Cumbria Community Foundation - Furness: Opportunities and Challenges 2021

F U R N E S S – O P P O R T U N I T I E S & C H A L L E N G E S 33 Another line runs north from Barrow to Carlisle with Furness stations at Askam, Kirkby and Foxfield. The number of trains has been increased – including the reintroduction of Sunday services – but it remains slow. The 85-mile journey to Carlisle takes 2.5 hours. Bus services are almost exclusively provided by Stagecoach on a commercial basis after Cumbria County Council withdrew subsidies in 2014. Fares are significantly higher than in metropolitan areas, in particular London, where they are heavily subsidised. Urban and inter-urban services are good but many rural routes have disappeared leaving some communities – such as Great Urswick and Satterthwaite – with no buses other than school services, isolating those without a car. The decline of rural bus services has led non-car owners to leave rural areas and this is reflected in the statistics for car ownership. 2 In mainly urban Low Furness, car ownership is below the national average. 29.9% of households have no car (England: 25.8%). The reverse is true of High Furness where only 14.5% of households are without a car. An increase in using electric vehicles is a national objective, though this has been slow to roll out in Furness. The numbers of electric cars may be approximated by looking at the presence of charging devices: there are only two public chargers in Barrow, which has a high proportion of terraced homes that lack off-street parking for overnight charging. 1 AA 2 Census 2011 3 Department for Transport 4 Commission for Rural Communities 5 Ofcom This equates to three per 100,000 population and in 2021 there are no rapid chargers at all. 3 Across South Lakeland (an area which incorporates a large part of High Furness), however, it appears that electric vehicles are being embraced - there are 72 public chargers, of which 24 are rapid, so there are 68.5 chargers per 100,000 population. Access to services 4 is relatively easy in Low Furness but more problematic in much of rural High Furness where travel distances are much greater. In Low Furness, the typical household is 3.8km from the nearest job centre (England average: 4.6km), 1.9 km from the nearest secondary school (England: 2.1km), 1.0km from the nearest GP (England: 1.2km) 0.6km from the nearest pub (England: 0.7km) and 0.7km from the nearest post office (England 1.0km). But in High Furness, the typical home is 16.6km from the nearest job centre, 3.6km from the nearest secondary school, 2.6km from a GP, 0.8km from a pub and 1.4km from a post office. This urban-rural divide is also true of digital connectivity 5 , which is vital for businesses and increasingly for private citizens as more services are delivered online. In Low Furness, only 0.4% of premises have broadband speeds below the Government’s Universal Service Obligation (England 1.8%) but in High Furness the figure is 5.5%. The average broadband download speed is 29.86 Mb/s in Low Furness and 23.39 Mb/s in High Furness, both well behind the national average of 45.08 Mb/s.