Opinion: Harmful and unsustainable cuts must be reversed

Let’s start with some small positives. Its urban “Citi” routes are actually set to improve. The additional early morning journeys for the Citi 4 bus to Peterborough City Hospital meet an important need for hospital staff. I know this first-hand from my casework.

Other Citi routes will be more frequent, which will help many of my constituents. You have probably seen the “but” coming here in the rest of this week’s paper. It’s twofold.

There are the bus routes set to be scrapped altogether, which is dominating most headlines.

There are also rural bus routes that would be completely hollowed out. I might be a city MP, but I am always acutely aware of the needs of my constituents in the fens.

Eye and Thorney would effectively get half of their current bus service. Instead of a route 36 or 37 bus to Peterborough every 30 minutes, it would be hourly at best. That means a two hour wait in Thorney.

It’s astonishing that such a drastic change was announced out of the blue – and it’s set to happen from the end of October, so this terrible proposal is made worse by the short notice.

Having seen the reaction, Stagecoach East has undertaken some rear-guard PR. Its managing director is now calling for “an urgent rural connectivity summit” and “an open and honest debate” about the future of rural bus routes.

I’m obviously up for that. Yet wouldn’t it have been better to have convened this summit – and held this debate – before announcing cuts and reductions from next month?

Given the lack of contact from Stagecoach, it’s not even clear that I’ll be invited to any summit. If Stagecoach’s media team are reading this, let me tell you now: I plan to turn up regardless.

How are people supposed to get to work, if the earliest bus to Peterborough is scrapped and the number buses arriving in the city before 9am is reduced from five to two?

How can a Thorney resident rely on getting home from work, if the last bus to return from Peterborough departs at 5.10pm? We can’t just abandon people without cars.

What justification can there be for making some elderly residents face a six hour round trip to visit their nearest GP practice?

Stagecoach isn’t wholly to blame here. The Labour Mayor has been missing-in-action and is now scrabbling around, trying to repair the damage.

It was Nik Johnson’s “lack of ambition” that failed to get a penny of £3 billion of national funding for buses. That wasn’t down to Stagecoach.

It’s Nik Johnson who is belatedly cobbling together money for some routes, while sitting on his hands when it comes to Eye and Thorney.

My rural constituents need regular and reliable routes to Peterborough. Removing over 120 bus journeys a week is harmful, unsustainable and must be reversed.