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Reducing Public Services

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Yet another set of cuts is now foreseen to our beleaguered local service, just days after announcements were made regarding consultations on reducing children's services, school buses and, well, just about anything you can think of which serves the public basically.

This time the council is proposing reviewing the timetables of a number of bus services in and around Witney, but also other rural areas of the County. I can’t comment on services in other neighbourhoods, but our 18 and 19 routes are for many people a lifeline. For the elderly, unemployed, disabled and youths buses are the one and only form of transport available to them to get them into the main business centres of Witney and Oxford.

The council is proposing reducing these services from hourly to two-hourly. If you have opened the consultation papers online you would have noticed that this would save the council at most under £200,000 - a sum which is insignificant in the annual transport budget of just over £53 million, but one with severe repercussions for many.

The view of the Green Party is simple. We can’t justify the existence of public services just on the basis of a crude income and expenditure analysis. In the instance of transport a proper cost benefit analysis should take into account matters such as benefit to the environment, sustainability and overall services distribution. In this context reducing buses in rural areas would clearly make no sense whatsoever.

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