Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Vere of Norbiton Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 14 May be approved.

Relevant document: 16th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con) [V]]

My Lords, these draft regulations are being made to provide new legislation to require the operators of local bus services across England outside London, including cross-border services, to openly publish data electronically about their services, including timetables, fares and location data.

For the benefit of noble Lords who may not be aware, open data is data that is published electronically, standardised, publicly discoverable and can be used by those who wish to do so without restrictions on its use and disclosure. Open data has transformed other sectors; for example, rail, where open data is feeding into customer-facing apps such as Trainline and National Rail Enquiries, and is simplifying journey planning and ticket purchase.

Bus open data will allow app developers to create applications, products and services for passengers so that they can plan journeys, find best-value tickets and receive real-time service updates. This is absolutely essential if we are to encourage the travelling public to use their local bus services and make the switch to public transport, which is vital to reducing congestion and improving air quality.

Since 2007, Transport for London—TfL—has made all its bus and transport network data freely available through the London Datastore. Currently more than half—51%—of all bus journeys are in London, with the remaining 49% across the rest of the country. A 2017 study by Deloitte exploring the value of TfL’s data found that open data was being used by 8,200 application developers to power 600 apps used by 42% of Londoners. This includes apps such as Citymapper and Bus Times London, which together were found to be delivering economic benefits of between £90 million and £130 million a year. These benefits came from travel time savings, additional journeys taken, reduced congestion and business innovation. Transport for West Midlands has also invested heavily to improve its public transport data in recent years. It has provided a single source for apps and journey planners across the region and is one of the few areas to report year-on-year growth of 7.8 million bus journeys, against a backdrop of continuing decline in bus passenger journeys elsewhere.

The statistics show that we can change how buses are perceived and attract new customers. This will be particularly important as we continue to recover and rebuild our services after lockdown. We will need to get people back on the buses when it is safe to do so, and if people feel that buses are not for them, we need to change that perception. As franchising is not yet in place in any local transport authority in England, except London, we believe that it is a vital part of the levelling-up agenda that we, as central government, regulate to require bus operators across England to openly publish data. We need to enable the provision of travel apps and services up and down the country.

These regulations will mean that any operator of a local bus service in England must publish its timetable, fares and location data to the bus open data service—which I will call BODS—before the service comes into operation and that changes to the data must be provided as updates. Data must be provided using legally mandated data standards and within set time periods. The consequences of not providing the data from the commercial perspective of the bus operator is lost revenue, and for passengers, it can be the difference between waiting at a bus stop for two minutes or 20 minutes. These new rules will be enforced by the Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency—DVSA—which will conduct checks of the bus open data service to ensure that any operator of a registered local bus service has published the required datasets.

I turn to the content of the SI. Where a local bus service is being operated in England an operator will be legally required to make freely available information about that service, including timetables, fares and location data, to comply with the Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020. Punctuality data will also be legally required, and local transport authorities will be legally responsible for maintaining data about bus stops and stations. It will be a civil offence for any operator of a service to be in breach of the requirements in the regulations.

The regulations will be commenced in a phased manner, with timetables and stop data requirements being enforceable from 31 December 2020, basic fares and location data from 7 January 2021, and complex fares from 7 January 2023. Breaches of the requirements by operators can be enforced under existing provisions in Section 155(1)(c) of the Transport Act 2000.

This draft instrument ensures that those operators which breach the new requirements may face financial penalties or the removal of their licence. Operators in England may face a fine of up to £550, and this sum can be multiplied by the number of vehicles operating under all the different licences held by that operator.

The policy area of public service vehicles open data is devolved with respect to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Scotland and Wales are currently preparing equivalent legislation.

In summary, these regulations are essential to ensure that operators of local bus services across England are compelled to make freely available information to help passengers plan their journeys. The new bus open data requirements can be enforced for local bus services across England from 31 December this year. These rules are at the heart of improving the public transport experience, digitally transforming the bus sector, and the levelling-up agenda. I am sure that noble Lords share my desire to ensure that they can be fully enforced as soon as possible. I commend these draft regulations to the House and I beg to move.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in today’s short debate for their generally warm welcome for these regulations, and for the bus open data service as a whole. I will respond to as many points as I possibly can in the allotted time, but I will of course write on the points which—[Connection lost.]

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]]

My Lords, my sincere apologies to the House for my poor internet—and I am in London.

As I was saying, these regulations have been subject to extensive consultation with the industry and local authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, noted that they are broadly welcomed by the industry, which I believe recognises the important consequences of these regulations. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, noted that there has been a formal consultation on these proposals. The Government published their response in January 2019, and it was decided that 2020 would be the transitional year for operators to start publishing their timetable data, and for the bus open data service to come into its own. It was therefore launched in beta on 28 January this year, so we have already seen companies getting involved and publishing their data, and that is a very good sign.

However, to meet the requirements of the regulations, operators need access to appropriate software to generate the data files and to create digital and data capabilities within their organisations. We realise that that can be a challenge, but bus operators have had many years to think about this, budget for it and upskill their workforce. The costs of doing this will vary by operator: some operators do much of it already and use it with their own apps.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, asked why we have not done this earlier. One of the reasons why this has taken a little while to come in is the small operators. The bus sector is hugely diverse, from the very largest operators to the smallest, and it is the small operators that need the most support. We have been helping the sector make its way through these proposals and are focusing our support on the small operators. For example, the team within the department has created a timetable data creation tool, which allows these operators to submit their data in a standardised and easy fashion—we have done exactly the same for fares as well. We have also offered to host data for the small bus operators if they cannot host it themselves.

