Po ten tial subsidies by Oxon 'massive'
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OXFORDSHIRE County Councils' rural transport policies have finally, after a 14-day hearing and deliberations lasting nearly four months, been rejected by the Traffic Commissioners in a bulky 71-page judgment.
The Commissioners have questioned the council's support for service applications submitted by private operators, Worths of Enstone and Carterton Coaches, and the opposition to proposed service reorganisations by the City of Oxford Motor Services.
The Commissioners say that the council policy of extending school contracts to provide a .community bus has led to potential subsidies of £234,000 for private operators._ "Both management and unions in these large, nationalised bus operating companies, and indeed the Government, itself, would do well to ponder the implications of the massive • public support of small private operators in rural areas which has been revealed in the course of the inquiry," says the Commissioners.
Their report states that to grant licences for private operators supported by the council would return the county to an obsolete 1930 concept of passenger transport.
They suggest that long-term planning of buses would become impossible and that Oxfordshire would be left without a proper network of routes, merely a host of unrelated services.
The Commissioners consider that the transport planning policies of Oxford shire County Council between 1975 and 1976 appear to have been made without consideration to their impact on the operators of the City of Oxford Motor Services.
John Bodger, general manager of the City of Oxford Motor Services, commenting to CM on Traffic Commissioners' decision, said that it supported his view that the policies being pursued by the council were not in the interests of the community. The chairman of the councils' bus subsidy working party until -last week, Brigadier Roger Streatfield, said that he would be surprised if the county would change its policy. "There is no reluctance to pay subsidies to any operator who does not demand them as bulk subsidies," he said. "I think that in this case the law is an ass."
Mr R. E. Worth, of Worths of Enstone, told CM that his company followed the only course open to it and also followed the letter of the law with the support and co-operation of Oxfordshire County Council. The Commissioners' criticism of his company was not justified and he was instructing his solicitors to lodge an appeal against the decision.
Mr D. Woods, of Carterton Coaches, said that the decision of the Commissioners has given a large slice of his business to the City of Oxford Motor Services in an area where his firm has been the major operator for 25 years.
He felt that the decision had given the City of Oxford Motor Services "all the cards" and had put them in a position to tell Oxfordshire County Council what services they wanted to supply and how much it would cost them in the future.