Buses: Rural Services

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

We are aware that in certain areas it is a challenge to access certain services using public transport. The Government are doing what they can to support various innovative initiatives to make sure that we improve services. The rural round table in December 2018 focused on these issues and came up with a number of opportunities whereby we can improve services, and we will be working on those opportunities and reporting back soon.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, owing to the 25% cut in local authority funding for bus services over the last four years, literally hundreds of shire bus routes have disappeared. Given that most rural households have only one car, and that car usually goes to the job, will the Minister consider setting up a group to look at the transport needs of those left behind, how they might be provided for and how we might encourage solutions? For instance, there are Wheels to Work schemes for the young, sharing services with the Post Office or the National Health Service, and community car schemes. I hope the Minister will agree that we now desperately need some new thinking in this area, and we also need some action.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I quite agree with the noble Lord that we need new thinking in this area. It is not just about money; this Government are supporting road passenger transport 12% more in real terms than the last Labour Government. It is about being innovative. The noble Lord was right to name a number of schemes, and I would be grateful to receive more information on them. Schemes that we are already looking at include demand-responsive transport, whereby people in isolated areas can, either on their smartphone or using their traditional phone, call up and get transport to services they need.

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (Science and Technology Report)

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I too sat on the committee during this investigation and thank the noble Earl for his very able chairmanship. Most of us on the committee thought there would be fully automated cars on the UK’s roads by 2030, but we all thought that driverless mobility would come more easily and sooner to fields of movement other than on our roads. The difficulty will be to get investors and Governments to invest in these other fields, because the rewards for AV cars are of course enormous and are already attracting billions in terms of private research funding. Details on progress, due to reasons of obvious brand competition, were sadly not available to our committee, which probably undermined the accuracy of our report.

One of those other fields is agriculture, where the advantages are many. In western agriculture, we currently look to use bigger tractors where possible, because one man—the most expensive component—can do a lot of work in the shortest period of time in very large fields. But myriad small connected and automated tractors—perhaps I can call them CATs—about the size of a garden tractor could change all that. For a start, they can work day or night. Being small, the soil damage will be minimal. There is no advantage to ripping out hedges and forming big fields for big tractors. Being small and, I hope, mass-produced, they should not be too expensive in the end, and maybe even smallholders in the developing world will be able to afford them. I envisage a day when each field will have its own CAT in charge of its crop. It will assess the soil, cultivate the field and ask its manager for the right seed, and it will then sow and manage the crop. It is already possible for a CAT to recognise pests and diseases in crops and then spray not the whole field but the individual plants affected. The savings in chemicals, from the point of view of the environment, and in the cost of food will be considerable. Bear in mind that satnavs on modern tractors are already accurate to within an inch and they already talk to their manufacturers’ computers, which can let the farmer know when something is going wrong. Many problems today in driving big tractors stem from operator error in handling the complicated technology, so driverless tractors could be an advantage.

Another non-road field for AVs is the high seas, as has been mentioned. To my mind, the advantage here is that the changeover can be gradual; you can have a huge ship running on only a skeleton crew to take over if things go wrong. In a car, it would be impossible for a passenger to take over in that split second when things have gone wrong, but a boat normally has a much slower timescale when it comes to approaching disasters. Rolls-Royce told us that a greater use of autonomous marine vessels could save the global marine industry up to £80 billion per annum from reductions in capital costs, manning costs and fuel costs.

Turning back to automated cars, the advantages, particularly when combined with electric power, are enormous. Elon Musk of Tesla fame believes that he can develop a self-driving capability that is 10 times safer than manual cars via, in his words, “massive fleet learning”. He also believes that just by tapping a button you can add your car to, say, the Uber 2 shared fleet and have it earn income for you when you are at work or on vacation. We use our cars for less than 10% of the time, and this extra money earned could pay for the cost of the car and more, making AV cars affordable to anyone—though, if you are like me, you probably ought to remove the golf clubs from the boot.

Certain changes will be needed. We will have to change the law to stop jaywalkers. As in the US and elsewhere, we will be able to walk across the road only at certain points. In trials in Italy, people tended to walk out in front of AVs just to test them. Still, I think that if the law is changed and all AVs have cameras and black boxes, people will soon learn. Everything around an AV will be being recorded; you might even think twice about picking your nose. Other necessary changes include the insurance framework. Google, Volvo and Mercedes have already announced that they will accept full liability for collisions involving their self-driving cars.

