Welcome to Warwickshire County Council

How is Community Transport Developed?

Most community transport came into being because, as the name suggests, a need was identified at a very local level close to the community.

Volunteers may have originally started a scheme to meet a very specific local need and have carried on through to the present day on much the same scale. Others over time may have faced growing demand for their services and found they needed to take on some paid staff or tie their operation in with an organisation having the necessary resources to sustain it.

In some parts of the country today, huge community transport operators run literally hundreds of vehicles (Ealing Community Transport, London; Ring and Ride, Birmingham). They are becoming social enterprises, increasing the proportion of their income from contract work and moving away from grant-dependency.

Operators of that size don’t exist in Warwickshire. Our county’s services are ‘small to medium’ and still close to the voluntary and community sector with varying degrees of independence and/or under local authority and partnership funding schemes.

In the past, new community transport schemes have been launched on the basis of a perceived need and too often quickly failed. The expected demand was not actually there. The County has therefore moved towards more targeted development based on identified need through local assessment. It will work with its community transport partners and stakeholders to:

Consult with local communities on the evidence of need
Encourage the gathering of user feedback to identify gaps in service provision
Co-ordinate the resources at its disposal to better meet new demand

The two key strategies that will provide the direction for these efforts are:

• Community Transport Strategy - (96 KB)
• Accessiblity Strategy