The number 65 bus runs between the Cambridgeshire market town of St Neots and through some of the surrounding villages. Passengers feel part of a small community, but the route is under threat, with transport chiefs citing reducing numbers and the cost of about £16 per person. As fears of wider cuts surface, what could these mean for bus services in one county?
Waiting outside the GP surgery in Buckden – the end of the line for the 65 – bus driver Dave Shepherd says this is the only route that can get some people to the doctors.
"Otherwise it's a taxi which would cost them an arm and a leg," he says.
The route runs three times a day each way, usually starting in the St Neots market square. Market day on Thursday is "especially busy".
"It means a lot to them and I enjoy doing the route. It's a nice pleasurable one. You can have a laugh and a joke with them."
Four people were on the bus on Wednesday afternoon.
One of the passengers, who did not wish to be named, says: "It's my lifeline. I can't get out otherwise. I can't walk… I was 84 last week and I come every day."
Bus services in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are overseen by the Combined Authority (CPCA), led by the Conservative mayor Paul Bristow since May 2025.
The CPCA said it understood that users of the 65 bus "value their service".
While no decisions have been made yet, a "public engagement" is ongoing, which the CPCA said was "an opportunity… to review the service rigorously to ensure publicly-funded investments in bus services are giving the best return in terms of social value and value for money".
Its figures say passenger figures were down by more than 10% between 2025 and 2026, to about 68 per week.
More widely, how buses are run across the county is set to change with the introduction of franchising under which the CPCA would set routes, timetables and fares, with bus operators bidding for contracts to run specific services.
It was a plan that started under the Labour mayor Nik Johnson, but now an independent report has raised fears bus services could be cut by more than a third in the next decade.
The review, chaired by Leon Daniels, said the plans for franchising were made on the assumption that the mayor's precept would gradually increase – but Bristow has committed to not raising it.
Bristow said: "Leon Daniels was probably the person who knows more about buses than almost anybody else in the country.
"We asked him to come and think about how do we franchise a model which the previous mayor decided he wanted to pursue, but that suits an urban two million person settlement like Manchester, how do we apply that to a rural county like Cambridgeshire without bankrupting us."
The report said as it stands there would be a funding gap, widening over time, due to falling demands and rising costs in line with national trends.
"Progressively more services and mileage would need to be removed to reach a neutral net position," the report said.
Bristow said there would be a gradual phasing in of franchising over a number of years and "hopefully we're going to produce a service which is better than it is at the moment".
Asked on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire if he was reconsidering his pledge not to raise the mayoral precept, Bristow said: "No, I keep my promises."
Johnson said when the franchising plans were consulted on "over 75% of the population who responded said, we want to see franchising, we want to see investment, we want to see a change from the broken system that has been running for the last 30, 40 years".
He said: "I think there is a difficulty that maybe in the campaign when he was out there to become the mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, I don't think he was all over the detail in regard to the actual costs and the implication.
"Everybody wants to say we want to keep taxation low, and we want to keep the bills low, because there is a cost of living crisis.
"But sometimes the reality of where we as a society, we have to work together to subsidise and support across different areas of the area, across different social economic demographics to make a fairer and kinder society."
Back on the 65, the public engagement runs until near the end of July.
As we travel through Great Paxton and the Offords to Buckden, one of the passengers says: "For these villages it's their lifeline. If the bus stops how are they going to get anywhere?"
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