Petition for Better Buses for the Waterside

Thank you for your petition in which you are requesting:

More frequent services to Marchwood, Challenger Way, Fawley, Calshot direct bus services to Southampton General Hospital and Lymington and a reinstatement of the summer bus to Lepe beach. You also are seeking better service frequencies at off-peak times including early mornings, evenings and weekends.

Reliability – an end to bus services being cancelled with little or no warning.

Fairer fares – seeking an extension of the £2 capped single fare beyond 31 December 2024 and London-style Hopper fares four people boarding and using another bus within 1 hour of boarding their first bus.

In your covering letter that accompanied the petition you raised several points some of which relate more to Bluestar than to Hampshire County Council. Whilst I cannot speak for Bluestar, officers have had discussions with them about these issues. Below, I will respond to each point raised in your covering letter in turn.

I am pleased to hear that your group welcome the benefits of the increase in service frequencies in the early mornings, evenings and daytimes on the Bluestar 9 that were introduced from the 2^nd of September has brought to many of the communities on the Waterside. We are working closely with Bluestar to monitor the impact of these service enhancements, that were funded using Department for Transport BSIP+ funding, and the corridor is showing good levels of passenger growth.

I note your concerns about the weekday service frequency reductions on the Bluestar 9 for the village of Calshot. Being a commercially operated bus service, the operator Bluestar needs to cover their operating costs from passenger fares. Ultimately the service frequency provided to places like Calshot is demand-led. If enough villagers make use of the bus to cover operating costs, then the operator has no need to reduce frequencies.

Where demand is very low (over a period of several months many of the services that saw frequency reductions were carrying no people or one or two people, with an average weekday demand of 12 passengers per day in total across all the hourly services), the bus operator Bluestar has the prerogative to tailor the service frequency operated to the level of demand. In this case, the services that remain are the ones that see the most use by villagers.

The County Council is not able to fund the reinstatement of bus services in the gaps between bus services to and from Calshot either from DfT BSIP funding or from our supported bus budget.

A key objective for the County Council’s BSIP is to grow passenger demand by focusing investment on the strongest performing parts of the bus network that are seeing good levels of passenger growth. This principle has underpinned the way that we have utilised BSIP+ funding from the DfT to fund bus service enhancements and commercial support on the commercial bus network. All BSIP+ funding provided to bus operators for service enhancements has been on the basis that by the end of the funding period, the enhancements would need to become commercially self-sustaining, so that bus operators are able to continue covering the increased operating costs associated with the higher frequency from ticket revenues.

Whilst the County Council does have the ability to operate tendered bus services for areas that can’t be served by commercial bus services, recent increases in tender prices and reducing budgets mean that the number of services that we are able to operate is reducing. This means that we are not able to fund improved bus service to and from Calshot. You may be aware that in the current financial year the County Council has expenditure on supported bus services and community transport services of £2.8m a year. For the 2025/26 financial year, Cabinet has agreed to implement savings of £587,000 (including reducing our expenditure on supported bus services by £262,000 a year as well as local enhancements to the Concessionary Travel Scheme).

The Waterside area is a part of one of eleven Districts and Boroughs within Hampshire that HCC needs to take account the needs of bus users for access to services and employment and we need to prioritise how available budgets for tendered services are used so that they provide the greatest benefit to the most people in a way that also provides HCC with value for money. The extremely low numbers of passengers carried would mean that funding a service from Calshot would require very significant levels of subsidy per passenger which would not be justifiable in the current financial situation.

I note your call to see increased service frequencies on the Bluestar 8 to beyond the current hourly service to Challenger Way and Marchwood. As and when the DfT make available future rounds of revenue funding for service enhancements we will work with Bluestar to explore what might be possible that has a good commercial case that it would be possible to sustain on a commercial basis after an initial 2 year period of funding support, in line with the principles of focussing support on the parts of the commercial network that have the strongest prospects of delivering passenger growth. We would need to prioritise potential enhancements across all 11 Districts and Boroughs of Hampshire in terms of likely levels of passenger growth, if the Bluestar 8 is in this category then it may be a route that could have frequencies improved.

I note your request for there to be additional bus stops provided on the A326 at Twiggs Lane to allow nearby residents to utilise the Bluestar 9 service. The feasibility of providing a pair of bus stops here has been investigated by officers. Unfortunately, the road layout on this part of the A326 in this location has a poor safety record and was changed from a crossroads layout several years ago to address this.

Although there is the existing signal-controlled crossing of the A326, the area is not conducive to the provision of additional bus stops. There are potential road safety issues of buses stopping on the carriageway as the volume of traffic on this part of the A326 is high, with a 40mph speed limit. Given this, there would be a need for buses to pull off the main carriageway into new bus laybys on both sides. These would need to be around 40-50m in length to provide space for buses to decelerate and accelerate back into the traffic flow. In the area near to Twiggs Lane, there is not sufficient highway land to provide such laybys and provide paved waiting areas for passengers to wait.

In terms of your request that the popular summer bus to Lepe beach be reinstated, I understand that the Bluestar 9 previously ran to Lepe during the school summer holiday periods. This is a commercial decision for Bluestar to make. From Bluestar passenger boarding figures, the numbers of passengers using it to/from Lepe were small. Bluestar took the decision to stop running this beyond Langley Farm as the bus parking and turning situation down at Lepe was very challenging. Bluestar were frequently encouraging issues with cars parked in the bus turning circle and drivers had numerous accidents as a result. Bluestar and Hampshire County Council bus infrastructure officers undertook a site visit with the local council, and the National Park Authority, but we were unable to find a solution to this issue.

It is entirely a commercial decision for Bluestar to decide on whether the boundary of the “Southampton Plus” fare zone could be extended to cover the Waterside area. We have put your question to them asking them to give it consideration and they have indicated that there is currently no commercial financial case for doing this. Although Hampshire is in an Enhanced Partnership with Bluestar, if in their view there is not a commercial case for this, there are no further steps that the County Council can take at this time to encourage them to change their position, other than asking to keep this under review.

Yours sincerely

Councillor Lulu Bowerman
Executive Member for Highways and Waste