Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Thursday 13th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

This group of amendments is really important, because training is an essential part of this new move to different models for providing bus services across the country. I particularly wanted to highlight the important amendment from my noble friend Lady Pinnock, because local transport authorities will be taking on significant new powers. We must not underestimate that, and it will be vital that their staff, stakeholders and members who sit on the authorities have a comprehensive training package, so they understand the legislation, framework and landscape—and accessibility and what that truly means, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, rightly highlighted. I liken this to thinking about planning and licensing requirements and what has transformed local government over the last couple of decades in terms of training and the quality of decision-making in that space: we need to look at this in a similar way. I really hope the Minister will respond positively to these amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to those who have spoken in this short debate. I have great sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said, as she knows. We will support her in her continuing campaign, and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, to put the case on behalf of disabled people for proper consideration in relation to public transport services.

I was mildly tickled by the proposal from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. One of my deep concerns, which I have tried to express in as gentle a way as possible throughout this Committee, has been the adequacy and competence of local councillors to take on the role envisaged for them by this Bill. I had not imagined that a vice-chairman of the LGA should give such ringing endorsement to my concerns, to the point where she actually said that training should be mandated by statute for those who will take part in making those decisions. We are at one on this in our concern.

None the less, I am not entirely sure—here I suspect that I will sound a bit like the Minister, and I speak as a former local councillor—that the idea of a statutory training programme in this area would be appropriate. There is a false analogy with training for the exercise of planning and licensing functions, because those are almost invariably what are referred to as quasi-judicial functions that relate to individuals making applications relating to their property, business, premises or whatever. They need to be taken in an appropriate legal framework, rather than a political framework. It is appropriate that councillors are given training in that legal background where they are called on to make those decisions.

The sort of decisions that will be made here are not in that category, so I wonder whether this approach is necessary. In fact, even it were appropriate to have statutory training, I would not have training on the provisions of this Bill, which is what the amendment calls for but, rather, training of the sort that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Snape, could provide: training in how to run a bus company and make the hard, crunchy decisions that you will be confronted with about how to manage your resources in a way that maximises your revenue while allowing you to provide as many, but not necessarily all, of the socially important services that you would like to provide. Those are the hard, crunchy things that people will need to be trained in, rather than understanding the legal background provided by this Bill.

In a way, I am delighted to find myself holding hands with the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on this topic, but I am not sure that I can support her on the wording of this amendment.

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[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, has raised some serious concerns and this group of amendments picks up a point raised at Second Reading by my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond. She described the ongoing situation with school bus services and pupils with special educational needs in North Yorkshire, and the terrible impact it is having on families and children. It is vital that bus services support children attending school and college, whether within their local authority area or further away, which is often the case with specialist education provision. This is an area of much concern. I hope the Minister is able to provide some assurance in response to this group of amendments.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I heartily endorse the comments made by my noble friend Lord Effingham and the support given by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. To be crystal clear, the fundamental issue is not the increase in national insurance rates as such, but the reduction in the threshold at which national insurance becomes payable.

Many of the people who drive special educational needs buses are part-time semi-volunteers. They may be working a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon, and their overall salary, as things currently stand, brings them in below the level at which national insurance contributions are payable. That is approximately £10,000 a year; I am using a very rough figure there, as I do not have the actual figures at hand. The Government’s proposal is a reduction to £5,000 a year of the point at which national insurance contributions become payable—again, an approximate figure. It is that reduction which brings these people within scope of national insurance contributions, which is potentially fatal to the operation of many of these services. They will simply not continue. The best that can be hoped for would be a more expensive service, after a lengthy period of retendering and disruption, in which maybe the same or maybe different operators are providing a more expensive service to the local education authority in many cases.

Separately, there is also the question of private schools and putting VAT on the bus services they provide, which would be bizarre because no other form of transport is subject to VAT, as far as I am aware. It is one of the consequences of the Government’s vindictive action against private schools. But the SEND issue is not simply about private schools; it is about the whole range of schools, and it is crucial that it is resolved soon.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I move that Clause 18 do not stand part of the Bill. I also wish to move that Clause 19 do not stand part of the Bill and, with your Lordships’ permission, I will speak briefly to both clause stand part notices at the same time and once only.

