by faults.

Details of the sale were disclosed by SPT after the three buses appeared on online auction website, Sweeney Kincaid Industrial Auctioneering, where the current owner is seeking £8000 per vehicle. They have so far attracted bids of £5000 each, but remain unsold.

It is the latest blow to what started out as a cost-cutting strategy for SPT. Between 2008 and 2013, transport bosses spent around £10 million buying more than 100 buses for use on various subsidised contracts.

The vehicles, which were designed to be more fuel efficient and accessible to elderly and disabled passengers, were farmed out by SPT to operators awarded Dial-a-Bus and Ring'n'Ride contracts. In exchange for a "free" bus, the operators took on responsibility for repairs and SPT paid a reduced tender.

In 2013, however, 14 of the original buses were axed after proving "extremely unreliable".

In January this year, an SPT report stated that the remainder of the fleet, which also includes Optare and Bluebird minibuses, would be replaced early amid mounting concerns that the vehicles were not “technically robust” enough for passenger services. They were prone to "a greater incidence of component failure, including in major items such as gearboxes".

Susan Aitken, leader of the SNP group at Glasgow City Council, called on the new chair of SPT, Bailie Jonathan Findlay, to launch an inquiry into how and why the vehicles were first purchased and how much the venture has cost the taxpayer.

She said: “The continuing saga of these vehicles just further reveals that this has been an example of serious mismanagement of public funds by SPT. These vehicles were not fit for purpose at the time they were bought, quickly became unusable for local bus services, and appear now to be unwanted even at a tenth of their original cost. From start to finish, this is a tale of a huge waste of public money.”

SPT insists the problems have been outweighed by "substantial savings in contract costs".

A spokeswoman for SPT said: “These vehicles were recently sold by SPT to a motor dealer. While in use during the last five years, the vehicles carried thousands of passengers over many hundreds of thousand miles and have covered their initial purchase cost.”