Oxfordshire County Council is having to find £4.4m from its financial reserves to fund concessionary bus travel for over-60s, it has been revealed.

The council claims that the relatively low level of overall funding it gets from the Government and the relatively high level of bus use locally leaves it worse off than any other ‘shire’ county in England.

The local authority is facing an £8.7m bill for all its concessionary travel for next year — but it says it can only afford to spend £4.3m of its central government funding on it.

The council has a statutory duty to provide concessionary travel and this leaves it with a choice of dipping into its reserves or making cuts to other services.

But it has hinted that it might not keep on doing this and that changes might have to be made to concessionary travel next year.

The information is contained in the agenda for the council’s cabinet meeting this coming Tuesday.

The agenda also includes the council’s plans to get rid of travel tokens — offered as an alternative to bus passes and used on taxi fares by people living in areas with limited bus services. The tokens are handed out to about 12,000 people in the county.

Also included in the agenda is a U-turn on plans to stop over-60s from using their bus passes for free travel on the ‘dial-a-ride service’, which collects people from their doorsteps in places where bus services are restricted.

This affects around 900 people and costs £100,000 to run every year. The county is understood to have been swayed by the level of support for being able to use bus passes on dial-a-ride services in its recent public consultation.

This is the first year that the county council has operated the concessionary travel schemes. Previously they were administered by district councils.

Councillor Ian Hudspeth, pictured, cabinet member for infrastructure, said: “The Government has decided to transfer responsibility for concessionary fare schemes to county councils up and down the country, and of all the shire counties we have received the poorest funding settlement.”

Mr Hudspeth said that operating a travel token scheme would have been “unaffordable”.

He said only three out of the five district councils in Oxfordshire offered the scheme, but the county council would have had to offer it to all county residents. This would have cost the county £700,000, rather than the £200,000 it costs the three district councils that offer tokens.

Mr Hudspeth said: “We recognise some people find them invaluable, but the cost is prohibitive.”

He added that he had this week raised his concerns about overall funding for concessionary travel with Communities Minister Baroness Hanham.