At one time, it was the practice in some American states to offer condemned convicts a choice between different means of execution – not an offer, one imagines, that they can have regarded with unalloyed enthusiasm.

In much the same spirit, Hertfordshire’s Tory cabinet member for highways, one Terry Douris, offers your readers a fresh consultation on how the county council should slash the bus services it funds (‘Setting the record straight on cuts’, Your Views, December 19).

With characteristic disingenuousness, he takes it as given that the council must make such reductions, and seeks to narrow the argument simply to one about where, when and on whom the axe should fall. Entirely absent from his letter is any evidence of awareness of (let alone sympathy for) the hardship which will result – or any justification for his party’s assault on public services generally, of which this is just one example.

Douris claims that 98 per cent of the bus journeys made in the county would be unaffected, including those on “all commercial services”. Yes, of course, but that’s because by definition commercial services are unsubsidised and beyond the reach of his financial axe. The whole purpose of county council contract routes is to meet social need for travel at times when and in places where demand is too thin for services to be self-sustaining.

In Borehamwood, the journeys most immediately at risk are those on route 306 on weekday evenings and all day on Sundays. At these times, there would be no buses to and from Bushey and Watford, and none to Stapleton Road, Stanborough Avenue, Gateshead Road, Grove Road, most of Furzehill Road, or Farriers Way. Passengers travelling on these buses do not do so simply for fun. They do so because they work unsocial hours, or have evening engagements, or are making hospital visits, or because these are the only times they are free to visit shops – and because buses offer them the most convenient (or only available) means to make these essential journeys.

Located as we are next to the frontier between Hertfordshire and London, Borehamwood residents are well-placed to observe the contrast between two different policy approaches to public transport. In London, successive mayors have invested in improving the density and frequency of the bus network, so that usage has been climbing steadily for two decades and the capital now accounts for more than half of all the bus journeys in the country.

In Hertfordshire, by contrast, frequencies have been reduced, whole routes have been withdrawn, and large areas are left unserved for parts (or even all) of the day or week. Unsurprisingly, usage is falling. The hardship which results is felt most keenly by those who are too young, too poor or too frail to have access to private cars – a consequence to which Douris and his ilk are blithely indifferent.

District councils also have powers to fund local buses. But for the past few years, the Tories who run Hertsmere have opted out. If they disagree with Hertfordshire’s bus cuts, they could step in to reverse them. So their deafening silence on the situation speaks volumes. We will all be free to draw our own conclusions when deciding how to vote in the local elections due in May.

John Cartledge

Haddon Close, Borehamwood