During the last parish council meeting (13th February 2025) it was brought to our attention the poor service from NIBS buses since they took over the contract.
We decided to join forces with neighbouring parishes Doddinghurst PC and Stondon Massey PC to apply for the Love Your Bus Grant as encouraged by the grant itself. It was also easier to have one clerk to communicate with NIBS buses as they are notoriously hard to get hold of.
A condition of the grant was to obtain a letter of support from the bus operator, in this case NIBS buses and our county councillor, Lesley Wagland. We managed to get both letters on the last day. NIBS buses couldn’t provide exact costings to improve the service as they explained that:
“The biggest issue we have with services 21, 61 & 71/72 is the unpredictability of the traffic in Brentwood and what we don’t want to do as a company is to increase the running times between stops only to find when the traffic is good, we end up waiting at every other stop. This will discourage patronage.
A word of caution regarding service 61 & 71/72 these are funded by ECC and we operate these on their behalf this means any route changes including timetables would probably need to go out for consultation and be passed by their cabinet.
Please don’t take this email as us being negative as we all have the same goals of increase patronage, making bus travel more attractive and reducing car travel.”
Taking these comments into consideration we decided to apply for “A full investigation to revise the problems and recommendations (with steps) that must be taken to make the bus services run on time and being reliable. The 61, 21, 71/72 services are not loved by the local community as they have been utterly unreliable since NIBS took over”.
This way there is an official record of the problems that we are facing and even if we don’t receive the grant Travel Essex will have to do something about it.
We will of course keep providing updates on the grant outcome.
We created a local bus WhatsApp group and we will be grateful if any bus users could please join it to keep us informed of any delays-no show or “disappearing” buses so we are able to create accurate reports. To join the group please use the QR provided or email clerk@kelvedonhatch-pc.gov.uk
