THE members of Aylburton Parish Council wish it to be known that they strongly object to the proposed withdrawal of the number 73 Lydney to Chepstow bus service.

Firstly we would question the basis for the decision. Last year the parish council initiated a Community and Parish Plan exercise that has just been completed and will soon be published (it is already on our temporary website http://www.aylburton.com">www.aylburton.com. In the survey, parishioners were asked about their usage of the bus service. The percentage of parishioners who claimed not to use the service is only just over 50 per cent. We note that Stagecoach, perhaps not surprisingly, declined to provide details of their survey, but we believe that they will reveal that the service is used, but by elderly people on a concessionary fare. Aylburton has a large proportion of elderly people; removing the bus service would have a serious deleterious effect on their daily lives.

The Parish Plan survey went on to reveal that over a quarter of respondees stated that an infrequent service with inconvenient times was a major factor in their not using the bus service; to get usage levels up, the service needs to be improved, not made significantly worse. As a local train service is already non-existent, residents of all the parishes along the A48 will now have no choice but to travel by car, which can only make the already serious congestion on the A48 worse. 92 per cent of our residents feel that traffic on the A48 is the biggest single issue affecting the quality of life in the parish; the county council need to be doing much more to tackle the problem, not just ignoring it because it's too difficult.

We were extremely disappointed that we had to find out about the withdrawal of the bus service through the pages of the local press. It is shocking that nobody had the decency to discuss this problem with local representatives first before announcing it as a done deal to the general public. We would strongly urge the county council to discuss the issue with parish councils along the A48 to try and find an acceptable solution; the impact on the public, the environment and on our quality of life is far too great for this to be ignored. – Mrs Karen Blackwell (clerk), Aylburton Parish Council.