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

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations. I want to say a few words about apps.

I first came across the multimodal transport app Moovit a few years ago when visiting the Rhine-Ruhr area of Germany. I was amazed that it could predict quite a complicated journey involving a bus, a train and a tram, timed down to the nearest minute. I do not know Citymapper so well. Pre-Covid, going up to London by train, most people would be checking the train company’s own app. Ultimately, one would want to use a single app that covers the whole of the UK, rural areas included, and abroad as well. Certainly, this would be true for tourists.

Of course, these apps are only as good as the detail and accuracy of the information fed to them, although presentation, including the map used, is clearly important. My questions to the Minister are as follows. Will these data for buses, including GPS data, be supplied alongside all other public transport data in a freely available format appropriate for use by any multimodal transport app? What recourse does an app user have if information is found to be deficient, particularly in regard to rectifying data? If equivalent legislation is happening in Scotland and Wales, can the Minister assure us that the data supplied will be easily connectible between countries? The question ultimately begged is: how much of an integrated national transport network exists that will then make sense for passengers?

These apps strongly emphasise the network aspect of our transportation system; in other words, this is about not just a national bus strategy but a whole public transport network, of which buses and coaches are a significant part. What is particularly interesting about these apps is that they do not recognise a hierarchy of modes of transport. Everything is equal. The question is just how you get from A to B, although the user might take other factors into account. Where the network is weak, that will weaken the network as a whole, such as it exists.

Last year’s report by the Campaign for Better Transport found that 3,000 bus routes had been lost or been significantly reduced in the past 10 years, which is bad news if we are fighting to protect the environment as well as combat social isolation in rural areas. Due to the Government’s austerity measures, local authority funding of bus services has fallen by 40%, while central government funding over the same period has reduced by 19%. This is relevant to the regulations because, without services, there will be no data.

Therefore, I ask the Government not just whether they will reverse these cuts—on top of the financial aid necessary to maintain services during the Covid crisis—but whether they will use these data, or encourage local authorities to do so, to help identify holes and unreliability in the network, in particular with regard to town-centre congestion, which bus companies, whose drivers have been doing such an important and dangerous job in recent months, have limited control over in terms of scheduling.