PARENTS were today celebrating after council bosses bowed to public pressure and scrapped proposals to axe 17 school bus routes.

Just days before a massive protest was due to take place outside Blackburn Town Hall, weeks of talks between Blackburn Transport and the borough council have led to 14 of the 17 subsidised services being saved.

Some of the saved services have been merged together to make them commercially viable.

Council bosses said pupils who used the three axed services would be able to use regular bus routes to get to school.

Blackburn with Darwen Council announced plans to scrap subsidies for 17 of its 44 subsidised buses in April in a bid to meet Government targets on the amount of cash it gives to each school.

The 17 buses under threat were ones the council believed it was not legally obliged to provide because the majority of the passengers lived too close to school to qualify for bus passes.

But without the council subsidy, the services would not have been commercially viable and operators would not have provided them.

To qualify for a bus pass, under eights must live more than two miles away from school while over eights must live three miles away.

By cutting the services, £167,000 was to be saved. Following weeks of talks among council officers and bus operators, the subisidies withdrawn by the education department have been replaced by the regeneration department where it thinks services are "socially inclusive".

A service to Our Lady and St John's RC High School from Birley Street will not be replaced, along with two services to Pleckgate High School -- one from Blackburn town centre and one from Little Harwood. Habib Adam, a parent whose children travelled on a threatened service from Bold Street to Roe Lee County Primary, led the campaign to save the services and spoke on behalf of the residents at last month's executive board meeting.

He said: "This is excellent news. It is wonderful that the council have listened to us and taken action to make sure our children can get to school safely."

Coun Sheila Williams, shadow spokesman for education and lifelong learning, said: "The Labour group should be ashamed of themselves for putting parents through the mill like this.

"They should have sorted this out a lot sooner."