Given the potential impact of coronavirus on the bus industry, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, it is the case that we may need to give certain operators breathing space if absolutely necessary, and if there are mitigating reasons, as we move towards the deadlines in the regulations. We will work with the traffic commissioners to adopt a lenient approach, and of course we will work with the bus operators to ensure that they can make progress as quickly as possible.

My noble friend Lord Blencathra asked whether the review of the regulations should be after two years instead of five. I do not think that two years would provide the sufficient timeframe to evaluate the impact of these regulations, particularly the benefits and outcomes that we anticipate. The post-implementation review, which may happen every five years, is often started after three to four years, as these things can take quite a long time to deliver and report on.

We expect to see an uplift in bus usage as a result of these regulations, based on our experience with TfL and with Transport for West Midlands. This might mean that existing services become more sustainable and would therefore need less support from the local authority. That local authority would then be able to direct its own resources on to other routes that are perhaps particularly vulnerable. It could lead to a shift in resources, which would be a good thing.

We have had lots of round-table meetings with app developers all the way through developing these proposals, to make sure that they are happy with what is happening. Given that some data has already been published, some app developers are already accessing it and putting it to good use. I reassure my noble friend Lord Blencathra that it is not the intention of the Government to get involved in transport app development at the current time. But what we will do—I think this is only fair—is require developers to acknowledge on their app that the information has been taken from the bus open data internet site. My noble friend also asked what would happen if an app developer breaches the conditions of use for the data. If they do that, the Secretary of State can switch off the app provider’s API key and restrict access to their account or close it down completely. They would then not be able to access the data at all, which is clearly quite a significant sanction.

With regard to any liability on the Secretary of State and a potential challenge in court as to the accuracy of the data and so on, the Secretary of State has made the information available and the data consumer —the app developer—has chosen to use it in accordance with the restrictions in Regulation 16. There is no contractual relationship between the Secretary of State and the app developer, therefore there is no liability created to the state.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, noted the provision of real-time data at bus stops. I agree with him that it can be really useful for people to see when their next bus is coming. This falls under the remit of local transport authorities, and although the data on BODS—the bus open data service—would support its widespread rollout, the issue is that the purchase and maintenance of screens can be prohibitively expensive, particularly at less frequently used bus stops. We will look into this further; it may well be that screens become cheaper over time and easier to maintain. It is something that we believe would benefit passengers.

I was very interested in the broader issues raised by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and I will write with my reflections on them. App developers are already very good at taking data from lots of different datasets, collating it and then publishing it. We are in conversations with the devolved nations—Scotland and Wales—to ensure that we have equivalent data standards and that the data will be interoperable.

As apps develop further and become more mobile as a service, a more high-quality solution could allow the integration of different transport modes, so that passengers can plan an entire journey and eventually make a payment for a single journey across all different modes, if they can get agreement with the travel operators. I hope that we will move in that direction. This regulation will enable that, but in many cases we are not quite there yet; I hope we will be in the future.

One of the issues is the difference between complex and simple fares. At the moment, bus operators have no obligation to provide information about fares, except at the point of boarding. Even publishing the simplest fares will be a step forward. Bus fares can be hugely complicated. They can vary depending on the route taken, the duration of the journey, the type and number of passengers, whether a discount or a cap is applied and all sorts of other things. Therefore, establishing a digital standard for these complex fares will take some time, and that is why we have given ourselves the deadline of very early 2023 to establish it.

Rural areas are very important, as noted by my noble friend Lady McIntosh, and of course they do not have the sort of services that we have in London. The bus open data service will help passengers enormously in rural areas, because they will have real-time information. It is about giving rural communities the access to the same information as passengers in London. They will know if their bus is delayed, whether it is yet to turn up and how long they will have to wait at the bus stop, and they will be able to check that without even leaving home. For rural app development, we have made sure that the data is available in very developer-friendly formats, GTFS and GTFSRT—real-time—because we hope this will mean that the maximum number of app developers can come in and develop solutions for rural as well as urban areas.

My noble friend Lord Lucas mentioned demand-responsive systems, which are incredibly important. Flexible services are within the scope of the legislation, and hail and ride sections on fixed routes can already be represented and published. For demand-responsive transport, we will need a different dataset, which will require further development, but it is our intention to release this functionality in due course.

I am well aware of the commitment on information on accessibility mentioned by my noble friend Lord Holmes, and I would like to reassure him that we are considering how to provide accessibility data for vehicles and bus stops. The bus open data service has been designed to allow operators to provide some accessibility data, particularly about vehicles, and we will be encouraging operators to provide this information to the service. The information will also be very good for talking buses—accessible information on buses.

If I may take just a few more seconds, on enforcement, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, mentioned the DVSA and what it will be doing. It will be checking that the data on the system matches what is happening on the ground, to make sure that practical provision is being matched with the data provided. Any resources needed will be scooped up as part of the annual work-planning process, but we will continue to monitor resource levels as these regulations come into force.

This Government are hugely supportive of the bus industry. Currently, we are supporting the majority of bus services in this country directly from government funding, because we recognise the important contribution they make. We also recognise that we will have to look at some sort of medium-term financial—and other—solution to bring the bus industry out of this current phase, back into recovery and out the other end.

We have committed £3 billion to the sector. We are working on how best we can invest that, both in zero-carbon solutions and supporting services across the country. Allied to that will be the national bus strategy, which will also discuss many of the issues outlined by noble Lords today, including demand-responsive transport, rural services, integration with other transport modes and all of that. Finally, we will be working with the industry on a very robust communications strategy. I share your Lordships’ concern that we will not get people back on buses. We have to get people back on buses, and we are committed to working on that. I commend the regulations to the House.

Motion agreed.