Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Hampton

Committee stage
Thursday 13th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 58, I will also speak to my Amendments 59 and 60. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Pidgeon, for their help along the way. I degrouped these from the original groupings, as they are more about safety than accessibility and inclusivity. I felt that they were important enough that they might get a bit lost in a larger group.

On 29 January, bus drivers marched from Victoria to Parliament to protest about driver conditions and present a petition, signed by over 29,000 people, calling for the acceptance of a bus drivers’ bill of rights, which is about giving bus drivers the basic rights of employment that they feel are being eroded. It was timed to commemorate the death of Kathleen Finnegan, who was killed by a London bus while crossing at Victoria Station. Driver welfare should be the cornerstone of any legislation. I have had meetings with representatives of bus driver groups who feel that there are some working practices going on that they are unhappy about.

My Amendment 58 would mandate that everyone has access to a confidential incident reporting system. CIRAS is one, but there are several bona fide reporting systems available. TfL has had that in place since February 2016; once again, we go back to the fact that TfL does a very good job, so let us roll that out. In my conversations with the Minister, for which I thank him, he felt that this could be brought in and would help a lot with driver safety concerns. If this were a requirement for every bus company, one would hope it meant that any driver safety issues could be thoroughly investigated. That would be great for transparency, passenger confidence, workers and politicians.

I turn to Amendment 59. On the first day in Committee, the Minister said that this Bill is about safety. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, referred to that as well in talking about passenger surveys. However, except for a section about how to deal with crime on buses, there is very little in the Bill about safety.

My amendment would force bus companies to publish their safety data regularly. I talked about this at length at Second Reading, so I will not repeat myself but, in reply, the Minister said that all the data nationwide is already available on STATS19. I am afraid that I will ask the Committee to buckle in and follow me closely on this, because it will get quite granular. The Minister said in his letter that,

“It should also be noted that STATS19 data is a comprehensive and robust public record of personal injury incidents and includes a wide range of data that can be used to support future improvements to safety. A further set of safety data is collected by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Authority, who also collect data on incidents or collisions involving Public Service Vehicle … licence holders. By law, all PSV operators must report fatalities, serious injuries, allegations of a safety defect, serious damage as a result of the incident, a safety critical component failure or history of the same component failing, and a vehicle catching fire”.


I have to say that I did not find STATS19 to be user-friendly, on quite a brief look, and nor did it seem to regionalise data.

In response, the very excellent Tom Kearney, of LondonBusWatch—if there is anyone you need to granularly look at data, it is Tom Kearney—said this. I will quote him exactly:

“Compared to London’s published data, the DfT’s STATS19 Data is seriously deficient and undercounts the number of people killed and injured in Bus Safety Incidents. Even a casual review of STATS19 Data … reveals that is neither published as frequently or in as much useful granular detail as the Bus Safety Data TfL has published on its website every quarter since 2014 … Because STATS19 data combines incidents involving Bus and Coaches and does not include injury incidents involving Buses that have taken place on private roads or land (entrances/exits to and at bus stations) as far as Bus Casualty Data Reporting is concerned, STATS19 is both inaccurate and misleading. STATS19 also does not include injury incidents (Trips & Falls) onboard buses that might not have been caused by a collision, yet produce a lot of casualties (including fatalities) and are an important indicator of Bus Safety Performance”.


He continues by saying that an analysis of TfL’s published data reveals that, for the period from 1 June 2016 to 31 December 2023,

“Collisions from London Buses at Bus Stations have injured 133”

and sent 87 people to hospital.

In addition, between 1 January 2014 and 31 January 2024,

“6 people have been killed from Collisions from London Buses at Bus Stations. None of these fatal or injury incidents involving Buses are recorded in STATS19 Data; Out of the 120 Preventable Bus Safety Deaths that have occurred over the period Q1 2014-Q2 2024 that TfL’s published, 27 … don’t get reported in STATS19 because they occurred at Bus Stations … or resulted from onboard falls … or ‘other’ preventable safety incidents”.

TfL does not provide any details on those. Tom Kearney concludes:

“We have FOI requests that prove that the DVSA collects but does not publish data and the Traffic Commissioner neither collects nor publishes data”.


If the Committee has followed that, this issue is at best muddy.

Could we, as the users, have this data on a dashboard divided by LTA? STATS19 is neither easy to use nor, as far as I can see, divided across the regions. The Minister said that it might well be possible for franchises but was doubtful whether it would work where there was no franchise in place. These days, we are being told that data is gold. Surely companies should be mining this data anyway to analyse their performance—and if not, why not?

When I spoke to Go-Ahead, it was also concerned that much of the accident data is not the fault of buses but might be used as a headline number to dent passenger confidence. I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of mankind to separate fault from no-fault accident data and learn from it. Again, we are talking of transparency and public confidence.

