Can anyone explain to me why, since the sorry demise of Whittle buses from Kidderminster and the surrounding Wyre Forest area, Diamond buses have been allowed to acquire almost a complete monopoly of bus services here?

I say ‘services’, because what they actually now provide from Kidderminster garage is a fleet of noisy, unreliable buses, which are usually very dirty inside and out and often without a working heater.

Only on Sundays do we get new, clean, reliable buses, because those Sunday buses operate from Redditch garage, which does have new buses aplenty.

But Diamond see fit only to run them on the 3/X3 route on Sundays.

They provide no other bus services at all, in or out of Kidderminster, on a Sunday, and no late evening buses on weekdays at all, ever.

Diamond has taken over Whittle’s 192 hourly service from Stourport to Halesowen but have shortened it so that it now starts and ends at Kidderminster, thereby depriving people from the Lickhill and Burlish areas of Stourport of a fast bus service to Kidderminster.

Who agreed that the 192 service should now terminate at Kidderminster?

In fact the Lickhill / Burlish Park area of Stourport now has only the hourly 15 bus service, via a tortuous route all around Stourport and then a lengthy, slow trip via Wilden Top to Kidderminster, a service whose new operator is currently struggling to keep to the timetable.

Another awful thing currently happening is that Diamond seemingly cannot assign one driver to the same bus for the whole day.

That would be far too easy and sensible.

So at Kidderminster Town Hall, where drivers frequently now have to change over, for reasons best known to Diamond, passengers are left out in all weathers, bus doors clamped firmly shut to them, while drivers take forever to effect the complicated changeover.

This is not the fault of the drivers, who probably hate it as much as their passengers.

It is the fault of Diamond Buses, who cannot run a service that puts their customers first, either in terms of their comfort, or the quality of service provided to them.

Why are Kidderminster and Wyre Forest deemed unfit for modern, comfortable, efficient and reliable buses and proper bus services?

Redditch and Bromsgrove have them.

Christine Short Stourport