FOR those of us who think that bus services are important to the community, recent reports in your pages have made depressing reading.

It seems that neither Wiltshire Council nor the Clinical Commissioning Group are willing to pay for the Hopper service to RUH, so that will die. The person who has managed the PHAB minibus in Devizes for 30 years is retiring, and unless he can be replaced that will die too.

Last week you highlighted Wiltshire Council’s public consultation on subsidised bus services, and the plight of some people who depend on bus services. The consultation questionnaire is so long and wordy that not many people will battle through it.

Worse, it is blatantly geared towards existing bus users, not those like me who would make more use of them if the service was better. It is totally negative in tone, just asking about how the person responding would be directly affected by various levels of cuts, including the abolition of all subsidised services. It has already created alarm among some users at the prospect of reducing services to two or three buses a day. The only alternative approach it asks about is community services run by volunteers, but look what is happening at PHAB.

I wrote to you last week about the improved Connect2 service in the Pewsey Vale, designed to save £70,000 a year but meet people’s travel needs in a better way.

It took a long time to get going, and there may not be time before the review closes to see whether more people will leave their cars at home and use the bus. The new Trans-Wilts train service has already demonstrated that if a service is frequent, reliable and well publicised, it gets used, whereas if it runs at times which suit no-one and is not well known it runs around empty.

I realise that even full buses do not always cover their costs. But there is another dimension to this. In Wiltshire, we are told, “Everybody matters”. So what about the elderly person who is housebound, the person who cannot get to hospital for an out-patient appointment, the shop worker who has no transport to or from their shift, the young person who cannot get to college for a training course, because there is no bus? What about the campuses and treatment centres which are being built at great expense, but which people may not be able to access?

What about the increasing traffic congestion caused by people jumping in their cars, and the resulting pollution which affects people’s health? It is easy to save money by cutting services, but the extra costs which result in other areas could well outweigh what has been saved.

JASPER SELWYN, Devizes Passengers