THE government has created a £300m fund to postpone a few council cuts by one year. £9m of it is for Oxfordshire County Council.

On February 16 the county council revised its budget, using £4m of that fund to defer by 12 months the closure of some children’s centres and adult day care.

How will it spend the other £5m? Councillors vaguely mentioned saving some care for homeless people and some subsidised buses. But with how much money for each? How many, or few, buses might the county council save?

Last November, the county council's Cabinet voted to end all subsidised buses without even knowing how many passengers were using them.

When the county council consulted the public in previous subsidy reviews it always published passenger totals for each route. But in last year’s consultation, such data was absent.

We have asked the county council for passenger numbers for each route under threat. We believe several routes each carry more than 50,000 passengers a year, and several cost less than £1 per passenger to subsidise.

Passengers may be quickly lost and only slowly regained. Some routes are still recovering from RH Transport’s decline and bankruptcy in 2012. Others lost passengers when Go Ride over-reached itself in West Oxfordshire in 2014, and then withdrew from routes that it was struggling to run.

Last year’s bus review was ill-informed. The county council should publish passenger totals for each route from at least the last five years. Then anyone could see what their bus is up against, and reach their own informed opinion.

HUGH JAEGER

Chairman, Bus Users Oxford