Rising fuel costs puts strain on transport charity

5 hours ago

Alice Bouverie,Newent, Gloucestershireand

Georgia Eadie,West of England

News image — The cost of rides from the service has gone up by 50p per trip

BBC The image shows a man assisting a person in a wheelchair out of the back of a minibus. The man is wearing a blue high-vis vest. The minibus is parked in a car park. — The cost of rides from the service has gone up by 50p per trip

A transport charity providing a "lifeline" to the community says it will have to find an extra £20k to cover increased fuel costs.

Gloucestershire charity, Sheppard House Health and Social Care, has been forced to put the price of their dial-a-ride service up because the increased costs have made it "impossible" to make it work otherwise.

Lyndon Biddle, from the charity, said "some costs we just have to pass on because the margins are so fine".

The service provides transport for people with mobility issues in Newent in the Forest of Dean and the surrounding villages.

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Biddle said the charity was finding it is "increasingly expensive" to fill up their fleet of minibuses.

He predicted the increase is around 35%, which he said, "could be the difference between profit and loss".

The dial-a-ride service has gone from £6 to £6.50 per return trip.

Increasing the price is "not something we do lightly and we've managed to hold the price for several years, but unfortunately the fuel increase has tipped us over the edge," said Biddle.

A man is smiling at the camera. He has grey hair and a grey beard. He is wearing a grey checked shirt and standing in a garden. — Lyndon Biddle, from Newent Association for the Disabled says rising costs has put the service under "extra pressure"

Eco shop owner, Kirsty Scott, is also feeling the pinch with rising costs.

She relies on importing a lot of the herbs and spices she sells in store from abroad.

The cost of some items have gone up by "30% overnight", which has forced her to "put the prices up," she said.

Despite shops closing around her in Lydney in the Forest of Dean, she said she will "never close".

"I do it for the love of it, I'm not doing it for income right now, unfortunately," added Scott.

Image shows a women wearing a brown hoodie is smiling at the camera. She has blue shoulder length hair and black rimmed glasses. She is stood behind plastic containers of a yellow spice. — Kirsty Scott, owner of Forest Friends eco store, said costs are going up but her income is not

The average prices of both petrol and diesel have now "increased every day for the last 40 days," according to Simon Williams, head of policy at RAC.

He added, for diesel, this is a "new record for consecutive daily prices rises since 2015 and for petrol it matches the run of rises seen at the end of June 2022".

But Williams said that the increase has slowed down, and we "shouldn't see unleaded rise any further for the time being and the record diesel price now shouldn't be surpassed".

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