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| Arnside: Soon to lose its bus service. |
Service 530, linking Cartmel and Cark with Grange-over-Sands and Kendal and service 552 from Arnside, Milnthorpe, Sedgewick and Natland to Kendal will run for the last time on 27th October.
Although parts of the routes concerned will still be served by other buses, or in the case of Cark and Arnside by train, the villages of Hincaster, Sedgewick, Natland, Cartmel and Levens will be left without any form of public transport. According to Stagecoach, the services are being withdrawn because the home-to-school transport contracts with which they were linked have been re-tendered by Cumbria County Council and awarded to other bus companies. The company says that this means that the public bus services are no longer viable, which raises a number of interesting points.
English county councils have a legal duty to ensure that an "adequate" level of bus service is provided within their areas. However, the same law also allows councils to arrive at their own definition of adequacy. Cumbria was one of the first to declare that the commercial services provided by operators without subsidy were, in themselves, adequate to meet all of the county's needs and ceased providing funding for any additional buses in 2014. This, apparently, meets the requirements of the legislation.
The level of school transport service that a council must provide is set down much more precisely in law and, of course, there are very few "commercial" home-to-school buses in the first place, so councils are required to procure a large network of school buses. For many years, the prevailing view was that some form of integration between school and public buses was desirable and would lead to better services and better value for money.
Cumbria doesn't take this view. It looks solely at the bottom-line cost of a school bus and awards the contract accordingly, without any consideration of the effects that might have on the public bus network. So Stagecoach, which in effect was cross-subsidising a loss-making public service with the profit it made from the school buses, was given no credit for this when the school contracts were awarded to another operator. The replacemnet operator will also made a profit but will keep it all for itself, whilst the residents of the villages affected were left without a service.
The county council has form in this respect. Just last year it re-allocated another school contract, the loss of which put a huge hole in the finances of Blueworks' services 11 and X12 between Barrow, Ulverston and Comiston, leading to significant timetable reductions and even more problems for the Friends of the X112 support group that fights tenaciously to keep those services going.
So, a black mark for Cumbria! But the issue also raises a question for Stagecoach. The company, and other operators, has always told the Bus Users' Group that it is unable to use the profits it makes from one part of its operations to subsidise what would be loss-making services elsewhere, because this would be illegal under Competition Law. Fair enough, one might say - but isn't this exactly what it has been doing in the case of services 530 and 552 all along?