Cumbria County Council cabinet has agreed to draw up plans to help maintain a modern fleet of minibuses for community groups around the county.
Members of the county council's cabinet agreed to create a strategy and explore funding options to keep a fleet of high quality community minibuses around the county.
A bid will now be made for funding under the county-wide Local Transport Plan (LTP) to pay for a rolling programme of vehicle replacement for the current fleet of 25 minibuses operated by the county's bus brokerages.
The council has been helping to fund bus brokerages since 1998. These are bus sharing schemes that use vehicles driven by trained volunteers to give community groups of all kinds access to affordable transport.
Community Transport South Lakeland is the community bus brokerage in the south of the county while North Cumbria Community Transport runs minibuses in the rest of Cumbria. Both help tackle rural isolation and social exclusion by providing affordable transport to not-for-profit organisations including those working with children, the elderly and disabled people.
The county council has worked with various groups and organisations to fund eight 16-seat minibuses and part-fund a further 17 vehicles through local committees. But with important funding streams like that from the now-defunct Countryside Agency at an end, future funding is at best uncertain.
If the Community Bus Strategy replacement programme gets funding through the transport capital programme during the current LTP period (2007 to 2012), community buses across the whole county will be replaced at a cost of more than £1million.
Ian Stewart is the cabinet member for Environment, Transport and Planning. He said: "We are showing our commitment to community transport and to the bus brokerages which do so much for people in this county with their vehicles and volunteer drivers.
"It is one of the many ways Cumbria County Council has of helping to make sure all people in Cumbria can get access to the services and activities they need. In a big, rural county like Cumbria it is not always easy to for people to get to where they need to be and we have to be creative and make good use of the limited resources we have."
"This underpins everything that we are trying to achieve with our community and public transport policy in Cumbria but there is a lot of financial pressure and it will have to prove its worth."
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