Clauses 18 and 19 are concerned with information that is to be extracted from local transport authorities but also from bus operating companies. I am perfectly happy with the notion that we should try to have as much information in the public domain as possible, and of course I do not intend—as I think noble Lords will understand—that these clauses should disappear entirely. This is a probing amendment, so to speak, to try to find out exactly what the Government think they are doing in this regard. I will speak very briefly to them.

First, quite a lot of the information being sought here, not least on the costs of particular routes and the revenues per route, would be commercially sensitive and belong to a particular company. The fact that Clause 19 allows that to be published in the name of the company is significant. These companies may well be operating a route for a particular local transport authority and another route in an adjacent area, very close by, in an entirely commercial sense. The information sought of them can have real commercial consequences. Nothing here assures me that the Government are respecting companies’ entitlement to have their commercial information protected in what they propose.

There are some difficulties in requiring this information. Having had a long association with the board of Transport for London, I am trying to think of a bus route in London where TfL could produce its cost and the revenue from it just like that. That is not entirely how bus services operate normally. Perhaps revenues do, but costs come down to a lot of questions about allocations that can be highly contentious.

Quite apart from the difficulty of extracting this information, the main purpose in these two Motions that the clauses do not stand part of the Bill relates to the protection of commercial confidentiality, to which private companies are entitled. There are circumstances in which one can imagine private companies choosing not to bid because their existing business would be threatened by the information they would be required to produce about particular routes. It is important that the Government should be clear about their intentions, what they expect and how they will protect that information, before we proceed with these clauses as drafted.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I was rather surprised to see these latest amendments, which seek to remove whole clauses from the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

They are probing.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

If I can continue without being heckled, I am assured that they are probing and that the noble Lord does not want to see these clauses completely removed. He has raised an interesting point about commercially sensitive data. As we know, in running a transport network, data and information are absolutely crucial and transparency is key. All this helps us improve services, so I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response, particularly around commercial sensitivity.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, a small number of amendments here in my name relate to zero-emission buses. I am concerned that the requirement for them is being imposed with excessive harshness and cliff-edge characteristics upon the bus industry. Amendment 47A, which I will talk about first, creates a form of exemption—a continuation that local transport authorities can put in place, particularly for rural services and in locations where battery-powered buses would be inappropriate because the distance that the rural service is running might be more than it could sustain. Generally, it might be appropriate in some rural areas to continue running diesel or hybrid buses for a further period beyond the cut-off that the Government envisage. That would be a relaxation of the requirement and would be welcomed in many parts of the country.

Amendment 47 provides a similar consideration on a broader basis—again, I am not being excessively harsh about all this. Amendment 48A requires the Government to justify their policy on public health grounds by publishing data in relation to the sorts of improvements—particularly air-quality and noise-pollution improvements—that they expect to achieve, for the travelling public and local people, with the changes that they envisage in relation to net-zero buses.

It would be helpful if the Government could take an approach that was a little less ideological and more tailored to what might suit particular areas and populations. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

Amendment 48 is a small but important amendment picking up on a potential anomaly within the Bill. It is something that Baroness Randerson flagged with us before Christmas. The Bill is clear that it wants to see cleaner zero-emission buses providing bus services across the country, and that is something that I would have thought the majority of noble Lords would support. However, this requirement does not seem to cover mayoral combined authorities. This amendment, therefore, seeks clarification from the Government on whether the provisions of new Section 151A on zero-emissions vehicles also apply to mayoral combined authorities. If not, this amendment should be agreed to ensure that every authority is covered.

