STROKE sufferers believe they are being penalised because they are disabled.

They are asking why Hampshire County Council is now charging them for a bus service that used to be free under Test Valley Borough Council.

Romsey Open Gate Stroke Club was told last week it will have to pay a £25 weekly fee from April 1 for the community group hire bus which takes members to their meetings.

Bus-user, Jean Bailey, a pensioner from Fleming Avenue, North Baddesley, who had a stroke nine years ago, said she was not sure how she was going to find the funds. Her share of the costs could amount to more than £200 per year.

For the 85-year-old great-grandmother, who lives alone and uses a wheelchair, her weekly trip to the stroke club is one of the few times she gets out of the house.

“It’s the only place that I can go. I’ll have to find the money, but it will be difficult,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s right that we should pay all that ourselves. Why can’t we use our bus pass?”

Currently, the pensioners’ concessionary bus fare pass scheme in Romsey is administered by TVBC, but from April, under government direction, it will be controlled by Hampshire County Council.

Stroke group leader, Beryl Pearce, said that because the majority of her members were taken to meetings by car, it was only the most severely disabled who had to be brought in by bus under the community group hire scheme. She said it was fairer that these five or six users shared the £25 weekly fee between them.

Ms Pearce said: “It just doesn’t seem fair that they are penalising disabled people, who have no other choice.”

She said the group had been told by HCC that those members who qualified for a disabled persons’ pass were each entitled to £32 worth of bus tokens per year, but this would go only a little way towards covering the bus hire.

Margaret Niblett, the group’s tea lady, said: “If you are over 60, able-bodied and living in town, you can hop on a bus after 9.30am as often as you like for free, but if you are disabled and use this bus once a week to transport you and your wheelchair to the stroke club, thus relieving the monotony of watching the wallpaper fade, you must pay.”

Dick Hewett, community transport manager for Test Valley Community Transport Scheme, which operates the community group hire bus, said that from April 1 the stroke club trips did not qualify for a concessionary fare pass because they were group hire.

He said that other groups had always paid this hire rate and that in the past Test Valley Borough Council had covered the hiring cost for the stroke group as an “exceptional case”.

This was no longer the case under the stricter budget of HCC.

In the past, the county council has said that to maintain all the different schemes previously funded by district authorities within a countywide scheme would cost almost £18m and exceed the available funding.

Mel Kendal, executive member for environment at HCC, said: “As much as we would like to, we cannot afford to provide the extra benefits that individual district councils have been providing because the Government has not transferred to the county, the full value of funding previously given to local councils for the scheme.

“District and borough councils can continue to provide the enhancements however, if they wish to, from their own resources and earlier this year, the government did allocate some addition funding to local councils for this reason.

“The bus pass is for individuals to use when making individual journeys and allowing the use of bus passes on group hire trips goes beyond the scope of the scheme.”