Henry Perez of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury Ward has submitted the following petition for debate:

We the undersigned petition the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead to provide a bus service to all main roads in Wraysbury keeping residents connected with vital services including Datchet Health Centre as well as our two local villages of Horton and Datchet plus Windsor Town Centre. The borough has current funding to support this inline with the Government National Bus Strategy, if not, the bus service should be funded by RBWM.

Full information about the petition, context and signatures can be viewed on the petition pages of the website.

The Constitution provides for a maximum time of 30 minutes for Members to debate petitions; this can be extended at the Mayor’s discretion.

a) The Mayor will invite the Lead Petitioner to address the meeting

(5 minutes maximum)

b) The Mayor to invite the relevant Cabinet Member to speak, including proposing any recommendation in the report

(5 minutes maximum)

c) The Mayor to ask for the motion to be seconded

d) Motions without Notice (other than those detailed in Part 2 C13 of the constitution) will not be allowed.

e) The Mayor to invite any relevant Ward Councillors to speak

(5 minutes maximum each)

f) The Mayor will invite all Members to debate the matter

(Rules of Debate as per the Constitution apply)

Members debated a petition requesting the council provide a bus service to all main roads in Wraysbury. The full wording of the petition was as published:

We the undersigned petition the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead to provide a bus service to all main roads in Wraysbury keeping residents connected with vital services including Datchet Health Centre as well as our two local villages of Horton and Datchet plus Windsor Town Centre. The borough has current funding to support this inline with the Government National Bus Strategy, if not, the bus service should be funded by RBWM.

Henry Perez of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury Ward, lead petitioner, addressed the meeting. Mr Perez explained he and Graham Cribin represented Horton and Wraysbury residents. Their connection to the Number 10 bus went back to December 2017 and included involvement in submitting a petition, arranging two public meetings, the setting up Facebook group called ‘Replacement Number 10 Bus’, liaison with Courtney Buses now called Thames Valley Buses and the Borough representative Darren Gouch aimed at establishing a fit for purpose timetable and Route. He explained that before the Covid pandemic the number 10, which was funded by Heathrow, provided a reliable service with routes into Windsor, Slough and Heathrow. He said that in March 2021 they heard the disappointing news that Heathrow would stop funding the service and it stopped in April 2021. This left Wraysbury without a bus service operating via Welley Road the spine of its most populated area. Despite ongoing communications with the borough to stress the need for a regular or limited bus service, to date the village had not been provided with either. He explained that they were committed to achieving a regular bus service for the whole of Wraysbury linking their village to its neighbouring villages of Horton and Datchet. The three villages shared one doctor's surgery, one senior school, three ward Councillors and events on the village greens and other venues.

He continued that the request for a bus service was on behalf of the whole Community whatever their ages. Children living in Horton that did not qualify for school transport a bus would be a very valuable asset and anyone looking for employment would need to look beyond the three villages but would need transport to attend job interviews and work venues. Since covid many people now have to rely on offers of a lift by friends, family or charity but would prefer their independence. People wanted the opportunity to return to a near-normal life following the Covid restrictions and a bus service would help remove them from their current isolation and loneliness.

He stated that the list of reasons for a bus service were numerous and included shopping, sightseeing, attending sporting events, swimming pools, libraries, places of worship or just to have a break from the daily routines including attending the doctors. He asked that it was also an opportunity to obtain bus connections to other destinations.

He explained that they had made many suggestions in relation to Thames Valley Buses and how they could assist. They had also conducted a poll as to which days would be best if a limited bus service was offered. The lack of a bus service in Wraysbury to connect the villagers with shops and medical facilities must be considered detrimental to sustainable travel and added to already high levels of pollution in the village.

Although the Council had extended its review to 24 April they had decided to submit their petition for consideration with the full support of each Parish Council and a huge percentage of the adult population that gave 1,675 signatures for the petition.

Mr Perez wanted to mention that there was a 305 bus which ran from Staines to Colnbrook and the new number five bus which goes from Slough to Heathrow with stops in Datchet and Horton. He recognised that both these services appeared to work well for the communities they served but neither of these services were accessible for the majority of Wraysbury residents. Their petition was for a regular service seven days a week that operates a route from Windsor, Datchet into Wraysbury via Welley Road, Windsor Road, Staines Road then Wraysbury Highstreet, Station Road Copper Mill Road, Horton, Datchet ending back in Windsor rather than rerouting an existing route. He said this would assist passengers to pick up connections with the 305 and the number five bus mentioned previously. He concluded that reinstating the bus service meant a lot to local residents.

