RURAL areas of the Borders are up in arms after council cuts affected lifeline bus services in the area, meaning there is now no link from Edinburgh to towns and villages en route to Dumfries after 7.35pm.

Campaigners are to protest to Scottish Borders Council which scrapped a subsidy, leaving workers and students, as well as people visiting Edinburgh, without a bus home at night.

The Stagecoach-operated service is currently funded by the South West of Scotland Transport Partnership and the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport as well as the council.

The latter originally intended to cut its entire £135,000 subsidy for the route. It kept a £35,000 contribution in the end, but later services had to be scrapped. The council said services were underused.

Now an attempt is to be made to persuade the council to use just 0.35% of its near-£28 million reserves to restore the subsidy and allow a “proper” survey to be carried out, with a protest going to the Scottish Government which has pledged to protect rural services.

The bulk of the pressure on the council is coming from the villages of Carlops and West Linton where 3300 people signed a petition protesting against the cuts.

A public meeting is set to take place at 7.30pm in the Graham Institute in West Linton tonight, but even that has been described as a “farce” because anyone attending from outside West Linton will not be able to get a bus home.

Braveheart actress, poet and author Gerda Stevenson lives in Carlops. She said: “Everyone knows that by cutting the later services, people will be far less likely to take the bus into Edinburgh given that they won’t be able to get back home.

“They will be forced to go by car which will have a detrimental effect on the environment and send the family budget soaring.

“Yet by some outrageous feat of political doublethink, Scottish Borders Council has dressed up this new timetable as an improvement.”

One local campaigner told The National: “To cut more or less the entire subsidy is savage. They say a survey was carried out using the figures supplied by the bus companies which they got from the number of tickets recorded for services.

“But many of us have seen drivers just waving people on to the buses and not recording their return tickets. I have never been on a late bus from Edinburgh to Biggar with just four people on it, certainly never at weekends.

“What we want is for the council to carry out a proper independent survey of how many people actually use the bus service and what they use it for.

“Bear in mind that there was no genuine consultation with the people of the area from Penicuik down to Dumfries and this was all imposed on us.

“There is great anger about this cut being imposed in such a high-handed manner by the council and some of us are considering withholding our council tax in protest. It has plenty cash in reserve, so why not use some of it?”

A council spokesman said: “Statistics from 2017 show that the 8.45pm service was used on average by fewer than five passengers per day travelling to West Linton and Carlops.

“The 9.55pm service carried fewer than four passengers per day on average.

“The cost of continuing these two evening services alone would have been around £88,000 per year, representing a subsidy of around £30 per passenger which our review concluded was not a reasonable use of public funds.”