Transport is a significant contributor to pollution in the UK. In 2021, transport was responsible for producing 26% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and the majority of those emissions come from road vehicles, which account for 91% of domestic transport emissions. Getting more cars off the road and more people using quality bus services is essential, as is ensuring that those bus services are as environmentally friendly and zero-emission as possible. I hope that the Minister can provide clarity in this area and put on record today clarification about the subsection at the bottom of page 29, which states:

“The date specified under subsection (2)(b) may not be before 1 January 2030”.


Those I have been talking to in the bus industry are concerned and I think are misunderstanding what is meant by this. Some clarity on the record would be helpful for all concerned.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Baroness Pidgeon and Lord Moylan

Report stage
Wednesday 6th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, our Amendment 7 is about rail devolution, discussed extensively in Committee from all sides of the Chamber. We believe it is really important that this first piece of rail legislation from the new Government not only meets their manifesto commitment to public ownership of the railways but allows further rail lines to be transferred to metro mayors and local and regional authorities where there is a strong case, and a desire, by the locally elected members. Local accountability is key.

I remind the House that we have discussed in detail the huge success of the Overground and the Elizabeth line in London and of Merseyrail in the Liverpool region, and the desire for metropolitan areas such as Greater Manchester to deliver a truly integrated public transport offer, branded under one logo and accountable to the mayor. These not only improve transport but contribute to housing and economic growth. I hope that the Minister can offer some stronger words today about future devolution, not just the limited existing devolved lines. The Minister started to outline this in response to the previous group, and I hope to hear more.

We on these Benches want our railway to become a reliable, fast, cost-effective and efficient service for everyone, with local services run in a way that serves the needs of local areas and local communities. I sensed in Committee that the Minister was listening very carefully to the points that were made, especially given his direct experience in a former role of running and expanding the Overground service in London.

I thank the Minister for his time, since Committee, meeting with my noble friends to discuss our amendments further and the assurances that we would like to hear at this stage. I hope the Minister can today assure the House that, as franchises end and come into public ownership, there will be genuine consultation and discussion with devolved authorities on how future services should look, and indeed on how best to run them—including the option for locally run and accountable devolved rail services, in addition to those already devolved. We believe that this will help bring about the transformation of the railway that is the aim of this Bill. I look forward to hearing from the Minister real assurances in this area. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 12 standing in my name. I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. Both amendments are aiming at the same thing.

I said earlier today that there are a number of crucial things missing from this Bill: one is staff, and we will come to that, and another is the passenger, and we have dealt with that. The third is the local authorities, the regions, the metropolitan authorities and devolution as a whole. On this side of the House we have always had great aspirations for the powers of combined metropolitan authorities and regional government, and for their expansion. We are largely responsible for promoting and establishing mayoralties in Manchester and the West Midlands, and in other places as well, such as Teesside and so forth. We have done that with a view to expanding their powers, and part of that was to take on a greater role in transport. We are seeing the beginning of that in Manchester with the buses, and Merseyrail is operated by the combined authority.

In doing that, we are coming from a successful metropolitan model, London, which already has many of these powers. As far as we can make out, these powers, where rail is concerned—not buses—are effectively to be closed down where they do not already exist. They will not be expanded further—the Minister has been quite clear about that—and we will not see the growth of rail on a metropolitan basis.

My Amendment 12 is simpler than that advanced by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. It would require a preliminary report that outlines the proposed framework in which Great British Railways is going to communicate with local authorities and regional authorities about passenger railway services. That it is going to communicate is something that the Government have committed to, as the Labour Party document Getting Britain Moving said so. There is going to be a great deal of consultation and involvement on every possible front, but, again, we are told that we have to take all of this on trust—that none of this will become manifest until we see the great rail Bill that will come in the future, with a bit of consultation but without seeing a proper text in advance for pre-legislative scrutiny.

We are trying to get it established now, as a principle at least, that the Government can initiate these communications before that Bill comes into effect. They can set up structures that allow those communications to take place; this amendment requires the Government effectively to do that.

If the Minister cannot agree to the precise amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, I very much hope that he will at least be able to agree to my amendment, which asks him to get those structures—which he envisages happening—in place as soon as possible, so that local authorities and the relevant regional authorities can be involved.