Comberton College principal concerned bus cuts will affect students

A school principal says he is concerned students may not be able to get to school after a bus company announced plans to axe 18 routes.

Stagecoach East said the changes in Cambridgeshire were to enable "long-term viability of the network".

It said the routes had "significant falls in passenger numbers" and were not covering operational costs.

Peter Law, principal at Comberton Village College near Cambridge, said the cuts were "problematic".

According to data seen by the BBC, the routes carried almost 90,000 passengers in June 2022, and lost £4.7m a year.

Stagecoach East said the axed services were only 6% of the network and 12 other services would be "enhanced".

The routes that are closing mainly serve rural parts of the county, and a further 13 routes that carried 182,000 passengers in June will run on reduced timetables.

In April, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), which has responsibility for transport in the county, failed to secure funding from the Department for Transport (DfT) for its Bus Strategy Improvement Plan.

The DfT said areas were chosen for funding "because of their ambition to repeat the success achieved in London, which drove up bus usage".

Mr Law said the school's transport manager's email inbox had been "inundated with people asking how they're going to get their children to school".

"If you're a parent you don't know how your child is getting to school in six weeks' time - and that's really worrying," he said.

"Worst case scenario is there will be children who can't get to school because their parents work, so they can't drive them, and it's a long distance so as we approach winter and it gets darker it's going to be harder to travel independently."

Mr Law said the axing of the routes raised issues of "equality and ecology".

"The equality issue is those who are able to find cars and get transport themselves will be able to get here, but those with working parents who really rely on the bus are in a difficult situations," he said.

"With ecology, we are really keen on trying to decarbonise the school.

"We just spent £2.9m on a ground source heat pump and now it looks like more people will be driving their cars to school."

Mr Law said the school was "working with bus companies" to try and "come up with a solution" but he predicted it would be "less convenient and more expensive than what's currently there."

Darren Roe, Stagecoach East managing director, said the company had made "some tough decisions that reflect the reality of how services are being used after the pandemic".

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