YOUNG vandals on school buses cost East Lancashire firms about £250,000 every year, it was revealed today.

Groups of schoolchildren bring in bags of flour and eggs to deliberately trash buses and some set fire to seats, said transport bosses.

Chris Bowles, transport manager of Stagecoach Ribble, said the firms were not seen as victims of crime despite the enormous cost of repairing damage.

He said: "To these children, it's just a bit of fun, a way of letting off steam. The cost to us is frightening."

Mr Bowles said the situation had worsened so much in the last three years that many of their drivers now refused to work school runs.

Last year, 446 incidents were reported to Lancashire County Council by bus operators, including 106 incidents of damage, nine assaults on drivers, ten fires, and 35 incidents of children throwing flour and eggs. In the first half of this year, 206 incidents were reported.

One of the most worrying trends is for children to break the warning systems that tell drivers if the emergency exits have been opened, which can lead to drivers setting off with doors still open.

Stagecoach Ribble spends about £1million every year repairing vandalism on buses in Lancashire and Northern Manchester, and about £200,000 of this was due to East Lancashire schoolchildren.

Jim Hilton, of Blackburn Borough Transport, said they spent about £50,000 a year cleaning and repairing deliberately damaged vehicles, and about 80 per cent of it was caused by schoolchildren. He said: "It's not a constant problem and there's no set pattern, but there are times when they seem to blitz the buses. Children coming out of school seem to have a pent-up frustration that they take out on the buses."

"We regularly have one or two days when there's lots of problems, and those days cost us an awful lot of money until we identify the culprits."

Mr Hilton said some children had been made to come in and clean the vehicles as part of reparation orders made by courts.

He said: "It's too early to say if it will be successful in stopping damage. It's very seldom just one person who does the damage but because of the requirements of evidence there's only a very small number of people who are taken to task for it."

Mr Hilton wants more schools to take part in monitor schemes so pupils are policed by their classmates on the buses.

Stagecoach Ribble plans to install CCTV cameras, costing £600 a time, on many more buses to catch culprits and both firms are taking part in a new reporting system by Lancashire County Council.

They hope to build a database and identify "hotspots" of trouble so they can reduce damage.

Coun Richard Toon, Lancashire's highways chairman, said: "High spirits at the end of the school day are understandable but we need to get the message across that bad behaviour and causing damage is simply not acceptable."