Following the cessation of the 7/7a bus, East Woodhay Parish Council (EWPC) and Highclere Parish Council continue to seek solutions to try and restore a local bus service.
This update comes from East Woodhay Parish Council
To further this effort recently a number of EWPC councillors and a representative from Neighbourcare attended a Hampshire County Council (HCC) forum, hosted by their transport team (who are responsible for bus services) and bus operators. This focused on community operated services to replace cancelled bus operations. However, it soon became clear that was not feasible for us due to the HCC funding model presented by Hampshire Councillor Lulu Bowerman and her transport team.
Despite this, the forum allowed us to have further discussion with the HCC Transport Team and potential bus operators. HCC reiterated they will not restore the 7/7a service. We discussed the option of providing a local service for the area based out of Newbury. HCC stated they had looked at this option before the cessation of the 7/7a. HCC said they were not able to allocate the funding to support it, so they would not pursue this option.
We discussed the local service option with the bus operators. No operators were interested in restoring the 7/7a service. Only two bus operators were interested in looking at operating a revised local service. These were Basingstoke Connect (based out of Basingstoke) and Newbury and District (based out of Greenham and who operate other Newbury based local services). To review the feasibility of servicing the route these operators required the usage data from the 7/7a service. We were able to push HCC to provide the usage data from the previous provider, Stagecoach. However, on reviewing this information it is disappointing that it does not provide the resolution of data the operators require to assess feasibility.
We are continuing to have further discussions with Basingstoke Connect and Newbury and District to review service options, funding and the feasibility of restoring a local service. Unfortunately, at present the feasibility of a short / medium term solution does not look optimistic.
However, we have identified that there may be a potential solution on a longer term basis as the Watermill Bridge development (in the north of our parishes where it borders Enborne), has a Newbury / Watermill Bridge bus route included in the planning application. We will discuss the feasibility of extending the route to cover our area with the HCC, West Berks, the developer and the bus operators.
In parallel, we are also in discussion with Newbury Handybus. This provides a request operation but not a regular service, so would be limited for our community. They have recently performed an audit of interest from the community via Facebook and said they received a good response. They are in the process of reviewing the feedback to determine if they would move forward and will keep us informed.
The two parish councils will continue these discussions with the bus operators to explore the feasibility of all the options for a short /long term solution.
Further communication will follow …….