Councillor Hill, lead member for Highways and Transport, Customer Service Centre and Employment responded to the submission before proposing a motion. He stated that in response to the above petition, the significant number of signatures that it had attracted, officers had been taking a number of steps over recent months. He explained that prior to the covid pandemic RBWM ranked bottom of the local authorities nationally in terms of average bus trip per head of population. He expanded that the causes of this were varied and included the geographic nature of the borough, levels of affluence in parts of the borough, high car ownership and bus services that were declining in frequency over time. The Covid pandemic had a significant impact on bus service across the borough and specifically Heathrow withdrew its funding of the route 10 bus which provided some links locally and the budget pressures experienced meant that the Council was not able to step in. Since the pandemic the whole of the borough and the country had experienced substantial changes in travel habits. He noted that inflation exceeds targets and cost pressures on the bus operators had resulted in higher costs. He explained that whilst the government had provided some funding to keep services going this was not sufficient to maintain the status quo. Since October 2022 buses had been operating on interim routes.

Councillor Hill continued that in the east of the borough this funding provided an opportunity to extend the 308 route incorporating Datchet as well. From a wider perspective there has been a need to review the whole of the borough network. Whilst the Council has to retender for the support bus services there was substantial evidence that on a like for like basis the costs could increase by 40 to 60 percent. Despite additional funding being approved for the bus services within the financial year 2023-24 this was still not sufficient to cover the whole cost of all the routes. As a result some decisions need to be made.

He reported that officers recognised that the Wraysbury service was sub-optimal and had commissioned discussions with operators to investigate the feasibility of Windsor to Staines route incorporating Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury with the idea of buses operating in both directions throughout the day. The frequency and the coverage across the day would be dependent on the costs involved in setting up such a service and this detail would not be available until the tender was complete. However, it would include making the service available to students at local schools with the start time scheduled to be to allow timely arrival and collection from the schools. The request to serve all parts of Wraybury area is included in this investigation due to the generic and the geographical nature of the area there was no simple solution with either longer routes that would involve driving the same route twice or automating services being investigated. He continued that it was likely a service of this nature would replace the existing 308 route given the overlaps of the roads served.

Councillor Hill advised that improvements in services in one area could not be achieved without an impact on the rest of the network given the financial challenges the bus industry was currently facing.

He explained that the proposal was for a paper to be presented at Cabinet in September to seek approval to tender for these routes considering the viable and financial affordability. This would allow officers to formally engage with bus operators to obtain quotes for the services sought. He clarified that the paper would not include all the routes currently served. He explained that only once the tender process was complete would the Council have the information required to determine which routes could be committed to for the next five years.

He concluded that he proposed that the petition would be taken into account along with other feedback on the bus service when the paper was discussed in September at the meeting of Cabinet. He proposed the following motion:

Petition will be taken into account along with other feedback at the Cabinet meeting in September 2023.

This motion was seconded by Councillor Jones who reserved her right to speak.

The Mayor invited ward Councillors for the affected areas if they wished to speak before inviting others to contribute.

Councillor Grove thanked Mr Perez and Mr Cribbin for their unwavering commitment to this cause, all the volunteers who helped collect signatures on this petition and everybody who signed it. She recommended that colleagues took the opportunity to visit the most easterly region of the borough as Wraysbury is a beautiful historic village with amazing community links, some beautiful places to eat and enjoy your time and some lovely attractive green spaces by the riverside. She acknowledged that being at the furthest reaches of the borough also brought its own challenges and residents of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury had felt ignored and overlooked by the previous administration.

She continued that Mr Perez had very eloquently stated the reasons why Wraysbury needed the bus service and as one of the three ward councillors she confirmed and added her agreement to the points raised. The requirement for a regular bus service could not be ignored and was a topic which was often brought up during the election campaign. She reflected it was impossible not to grasp the importance of such a service when sat opposite a 90-year-old resident who was explaining how a bus would help her mitigate and avoid many of the detrimental effects of isolation and help restore her independence.