On my Amendment 60, from my conversations with bus drivers, again, they are really concerned about tiredness and things changing with shift patterns. They feel that they need more time. Again, since my conversation with the Minister, I realise that there are very different patterns in being an HGV driver and a bus driver. This is more of an amendment to push for an idea of the reporting. We really need to look at driver welfare and I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, raise some really important points about the safety of bus services and are important for our considerations. Bus safety performance data being shared in a clear, simple and transparent way is important if we are talking about driving up performance. The complexities that we have heard clearly outlined show why this is so.

I am particularly interested in Amendment 58. It is a good suggestion that all bus drivers should have access to the confidential incident reporting and analysis system known as CIRAS. Over my years of working on the London Assembly, we heard evidence time and again from drivers suffering from fatigue and stress and, in some places, of there being a culture which really did not support reporting of concerns and practices. Many drivers feared for their jobs and we heard similar things about the tram network as well.

CIRAS describes its role on its website:

“We listen to the health and safety concerns of people in transport. We protect their identity when we share their concerns with the right people to act. When we listen, we learn. We help our members share good practice and promote an even stronger culture of listening. And our members learn from valuable safety information they might have otherwise missed”.


This is important as we seek to improve bus services across the country. I really look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on this group of amendments, particularly the point around CIRAS.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Hampton

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 61. I was very pleased to hear the Minister say that the Bill is about safety. All my amendments are about safety, but this is the briefest. It is very simple and builds on Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to make sure that those who make these decisions are qualified to do so. My amendment would simply ensure that franchising authorities responsible for the design have the appropriate IOSH and NEBOSH certificates so that they can judge what is and is not safe.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendment 6, which seeks clarification following the debate on changing an “auditor” to an “approved person” in assessing bus franchise schemes. It would ensure that within three months of the Bill becoming an Act, the Government will publish the qualifications required for an approved person under the Act and would also lay a regulation with that information in it prior to the commencement of the clause. This is because Clause 9 amends Section 123D of the Transport Act 2000 to remove “auditor”, a term synonymous with an appropriate level of qualification, registration and probity, with the more generic term “approved person”. An auditor, by contrast, must be a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.

The Minister said in response to my noble friend Lady Brinton’s question at Second Reading:

“The intention is not to deregulate approved persons but to widen the range of them. I completely agree with her that they should have some qualifications. An unqualified person should not be able to make a judgment about whether a franchising scheme is right”.—[Official Report, 8/1/25; col. 790.]


The powers and responsibilities of the approved person are significant. Clause 9(2)(1) states:

“A franchising authority, or two or more franchising authorities acting jointly, may not proceed with a proposed franchising scheme unless they have obtained a report from an independent approved person on the assessment of the proposed scheme (see section 123B)”.


I understand why the Government would like to broaden the scope of those able to provide assurance that an approved person will have, at the very least, a CIPFA qualification or its equivalent. However, one of the problems of loosening very specific language in previous legislation is that without sight of exactly what the new qualifications are some organisations will take advantage of the new scheme. From these Benches, we would want any new franchise proposal to have been assessed and reported on by a qualified person because this is about significant public money and assurance. On that point, I hope that the Minister can clarify today what qualifications the Government would expect for such a person in order to reassure these Benches.

My noble friend Lord Goddard clearly set out Amendments 2 and 12, which aim to ensure that we learn from the Manchester franchising experience and that best practice is shared more widely, making franchising more dynamic and responsive. Clarity is absolutely needed on whether there is a minimum period from which services or changes to services proposed by a franchising authority may be enacted. I hope the Minister can answer this point and provide much-needed clarity today.

Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, regarding the qualifications needed for officials working in franchising authorities who will be responsible for designing, negotiating and enforcing any franchising schemes, is welcome, given that it is important that staff have a clear understanding of health and safety issues. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, raised a number of points linked to employment rights, and I look forward to hearing a response to his specific concerns.

The amendments in this group from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are a mixed bag, with many seeming, quite frankly, to be trying to put more obstacles in the way of any local transport authority that wishes to introduce franchising. They feel like an ideological response rather than genuine concern about bus service provision across the country. The noble Lord suddenly does not seem to believe in localism. I am not sure that he would have had the same opinion in his previous life as a local councillor and a deputy mayor of London.

If all local transport authorities want to move towards franchising, so be it. This is about devolution and local authorities deciding what suits their local communities. It is highly unlikely that everywhere will move towards franchising, but they should have that option. To want potential intervention from the Secretary of State feels an unnecessary and bureaucratic top-down approach, whereas this is supposed to be a bottom-up approach to bus services. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the points raised.