Deputy Minister for Climate change looks to rural Switzerland, Sweden and Germany for solutions to dearth of rural buses

The Deputy Minister for Climate Change Lee Waters MS was questioned about the end of funding for the flexi bwcabus by Leader of the Welsh Liberals, Jane Dodds at the Plenary on Wednesday (Sep 27).

She told Lee Waters MS that she had an idea for cash to keep it going, which she said she had raised with him before, which was that she understood he was going to be saving money on not building new roads, which she said she totally supported.

The Leader of the Welsh Liberals said: “I just wonder if there’s any idea from you whether we can start looking at any urgent funding from not building those new roads to go over to Bwcabus so that they can keep going, so that they don’t lose that custom. Because you do know that, as soon as something is lost, like a bus service, it’s really hard to get it back. So, I really would urge you to see if there’s anything that we can find in order to keep Bwcabus going.”

Lee Waters MS said that he understood the sentiment and supported it, because that was the intent behind the policy in the medium term.

The Deputy Minister said: “This is a funding decision for this financial year, and in this financial year we are still building roads, despite the Conservatives trying to tell everyone we’ve banned road building. If that was the case I’d have a lot more money in my budget. We haven’t banned road building, we are building roads, and we’ll continue building roads. So, there isn’t money in this financial year, nor, in fact, would it be much help, because that would be capital funding, and buses require revenue funding. It sounds like a nerdy accounting point, but it really does shape the choices that we have to make.

What we need to do, clearly, to meet our climate targets is to shift more people onto public transport. That is more difficult to do in rural areas, but it’s absolutely doable. We are working on a paper that we’re going to publish shortly looking at examples from rural Sweden and rural Switzerland and rural Germany where they do have a bus every hour for every village. So, it’s perfectly possible to do if the funding is made available. In their case, many of them use local taxes on businesses to pay for those services.

The Deputy Minister concluded by saying that Welsh Government were facing extreme financial pressures this financial year. Mr Waters went on to blame the UK Government and what he said was their failure to follow through on their promises to replace any EU funding lost to Wales as a result of Brexit.

Online forums are full of complaints regarding the loss of the bwcabus service with some saying it is their only form of transport for work or shopping. Many accuse Welsh Government of penalising rural communities. Some claim that there is an agenda to force rural dwellers towards 15minute smart city living. Some point out that Welsh Government’s policies are contradictory in wanting people to get out of cars and onto public transport.

There is a petition, which has gathered just over a thousand signatures. The petition reads:

Save our fflecsi bwcabus service
fflecsi Bwcabus is a fully accessible local bus service, which operates within specific areas in Wales, providing a mixture of both fixed route services and bookable journeys. fflecsi Bwcabus is designed to help people make local journeys and connections to main line bus services. A bus picks you up at your request, changing its route so that all passengers can get to where they need to go.