On Trains & Buses

Those Cheshire East Council cuts are coming

Posted on November 3, 2012

Reading time: 5 minutes.

Cheshire East Council seemingly is exceeding its budget for the year by something of the order of £7.7m and that may explain why they have been looking for cuts in services. That appears to include subsidised bus services and the sort of savings that were being sought were £750,000. Thus, it comes as no surprise that they have agreed with the proposals to withdraw financial support from quite a few bus services to achieve this. Notices have appeared to inform bus users of what is happening, possibly at the same time as they were updating the timetables for the Macclesfield to Knutsford service in our area.

The only change from the submitted proposals is that they take effect from the start of next year instead of the week before Christmas. Now, all that remains is to see which unsupported services and journeys are continued on a commercial basis and which don’t. It may be that some will survive like Sunday bus services between Macclesfield and Bollington, which lost their funding over a year ago. That is the only hope for the likes of the weekday (Monday to Saturday) evening 130 Macclesfield to Parr’s Wood service, which now has a very uncertain future.

The council have a page informing us what is happening, and the updates should prove interesting. The only hope is that we will see reductions instead of wholesale service withdrawals and hope is all that we have been left now. For everyone’s information, here are the affected services:

While it’s not good to see that number of journeys under threat, I believe that folk need to be aware of it too. To mind, this is far more than “some” of the services that the council supports as is their wording for what is coming. One only can hope that this is the last of the bus service cuts, but it is impossible to rule out another round of them either.