She added that the residents of Wraysbury had stoically accepted the realities of service reduction for, as mentioned, there is no doctor's surgery and there is no senior school within the village and no resident was asking for the introduction of these costly public services but they did ask for a means of being able to reach the places where those services were now located. She highlighted that a bus would help remove cars from the road so reducing traffic on already congested routes and helping the borough to become greener and more environmentally friendly. Being located under the flight path, very close to Heathrow, both the M4 and M25, meant that her ward desperately needed solutions to help reduce pollution and improve air quality. She concluded that she was not unaware of financial constraints that were being faced and greatly appreciated the hard work and efforts of the new administration to ensure RBWM’s financial future and stability. She hoped that when assessing requirements and priorities going forward the needs of Wraysbury residents would feature because for the people in rural villages and areas it was often a lifeline rather than a luxury.

Councillor Buckley thanked the residents of Wraysbury for bringing the petition to the council. All three villages of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury pulled together to support the petition which showed that it was a strong community pulling together when needed. He observed that residents had felt neglected, forgotten and overlooked. The new Council had been elected to stop this and give residents a voice. The fact that the petition had achieved such support to reach the full Council spoke volumes to the need of the community. He stated that even though the was facing huge budgetary restrictions caused by a decade or more of mismanagement of public finances we should not ignore the voices from Wraysbury. He continued that the Council needed to work together to find imaginative and progressive solutions to supply residents with a sustainable public transport service. He stated it was the Council’s duty to start to build a local economy that would create income streams

to support public services that residents need. Public transport is essential to the

success of all our policies from environmental to business therefore this should be a priority investment. He concluded that this was an opportunity to show residents that things had changed, not just our words but our actions.

As requested by Councillor Hunt the wording of the motion proposed by Councillor Hill was shared on screen. Councillor Hunt thanked Councillor Hill for the full information provided in his response.

Councillor Moriarty started by saying that he wanted to recognise and acknowledge the effort that went into putting petitions together. He said that he was a bus fan and he used the number 7 bus within Cox Green and it was only when sitting on buses do you realise how important they are to so many different people. In considering how a decision in one part of the network would have an impact on other parts he asked that any decision like this was set against things like traffic measures that were put in place, parking strategies, pricing around parking incentives to travel in different ways, active travel as all these things were part of the behaviours that residents were part of. He concluded that buses form part of that wider picture.

Councillor Bermange commented about partnership working especially in this environment where finances were really tight. He pointed out looking at the Horton and Wraysbury Neighbourhood Plan there was a non-plan action which called upon the parish councils to work in partnership with the Borough Council to look at possibilities for new bus routes possibly a hopper bus route service. He thought it was really important to note that residents not only answered in great numbers to the petition but also voted for the neighbourhood plan. He understood there used to be a shuttle service which was operated by the community pharmacist which helped get  residents to the medical facilities in Datchet. He wondered if there was an opportunity to explore this again. There is a Heathrow area Transport Forum which was quite active to discuss bus routes and surface access to the airport. Perhaps the Council needed to put some more pressure on Heathrow Airport to deliver this.

Councillor Story commented that many users of bus services in his area of Ascot, Sunninghill and Sunningdale were the elderly and people with disabilities and he was sure this would be the same for bus users in Wraysbury, Horton and Datchet. He said that Councillor Hill may be aware of government guidance published just over a year ago which encouraged local authorities to consider what is called ‘demand responsive transport systems’. These systems were particularly useful for rural areas and were schemes where bus services run without a set time timetable, using smaller vehicles and where people if they want a bus they use the phone or go online to book one. He advised it was being used in several places throughout the UK today and he suggested Councillor Hill may wish to include this in the September cabinet paper.

Councillor Wisdom Da Costa applauded the residents of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury and the parish councillors for bringing the petition before the Council. He reiterated that the key issue was that bus services are introduced or if we restore it, as seen in Windsor, if we do not have a bus service then we have a reduction in mental health, well-being and people suffering isolation. He commented that also money does not get circulated locally so there was a loss to the local economy. He stated that you also had the environmental impact from air pollution and the requirements to reduce carbon footprint of activity. He suggested that the Council should be looking at the local Enterprise Partnerships to create a wider strategy across the whole borough and organisations such as NHS integrated care system and Heathrow Airport for funding. He suggested that the Council needed to think more creatively about how funding was raised to deliver strategies such as the Climate Change Strategy.

