Another sweeping and inaccuarate statement Mr Garvie. WBC do tender for services. You are wrong!!
You are not doing yourself any favours on this forum. It is difficult to take you seriously when you make clearly provocative and inaccuarate comments.

why?

If West Berks refuse to supply information about these kind of issues, what else are we to think? Do West Berks tender for building work?

You have just stated that WBC don't tender for anything. That's what you said.
Now you are not sure because you have been challenged.
You know, I can't tell if what you say is true or false as you seem to make statements that suit your argument without any supporting evidence.

Money is paid in subsidy. You just have to look at the service guide to see why it isn't fit for service. Service 11 is being withdrawn because it doesn't attract enough full fare customers according to one person, I thought the purpose of subsidising bus routes was to provide a service to those who can't / don't drive? A bus costs around £10k a year to lease - 30 busses and the staff to run them would cost less than the money we pay in subsidy at present IMO.

Don't West Berks have a seat on the board of Reading busses harking back to the old BCC days??? They only tender for additional services. FACT. Building services, do they tender??? You have said I'm lying, where is the evidence to show they tender for these construction projects??? The CCTV transfer to Windsor - they did a deal with Windsor which was blocked because it hadn't been put out to tender. When it did go to tender, who won??? Coincidence???

Back on topic, there needs to be a proper review of what we get for our money RE: Bus services. There is no information online, apart from loose total sums paid. Why can't we see how much service 1 costs us as a local authority for instance?

.....Because I don't Want West Berks to employee another 10 bean counters costing about £400K a year to provide you with statistics that you can use to politic over....

As long as you are happy then

A bus service is provided to make money for the company that operates it.

£2million will be for the whole of West Berks. How many routes is that? How many buses, drivers, maintenance staff ? If there is a surplus here ( ie £2million is too much ) & cash is being wasted, why doesn't Labour offer to bring in bus operation into council control? Merely pointing the finger & saying that Labour would 'go to tender' isn't really going to improve the situation is it?

In my experience, businesses normally continue to run something if they can make money doing it. If RB want to cancel a route, it stands to reason that they want to cancel it because they are not making money, even with a subsidy. Just because you subsidise something does not mean it will run regardless.

Er, it's not exactly hard to find.

http://www.westberks.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=783

Perhaps if you did more research, you wouldn't make such sweeping and incorrect generalisations?Haven't we had this for years already?

http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/localgo...es/default.aspx

Again, do the research before you start announcing new Labour policies to spend taxpayers' money.

Bus services that are subsidised are paid money to keep running at a loss because it connects communities to public services. User23, show me a direct link to the exact amount we give Reading busses and how that figure is broken down. They obviously don't have it because I've been told that I can't have that level of detail. It's somewhere between £2m and £2.5m from what I can see, but why do different financial documents not add up to the same figure?

As I said before, Labour would propose a revised network of services and put it out to all companies to bid for. The level of service I believe we require would require 26 busses, so I accounted for four additional busses as cover. Based on a £25k salary for drivers and engineers, if Stagecoach ran that level of service elsewhere the subsidy level would be around £1.5m from a local authority. *Go on any bus lease site and the figures for leasing 30 busses would be around £300k a year.

The point is here, that to date West Berks refuse to provide any detailed financial information with regards to bus services or anything else, as to why we apparently have four cost centres for policy and scrutiny teams to the tune of around £1m and such like. Why don't you post direct links User23 (if they exist). I believe if the level of detail was available, the council would have supplied it weeks ago.

Another thread seems to have been turned into an off topic Labour Party campaign broadcast.

Apparently you only need 26 busses. That will be about 40 drivers then, on about 10-12 routes.

And how has this figure been arrived at?

well, you work backwards. You decide what great saving you'd like to show your party could achieve if you were in power & go from there.

At present, there are less than 26 busses in operation per day. From looking at the level of service you could provide for £2m a year, I looked into how busses it would get you and also took into accound operational cost such as staff and fuel. For £2m we should have an all singing, all dancing network of routes with half hourly services and the like, early morning and late night services and the like. This is why I believe we need to look seriously at what we are getting for our money at present.

No doubt a team of experts has been employed to work this figure out, and it hasn't just been scribbled out on the pack of a fag packet.

26 busses total? are you sure?

No you don't. You identify what level of service you require before dishing out the contracts. Once you establish what level of service you require, you go out and speak to as many operators as possible to get the best deal for the taxpayer. That's what anyone with a brain would do.

It's like the infrastructure, the argument from the Tories and the Libs is that we didn't need to improve our infrastructure such as roads, bridges and school capacity. Even now they deny we need it despite reports on the West Berks website saying the opposite. People need to wake up and realise that roads and schools won't build themselves. And before you start saying about the new primary school we are getting, is one little primary school going to address capacity accross the whole district???

As I've said elsewhere, we now need to focus on infrastructure and keeping people in West Berkshire. Without new employment generating floorspace, without ne retail capacity and without holding developers to affordable housing quotas, we are going to be in one heck of a bad situation, even worse than we are now.

And of course WBC don't bother with any of this do they.