A fare option?

Bus fare concessions vary across the country

A new improved bus service and cheaper fares have made a big difference to life for pensioner Margaret Jennings.

Margaret lives in the Bedfordshire village of Dunton, just outside Biggleswade.

A government grant of half a million pounds has helped her local council to lay on more frequent buses which have been built to specifications established by consulting local people - they even got to choose what colour the bus would be.

They are scheduled to combine with other services like rail travel to London to make travelling on public transport even easier.

Improvements

The buses come with a ramp which is ideal for Margaret, who uses a wheelchair, and pensioners only pay 50p a journey.

"It's a fantastic service," she said. "I hardly ever used to use the bus and couldn't get out much. But now I can get into Biggleswade or Bedford and back for a pound."

Margaret: Concessionary fare vital

The government wants to improve the buses for people exactly like Margaret.

But ironically its latest proposals for funding the improvements could hit her hardest.

Begg report

The Begg report, published last week, recommended cutting back the concessions allowed to senior citizens to help pay for improvements.

In his report, Professor David Begg, chairman of the Commission for Integrated Transport, said subsidies to bus companies should rise by 40% to £1.5bn a year for bus services outside London.

But he also suggested widespread reforms including proposing that pensioners should pay at least half the cost of bus passes.

The £48m saved could be spread around to help other disadvantaged groups.

Concessions

The report said concessions should also be available to people like students and job seekers to widen the number of travellers using buses.

"If they took away the concessionary fare I wouldn't be able to afford to use the buses, so it wouldn't help me at all, in fact it would make things worse," said Margaret.

The plans have also been criticised by Help the Aged.

The charity says research in the West Midlands found that 72% of single pensioners and 53% of pensioner couples don't own a car.

Pensioners pay 50p per journey

It also says that 70% of the people using bus passes were pensioners on a low income - exactly the people who would suffer from higher fares.

The charity wants to see free bus travel for pensioners extended rather than reduced and to end the differences in bus concessions around the country.

In Scotland, OAPs have free off-peak travel. In some parts of England, like London, the West Midlands, Nottingham and Merseyside, it's also free.

But in most other areas, pensioners have to pay and the amount varies widely.

In Margaret's home patch of mid-Bedfordshire, there is the flat rate of 50p. But a few miles down the road in Cambridgeshire senior citizens have to pay half the adult fare.

But even Help the Aged's figures show that it would cost £300m a year to provide free off-peak travel to pensioners in England.

Chancellor

With tax receipts down and public spending up, there is a question mark over whether the Chancellor will be prepared to pump in the hundreds of millions of pounds recommended by all the lobbying groups.

Plenty of government money has already been spent. Margaret's new service would never have arrived without the £500.000 grant and if the funding ran out its future would be uncertain.

As Margaret enjoys her bus ride into Biggleswade, the debate about how to pay for it runs on.

Everyone agrees that bus services need to be improved, but like university education, health services or improving the railways, deciding who should pay for it is proving to be the problem.