Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the Department for Transport
(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
It is clear that the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) is an optimist, looking forward to a Labour Administration next year. I cannot say I share his optimism on that.
Opposition day debates inevitably result in Opposition parties choosing a subject for debate in which they can make what they hope will be points that resonate with their voters, and attack the Government. I have to say that if that was the aim today, it has been a pretty weak attempt. We all recognise the importance of bus services: they provide access to work, hospitals and leisure facilities; and it is important that we mention that they provide essential services in rural areas and are vital to the countryside economy.
Do we need more regulation in order to achieve a solution? Of course, the Labour solution is always to produce more regulation. I am not wholly opposed to regulation—I recognise that some is necessary, and as long as the system works and is affordable, that is fine by me—but the key to better bus services is surely co-operation between local authorities and the private sector: it is partnership working.
I query the reference that was made to the loss of 1,300 bus routes. I suspect that some routes have in fact been merged, and I can give a number of examples. One of my own local authorities, in co-operation with Stagecoach, has just gone through that process.
We have heard that Opposition Members want London-style powers to make improvements. Of course, one cannot plan bus services in Cleethorpes, Barton-on-Humber or Fleetwood in the same way as those in our big cities, most notably London. Big cities are very different from the provinces and rural areas, and need different solutions. Is it seriously suggested that bus services under the control of cash-strapped local authorities will produce stable or even lower fares, better services and newer vehicles? What we need is bus operators that are prepared to innovate with ticketing initiatives and fare schemes.
Partnerships do work. I was a North East Lincolnshire council cabinet member for a number of years, and my brief included transport. I was involved in a number of quality partnership arrangements and here, I congratulate the previous Labour Government. One of those initiatives was the Kickstart scheme, which I believe was initially developed by Stagecoach and taken on board by that Government. A Stagecoach document states that the Kickstart scheme was
“driven by the entrepreneurial expertise of bus operators, who carry the business risk and have an incentive to grow passenger volumes, rather than by local authority planners.”
The document acknowledges:
“Central and local government already play a key role in developing non-commercial, socially necessary bus services by working in partnership with bus operators and providing public support.”
In that way, improvements can be made. It goes on to describe Kickstart as a concept involving
“a contract between the bus operator and Government which commits to a specified level of service linked to an agreed public investment profile”
and the risk being
“carried by the bus operator, rather than perpetual subsidy”.
I am sure that we have all had experiences in our constituencies of battles to get a grant to keep a particular service running for two or three years, knowing that we will get the political brickbats when the grant runs out. Such services are usually unsustainable without some cost to the public purse. Schemes such as Kickstart, which put the onus on the operator, are therefore crucial. The Stagecoach document goes on to state:
“The Kickstart fund would cover the difference between the projected revenue and cost of the project. However, the risk would be borne by the bus operator, so that if passenger volumes and revenue do not rise in line with projections…the bus operator would…absorb the loss.”
That is key, particularly in these cash-strapped days.
There are risks attached to subsidy. Any form of subsidy could tempt the less-than-scrupulous operator to, shall we say, adjust the figures to show a less profitable or unprofitable situation. The operator could then go to the local authority, which would feel obliged to say, “Yes, we can’t do without that service because the village would be cut off”. The subsidy would duly arrive, and a year or two later—or perhaps just months later—the operator would come back and say, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to stop the service in the evenings and on Sundays because the subsidy just isn’t enough.” This would, in effect, be a form of blackmail for the local authority.
We are all familiar with phone-and-ride and dial-a-ride schemes. These are community initiatives that are usually set up by local authorities, sometimes in partnership with bus operators. They are an essential lifeline for members of the public, particularly those who are disabled or who have difficulty accessing essential facilities. Certainly—
Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)
Interestingly, we seem to be hearing arguments in favour of quality contracts being imposed by central Government. I am not sure whether that is what the Opposition are after, but it seems rather odd to take away local authorities’ decision making. Buses are extraordinarily important, as everyone who has spoken today has said. The question is: what are we going to do? I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) express her admiration for TfL, but the idea that we could somehow magically roll out that model across the rest of the country seems a little ambitious to me.
As we know, people are usually disabled more by their environment than by their physical condition. We have seen in rural areas a disabling of young people who do not have much money; they are unable to go anywhere or do anything because they cannot afford to drive a car. That is why it is so important to promote the policy of making it affordable for young people to be able to take a bus, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) talked about so ably.
However, there are difficulties. How do we provide a bus service in an area where one large bus might have to travel several miles with only one passenger on board, and how do we make that affordable? That is the difference between subsidies for London buses and subsidies for rural buses. A subsidy for a London bus means that most of the time it will have a significant number of passengers, whereas the same subsidy for a rural bus means trying to make up for the fact that at times it will have no passengers on board. The situations are so different that they cannot possibly have the same solution. The further we get from a major town, the truer that becomes, and when we get to some parts of Somerset and Cornwall the whole situation has changed completely.
There are some answers: more bus shelters; bus shelters with areas for bicycles; feeder routes, with smaller buses feeding on to larger buses; and using local voluntary groups to try to fill the gap, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) explained. However, we definitely need to look at totally different solutions for rural areas, rather than thinking that we can impose a policy that works in urban areas. Part of that is obviously about devolving more decision making to local parish and borough councils. However, we cannot simply sit in this House, click our fingers and have a solution for rural bus services. It is more important to look for a solution there than to look for it anywhere else, because there are no alternatives and the distances are far larger. A person in a city can walk 2 miles for a job, but there is no way someone in the country can walk 10 miles for a job.
Another consideration for disabled people, particularly blind people, is the lack of audio-visual solutions on buses. For some extraordinary reason, every bus company quotes thousand and thousands of pounds for the cost of retrofitting a bus in that way. We know that we can get quite a simple system to make announcements of that sort. My noble Friend Baroness Kramer has set up an audio-visual competition—we will have the results soon—to come up with a solution to make it far cheaper to retrofit buses. That is something the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association supports. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will take note of the results of that competition and help us roll it out across the country.
Returning to quality bus contracts, they can pose a significant financial risk to local authorities, and it seems that nobody arguing for them today has mentioned that. It could also squeeze out small companies, and I think that it is vital that we encourage small companies to take part in this. My personal preference is for quality partnership schemes to allow for the best aspects of a quality contract without the risks and reduced competition for smaller companies. I commend many of these ideas to the House. I would like to see a cross-party investigation into how buses can be improved, rather than argue about whether to have a quality contract, a quality partnership, less regulation or more regulation. We need a solution, not an argument.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I call Pat Glass. It would be helpful to Front-Bench spokesmen if she could shave a minute off her time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I have received a report from the Tellers in the Aye Lobby from the earlier Division at 4.11 pm. They inform me that the number of those voting Aye was erroneously reported as 248 instead of 238. The Ayes were 238; the Noes were 287.