A showdown meeting has been scheduled for next Monday (26/10) after objections were made to a council decision to axe 26 subsidised bus routes in Milton Keynes.
MK Council, which has seen its budgets slashed by the pandemic, wants to replace the routes from next April with a new style ‘dial-a-bus’ system where passengers could book by app or by phone to be picked up.
But two village parish councils – at Castlethorpe and Hanslope – and two senior Conservative councillors, leader Alex Walker (Stantonbury) and John Bint (Broughton), have used council rules to ‘call-in’ the decision.
A meeting of the strategic placemaking scrutiny sub-committee has been scheduled for Monday evening, and it could decide to either take no action, ask for the decision to be made again, or refer it to the full council.
Castlethorpe Parish Council says the “potential impact is of such magnitude that this should have been a cabinet decision”.
Instead, the decision was made by just one member of the cabinet, Cllr Lauren Townsend (Lab, Bletchley West), using delegated powers at a meeting on September 29.
The parishes also say that the council should have consulted with the city’s network of parish councils.
The two leading Tories in their call in submission say they support demand responsive transport in principle but say this is not the time for it to be introduced.
“If we were not facing the reality of a Covid-19 second wave and the prospect of mass unemployment, it is a debate we could have in a more positive manner,” they say in their submission.
“However, at this point our focus should foremost be on protecting residents’ jobs and access to jobs and we fear the decision undertaken will detrimentally affect this.”
Cllr Townsend had said that a decision needed to be taken in time to allow the contract tendering process to happen before the end of the financial year.
The council uses its parking income to fund some of the subsidised routes and as this has been hammered by £9 million during the pandemic, the council’s leadership said it needed to make a decision.
The decision is set to save £1.1 million overall.
However, the Conservatives say that as the Government has come up with a relief scheme which reduces the parking deficit to £3 million, the council does not have to make a decision now.
Cllr Walker said: “I don’t think the council has thought this through at all and we want to ensure they are making a robust decision.”
Papers presented Cllr Townsend for her decision say the 26 subsidised routes were used by an estimated 600 people in July, compared with 2,000 before the coronavirus pandemic.
