Test Valley Borough Council will continue to support Community car schemes despite the transfer of the Government’s concessionary fare scheme to Hampshire County Council. At Test Valley’s recent Council meeting a motion on car schemes which I proposed and Conservative Mrs Jan Lovell seconded was agreed unanimously.

Up until now the community car schemes have been funded in parallel to the government’s concesionary fare scheme but they are in fact quite separate from the government scheme. It is essential and that the council continue to promote and fund these schemes. With the county’s continual cutting of funding for conventional buses and the health authority’s recent scrapping of the Andover to Winchester hospital bus these services have become even more important. There  are eleven schemes in the borough which receive grants from Test Valley, the current cost of the grants to these schemes is about £58,000 a year.