Meanwhile, as far as the UK Government are concerned, apart from putting in place the surrounding legal framework, which will be considerable, I personally do not think they should get too involved in funding automated cars. As I said, there are already billions and billions of pounds of private sector research being invested. All the major car companies are competing in secret against each other, and the Government cannot hope to be anything more than a bit player in the field. Buses and public transport might be different, and especially investment in their route infrastructure, as several noble Lords have mentioned, but there is enough private investment going into automated cars to mean that this is not an area for the Government to waste their money on. By all means create testing facilities and make it clear what we expect from the private sector, but leave the actual investment to those who will reap the rewards. The same probably applies to the world of automated ships, where the rewards are also considerable, but again the governance here will need serious attention.

The one area where Innovate UK really must get involved, along with DfID and Defra with their research budgets, is the area of automated tractors, which I have dubbed CATs and which I feel have great advantages. There seems to be a remarkable reluctance by normal tractor companies to get involved—they seem to hope that this advance will go away—but the public benefit could be enormous, and I believe there is a serious role here for even this cash-strapped Government.

Transport: Remote Island Communities in England

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for introducing this debate. I must first declare an interest as a frequent holiday visitor to Tresco in the Isles of Scilly, where our family often occupies a cottage during the first half of August—I am greatly looking forward to it in a couple of weeks’ time. I have also been known to visit Scilly in the winter when tourism is not in full swing and the 2,500-odd residents are left very much to their own devices, which isolation is the kernel of our debate.

I have raised before in this House the question of rural deprivation and isolation, and the need to rural-proof the delivery of services to rural areas—I probably bang on about it too much and will probably continue to do so. The problem is that most people, particularly those who live in the cities, do not understand that if you do not have access to your own transport then in many parts of rural England a simple trip to the hospital, to the courts or sometimes just getting to work takes on the magnitude of a major expedition. Neither do most people understand the transport difficulties of businesses struggling to survive in rural areas. How do you and your staff get to work? How do you get your goods to market or raw materials delivered? How indeed do you reach out to understand your marketplace?

I remember going with the Countryside Agency, which I chaired at the time, to visit a successful rural business—I think it was somewhere in the Welsh Marches. We asked that rural businessman what advice he would give to anyone starting a business in a rural area. He said, “Go to the towns, mate.” There was a hushed intake of breath and we thought he may not have understood who we were or what the question was. Then he went on, “Go to the towns, mate, and see what they’re wearing, see what they’re eating, see what they’re sitting on or even how they decorate their homes. It’s the urban marketplace that makes or breaks a rural business and you have to understand it, have a feel for it and use it”. They were wise words.

Think of this important connectivity from the point of view of a Scillonian. How do the people of Scilly use the urban marketplace or urban services when it is almost impossible or prohibitively costly to reach them? Imagine if in winter you have to fight for an expensive place on a small plane, vulnerable to winter weather, just to visit your family in hospital or have meaningful contact with the outside world. Imagine if your food costs were 20% more than on the mainland or if the cost of your building materials, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has already said, was nearly 50% more and petrol and heating oil were 26% to 40% more. Furthermore, imagine if your vital tourist numbers were dropping, all largely because of the high cost of transport.

Of all the examples I could choose to explain the isolation and transport difficulties of deep rural England, the Isles of Scilly must be at the top of the list. Statistically, in terms of access to services, the islands are ranked in the bottom 2% of the most deprived of all the 32,500 wards of England. As already explained by other noble Lords, the population is at the mercy of one company that virtually controls all entry and exit for not only people but also goods—raw materials in and finished products out. It makes any business, especially the tourist business, uncompetitive.

I talk to other visitors who manage to make it to the islands. There is certainly no lack of appreciation of what is on offer when they get there. It is just the hurdle of getting there that has seen the drop in visitors, particularly since 2012 when the helicopters stopped. Transport to the Isles of Scilly needs looking at urgently. The Competition and Markets Authority needs to look carefully at the monopolistic position of the Steamship Group. I will say no more about that.

