New Year's Eve revellers celebrating the start of the year 2000 were being told today they will be able to get home by bus.

West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority has announced that a skeleton network of buses will be working until 2.30am.

Chairman Councillor Mick Lyons said: "Until the authority took this decision, there would have been no buses at all on New Year's Eve after around 6pm. We have held on as long as possible to see if operators - or indeed any breweries or other leisure enterprises - were interested in supporting a service for people wanting to be out and about celebrating the New Millennium.

"As nothing has been forthcoming, and time is now of the essence to put all the correct procedures in motion, we felt that as an authority we had a duty and an obligation on this occasion to ensure that at least a basic service would be available to people to visit city and town centres."

He added the service would start at 7pm for about an hour then start up again at 11.30pm and continue until 2.30am to get people home.

Coun Lyons said: "We are now undertaking the necessary work to put out the routes to formal tendering and will be publicising the details of the routes as soon as they have been fine-tuned and finalised."

Brandon Jones, of leading bus operator First Bradford, explained Metro would be putting the proposal out to tender.

Then it will be for the various operators in the city to negotiate with their staff.

He said: "We are awaiting further information from Metro but if there is a demand, we will consider the Metro proposal."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.