'Our village needs a bus service'

A north Shropshire Conservative campaigner has called for a rethink on bus services, saying his village had been without one for more than a decade.

Shauney Connor, from Woore, said fellow young people who could not drive had nothing to do, while older people were isolated because of the lack of transport options.

"The only bus service that ever comes through is the school bus in the mornings and the afternoons, for pick up and drop-offs," he said.

The Liberal Democrat-run Shropshire Council has said it is keen to connect more rural areas with buses, but needs more funding to do so.

"With the latest pub closure in the village... people won't have a place to socialise or drink responsibility without having to walk down country roads, Connor said.

"If they don't drive, that would be a pain for them, because where's the public transport, where's the taxis, where's the community cars?

"There's literally nothing to connect them to elsewhere - Nantwich, Market Drayton, Norton in Hales, or anywhere else in Shropshire."

Connor said he was not advocating for a frequent service, but at least an on-demand offering.

Rob Wilson, cabinet member for transport and economic growth, said the local authority was keen to improve the public transport network.

"It's something that we want to see more of, those connect on-demand services," he said.

"Also for people in Woore, we're going to speak to colleagues in Staffordshire, and talk about cross-border travel.

"Some of our communities, they don't face towards the middle of Shropshire, they face towards Stoke-on-Trent, Welshpool, we need to work with those other councils to make bus services work wherever people live in the county.

"It's not something we could do on our own."

On-demand service trips are on the rise in the county - more than 21,100 trips were made in 2024, this increased to more than 33,000 in 2025.

"It all comes down to funding, we've now got a settlement from the government for three years - that gives us some certainty for what we can plan over the next three years, but it isn't really enough," said Wilson.

"There's small increases, enough to cope with inflation, but nothing to really deliver a proper public transport system that people want to see.

"We need people to use them, that's the key thing, the more people that use the buses, the less we have to subsidise those buses and we can start other routes elsewhere."

He added that the council understood that a lot of its communities were isolated and needed to be connected up again.

North Shropshire MP Helen Morgan said: "Shropshire has lost more than 60% of its bus miles. It got one of the worst funding allocations from the government... and look what we can do with that money.

"We put a new route on, it connects Market Drayton to Wellington and to Whitchurch - it means young people in Market Drayton can access college and people can access hospital."

She added that if given more money, other parts of the county could be transformed.

"The funding has very much gone to cities - the government has made an absolute choice not to fund rural areas, and to plough that money into metropolitan areas," she said on Politics Midlands.

Morgan said that was "disastrous" for rural areas, adding that poor funding from governmnet for public transport also extended to a lack of wheelchair access at some railway stations.

"Our local government allocation is grim, it cuts the funding over the next three years," she added.

In response, Laurence Turner, Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield, who is also on the transport select committee, said: "We've made a recommendation about taking rural areas needs more into account when the bus formula is changed for funding, I'm really glad that the government has committed to looking at that."

Shropshire Council has had good feedback on one new bus service that launched in January, subsidised using public money.

The 340 links Market Drayton with the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, and is funded from the council's recent allocation of government bus service improvement funding.

For years it had neither a direct bus link to nearby Whitchurch, nor the hospital.

"Market Drayton is almost like a bus desert - it has been until now," said Graham Turner, who uses the new service.

"People wanting to get to the hospital without their own transport have to rely on other people to help them out, and now there's a bus.

"People can get out and see their friends, they can go shopping... it makes all the difference to people, it's more inclusive."

Another user, Les Bell, added: "It's really useful for the people living in the rural areas, and it helps people from Market Drayton and Whitchurch to get to the Princess Royal Hospital without going through Shrewsbury."

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