Another aspect worth looking into is the question of government help for transport to and from these island communities. I was born and brought up in the north of Scotland, where for more than 50 years the Government have helped with transport to the islands. I stress the 50 years because this is not the new Scottish Government being lavish in their social policies. Even before Winnie Ewing had the twinkle in her eye of the first Scot Nat seat in Parliament in 1967, the UK Government, under the Highlands and Islands Shipping Services Act 1960, subsidised travel to the Hebrides and elsewhere in Scotland. They now have a road equivalent tariff scheme, RET, which links ferry services to the cost of travelling the same distance by road.

Without boring noble Lords with statistics, they have proven in Scotland that the number of visitors and passengers is hugely influenced by the cost of travel. Where RET applied, it gave rise to an increase of 17% in the number of passengers in two years. If RET applied to the trip from Penzance to Scilly, it would reduce the cost of a return boat trip from around £110 to £12.50—a huge difference. In terms of service, looking at the mainland connection to, say, the Isle of Islay—as a Scottish comparison of about equal distance to the mainland as Scilly is to Cornwall—the boat there runs three to four times a day and twice on Sunday. The ship, “Scillonian III”, runs once a day, not at all on Sunday and, more to the point, not at all during the winter months October to March.

Coming back to costs, while visitor numbers in Cornwall are increasing, those to Scilly are decreasing. If the Scottish analyses are correct, this is due largely to the high cost of transport. With 70% to 80% of the Scilly economy based on tourism, this is disastrous for the island inhabitants. If the Government are concerned about the extra costs of any transport support, think about the number of residents claiming benefits if the economy of the islands suffers a major collapse. That is not off the cards at the moment. Of course, I expect the Department for Transport are not too worried about extra costs to DWP—we will not go there.

What is to be done? Apart from encouraging the new helicopter service to get under way as soon as possible, the Government should look seriously at the support they can give to the people of Scilly. There is no doubt that, in winter particularly, this connection should be defined as a lifeline service and that, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, a public service obligation ought to apply during those winter months, October to March, when the ferry service currently does not run. There needs to be a winter link that is a subsidised obligation.

The Government could also look at the air discount schemes that operate for many remote parts of Scotland. In a way, that might be more useful, once helicopters are running again, than keeping the ferry service running throughout the winter, bearing in mind the age and seaworthiness of the current “Scillonian III” ferry, and the often stormy state of the seas during those critical winter months—which, of course, at the moment it does not have to face. I realise there are currently some concessions for local residents but they apply only on the ferry, which of course does not run in the winter. Furthermore, they fall well short of the two free journeys to the mainland available to the residents of the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland, for those who have a national entitlement card.

None of this will encourage what is the lifeline for the people of Scilly—namely, the number of visiting tourists. They need flexible alternatives from a variety of origins at a reasonable price, with as much reliability as possible given the frequent adverse weather conditions, which is one reason why the proposed new helicopter link is so important. I realise that, in these austere times, this Government will be unlikely to introduce a road equivalent tariff along the lines of the Scottish scheme. But there may be some halfway house possible; even double the road equivalent tariff would be a huge step forward. We need something that aids the transport of people and goods to the islands—I stress “goods” because the expense of their transport undermines the quality of life on Scilly for visitors and tourists. The Government should look seriously at the options for that.

Some form of investment is definitely needed. Would it be possible for instance for the Government to grant aid, by way of an investment or capital loan, for the replacement of the current passenger and freight ferries and the facilities needed at either end? This would reduce the time and thus the costs of getting people and goods to and from the islands. That might be doable and would certainly be helpful. Something needs to be done, and I ask that the Government look seriously at what they can do to help what is an urgent economic and social problem in the making. A taskforce is required to look at what is needed to improve the connectivity of the Isles of Scilly. If we look at the comparables, these are virtually the only islands in Europe that get no really effective transport aid.

I know that much of what I have said echoes the views of the noble Lords who spoke before me, and will no doubt be re-echoed by those who follow, but before I sit down I would like to re-echo what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was hinting at. Just because an Englishman is born on an island, that does not make him a recluse or a hermit. Our society and our Government owe it to him to be able to live a full life of contribution to our nation’s social and economic progress. In the same way as we have for generations tried to help the urban deprived to fulfil their potential, so we must equally help our islanders. The solutions may be different, but the focus must be the same. We must not abandon them, and something must be done.