CONCERN has been raised after figures showed a free shuttle bus and free Sunday parking did not help Dunfermline town centre businesses.

In December, a free shuttle bus was laid on for shoppers from the Leys Park Road car park into the centre while free parking on Sundays was provided between January and March.

However, at Tuesday's meeting of the City of Dunfermline area committee, councillors heard that the benefit of the £18,000 initiative was inconclusive.

Figures shown to councillors showed an 8.55 per cent reduction of footfall recorded in the centre on Saturdays and Sundays in November and December compared to the previous year.

Dunfermline South Councillor James Calder has now called for businesses to be consulted before deciding on future initiatives.

“It was useful to see the report on the initiatives agreed last year after our campaigning on Sunday parking charges. However there was a lack of detailed information on business feedback, other than it was generally positive," he said.

“Ultimately, businesses need our support more than ever right now after this dreadful year, and we need to listen to them to see what they need.”

Fellow councillor Gavin Ellis agreed, adding: "It is only right that we tailor our approach to help our High Street and retailers. We know there are many key dates for our culinary and hospitality trade along with retail and I would hope we can provide much-needed assistance to them on those dates.”

Councillor Ian Ferguson said he had been disappointed with the pilot scheme.

"I felt originally when we started doing this, the aim was to help town centre businesses – it might have been nice to have the free bus at Christmas but we were wanting town centre businesses to benefit and there's no indication that town centre businesses did benefit," he said.

"We need to set measures for when we do it this next year. Having people on the bus is not helping the town centre but spending £18,000 and not knowing if we succeeded or not seems a waste of money and I feel really disappointed by it all."

Susan Keenlyside, Fife Council lead consultant (transport networks), said around 1,200 passengers used the free shuttle bus.

"We had feedback that it was quite popular, especially for less able visitors," she said. "We did a lot of monitoring in the town centre but the data didn't highlight any increase.

"The free Sunday parking had a total cost of £12,000 – in general all of the street spaces were much more used and had higher occupancy and car park use was higher.

"There was a slight increase in footfall at the bottom end of the High Street but not in the whole town centre as we had hoped.

"We are trying to find out what works and how it can work better in a future year. The monitoring we did could only reflect on previous years. We don't know if it was better with or without the bus."

Committee convener Councillor Helen Law said they would be looking in the coming weeks at what they could do this year.

"I don't have any regrets that we chose to go down this road as a pilot," she said. "A lot of things we do in Dunfermline benefits folk from West Fife villages who come into Dunfermline as their hub town.

"It was a good initiative and I will be keen to see what proposals we can consider going forward. We can get further feedback from businesses before we discuss our proposals for next year."