FEARS over Bournemouth council’s finances have prompted questions about continuing to pay for OAP tourists using buses in the town.

The council’s monthly budget monitoring report forecast it will have overspent by £1.5million by the end of the financial year. Of this, it is estimated it will be £570,000 over budget for concessionary bus fares.

Cllr Ian Clark asked Bournemouth council’s cabinet members at its September meeting why that was. He was told it was due to an increase in demand, something the council has no control over.

This prompted Cllr Anne Filer to claim the “disproportionate amount” being spent by the council was “incredibly unfair”.

“If you take a big town like Swindon – I don’t imagine they have anything like that number of people who are using bus passes there as tourists,” she said.

“It would not be difficult, within a few years, for a smart card which registers a person’s eligibility for a free bus journey to be charged back to the place where they pay their council tax.

“It just seems incredibly unfair that the more popular we become the more we have to pay. Whereas in other places they get off almost scot-free because they come from places most of us don’t want to visit.”

She added that she would like the council to make representations to the Local Government Association about the issue.

Council leader John Beesley said that when concessionary fares were introduced the idea was they would be “cost neutral”.

“The government spread grants across the country and I think from recollection Bournemouth’s was about £1million,” he said. “But even in the first year we had to put our hands into the council taxpayers' pocket to find another million to balance the costs.

“As demand has grown that cost has increased and that cost is now several million and increasing yet further because more people need buses."

He added that with increasing visitors to the town the cost of covering the fares will put “more and more pressure” on the council’s budget.

He said: “It is something that is still on our agenda but in the current financial climate, given what the Chancellor has been saying about the deficit, it is very unlikely that we will get any further government grant.”

Addressing the overall shortfall of £1.5million forecast, Cllr Beesley said it was “not an unusual situation for this authority to be in” at this stage in the budget cycle. He added that in the last eight years the authority had an “exemplary record” of always ending the year with balanced books.

He said, however, he does not “underestimate the challenge”, adding: “Since most of the pressures are related to demand-led service then that means that the council can only be reactionary to them.

“As we know the spend in areas such as adult social care, children’s social care, concessionary travel – all of those are demand led – so the council needs to work very hard to get to a balanced position by the year-end and I have every confidence we will.”