Dear Keith,

I am e-mailing you to express my Council's extreme concern over the proposed termination of the Pegasus bus service. As you will know, the scheme was unveiled with huge publicity in 2005, and to huge acclaim. The scheme was simple but very effective: to provide free or affordable transport for all school children within the catchment, providing a service akin to the yellow school bus setup in the USA.

The service has proved hugely popular for a variety of reasons:

1. It offers a safe and reliable service to all children living within the school catchment;

2. By offering affordable and safe travel to those families not entitled to free transport it keeps the 'school run' traffic to an absolute minimum, creating a safer environment for those walking to school, improving the quality of life for those living on the school route, and has significant environmental benefits.

3. For those families not eligible for free transport, termination of the service will probably mean driving their children to school, as, even if a parent is willing to pay for their child to travel there is no guarantee that they will be offered a seat. This has happened recently on the bus service to Glebelands School in Cranleigh where several parents from Gomshall have been told that a seat is no longer available for their child even though there are free seats on the bus. The parents now have to drive the round trip of 13 miles themselves but this has huge implications for their ability to have a job with normal working hours, and is causing them considerable unnecessary stress. It seems completely bizarre to me that SCC should be pumping money into the pre-school daycare sector to allow parents with very young children to return to work, whilst taking away school transport with the other hand, thereby causing real difficulties for parents of older children to hold down a job with normal office hours.

If you would like to discuss this, or need any more information, then please contact me. It is difficult to explain the complexities of school admissions, and how that affects school transport eligibility in an e-mail, but I can assure that a rural community such as ours will suffer more than most.