Councillor Taylor also thanked the residents for bringing the petition forward. She observed that when she was growing up not many people had cars, so you walked or got the bus everywhere but then we've increased the use of cars so and therefore there were less people on the bus. Unfortunately services had been cut and we are trying to we get people into using the bus again. She welcomed Councillor Hill’s comments that he would be looking at this borough wide. She compared services with those in the Lake District which had very regular, well-used services running until 10 o’clock it the evening which connected to the rural areas. She observed that it was well used because it was reliable. She asked Councillor Hill, when considering this issue borough wide, to understand that people that live in the towns will use buses slightly differently to those who live in rural areas and to not try create a one-size-fits solution.

Councillor Price commented that although she was supportive of considering this issue holistically, she asked whether it was possible to give the residents who had brought this forward an indication of some sort of time scale of when something might change or be implemented. 

Councillor Sharpe commented that this was an interesting petition from the residents of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury and he thought that if they were going to look at the climate crisis sensibility we need to look at how to move people away from car transport and onto more sustainable forms of transport such as buses and shared modes of transport. He agreed that the ‘hopper buses’ should be investigated not only for Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury but for other areas of the borough. He added that we also need to look at how our residents can easily move from one area such as Windsor to Maidenhead or Ascot or wherever across the borough easily by public transport. He commented that to travel to the Council offices from Sunninghill for the meeting there was no bus and it would have been a four hour return journey by train. He reflected that there was no substantive public transport mechanism for most people in the borough so needed to consider different alternatives.

Councillor Carole Da Costa commented that she thought the Council was struggling to support the most vulnerable within the people who were the least able to afford their own cars and were under totally reliable on public transport and the elderly who no longer drove either out of choice or out of physical disability. She considered that we owe it to them to look at our public transport and we make it as good as we can and in the least make sure that people can access hospital appointments, doctors surgeries and dental appointments.

Councillor Jones commented that she acknowledged the need for a better bus service for the villages of Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury. She thanked the residents for bringing forward the petition and remarked that it was regrettable that central government was not providing sufficient funding to protect bus travel within the borough. She commented that one off funding was not a viable solution to providing sustainable bus routes. She reflected that the financial situation the Council found itself in was extremely challenging and the harsh reality was that they were forecasting currently a £4.9m overspend for this financial year and a budget gap of £3.7m for the next. As lead member for Finance, she could not recommend committing additional ongoing funding at this time because the Council’s reserves would not cover a forecast budget gap in the medium term and our priority was to ensure statutory services were fully funded. She continued that there was a need to obtain quotes for any proposed routes and until those figures were available it would not be financially prudent to make an assessment or decision. The paper which Council Hill referred to would review all the routes and put forward a recommendation based on how to serve residents in the best way possible within the finances available. She seconded Councillor Hill’s proposal to review the proposed Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury bus routes within the cabinet paper scheduled for September.

Councillor Hill summed up the debate on the submitted petition and thanked the petitioner and Councillors for all their contributions. He reiterated that it was hard work to raise a petition. He agreed that we do need more buses in the furthest reaches of the borough because he understood that Datchet, Horton and Wraysbury do feel isolated. He had visited and canvassed in those areas. He expressed particular concern for the elderly and also for those who are disabled and for whom a bus was the only viable option. He was aware of the pollution and the air quality issues recognising that a full bus was more effective and more efficient than a bunch of cars. He considered that there was likely to actually be 3,000 people which felt neglected, cut off and overlooked in those areas. He wanted to reassure them that they were not but the Council was finding the financial situation very difficult. He acknowledged the comments about active travel, he liked the thought of further partnership working with parish councils and he had previously investigated dial-a-bus and it may have advanced since then. It is a shame that Heathrow moved the funding for the Number 10 bus and they would lobby to get it back. In relation to government funding it was sad that the Council did not have enough money and he reflected that whilst £437k looked like a big carrot to put on another bus service but as it was a single year’s funding then it would disappear and the service would then have to be shut down. He observed that there was currently only one service that was commercially viable which was the service between Maidenhead and Windsor. He advised that all the other services within the borough had 60 percent subsidies. He was not suggesting that they should not be subsidised but he asked that it be recognised that the Council would not be in a position to subsidise them indefinitely. He made a plea to the public that where buses were put on please make use of them. 

Councillor Hill concluded the debate by stating that the council had listened to the petitioners and would consider the request as part of the planned report being discussed at the September Cabinet meeting.

Proposed by Councillor Hill, lead member for Highways and Transport, Customer Service Centre and Employment and seconded by Councillor Jones it was 

RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY that the petition would be taken into account along with other feedback at the Cabinet meeting in September 2023.

The Mayor thanked Mr Perez for attending the meeting and for everybody who worked on the petition.