Local bus services to continue
Cabinet has today (March 24) confirmed it will continue funding local bus services after taking on board results of a public survey.
We must make cuts of £157m by 2018 and to help make these savings it had been proposed to take £3.5m out of the subsidy for the local bus network.
A survey was carried out last year asking local residents for their views on this proposal.
Now councillors have confirmed they will put in £3.5m from reserves to keep council-supported buses running until 2017.
Most bus services are run commercially where the routes and fares are set by local bus companies. But around 15 per cent are paid for by us. Around 3.7m journeys are made on these services annually.
Between October and December 2014 local residents were asked to complete a survey telling us about their journeys and the importance of the services they used.
Following this survey, Cabinet announced in January it would continue to pay for 141 local bus services − typically Sunday, early morning and evening and rural services which if withdrawn would leave some communities with no or limited buses.
The survey also asked about community transport services, including dial-a-bus shopping services and journeys to healthcare appointments − known as aCTive Travel − and how important these were to people.
The county has six community transport schemes which provide these trips for people unable to use mainstream public transport because of mobility difficulties or because they live in areas with limited access to local buses.
It had been proposed to reduce funding for Community Transport in 2015/16 and to withdraw all funding in 2016/17.
But we’ve now decided to provide more funding and we’re working closely with the Community Transport schemes to ensure services can continue to run up until April 2016.
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