Bus Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Horam and Earl Attlee

Monday 4th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I agree that there is no distinction, really, in accountability terms between a mayor and a councillor who is considering these matters. I strongly agreed with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about London and London franchising. I live in London and I can certainly attest that what she said about that is entirely correct. London buses are, frankly, marvellous. Whether you congratulate Boris—poor chap, he is receiving rather a bad press at the moment so I might as well praise him for his new buses—or Thomas Heatherwick, who actually designed them, they are absolutely superb. Whether you praise Thomas Heatherwick, Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone, London really works from a bus point of view. In fact, my wife said to me the other day, “You’re becoming a bus junkie”. I actually took a bus to go one stage because the bus routes give you priority over cars, et cetera, so it really does work. Therefore, I am emphatically in favour of the Bill, which tries to extend franchising to the rest of the country, which I think badly needs it.

However, I am, frankly, horrified by Clause 4, which submits everything—apart from the one aspect of mayors with combined authorities—to the requirement that the Secretary of State should process it. It means that a council which wants to put on a new bus service from, let us say, Little Dribbling to Nether Wallop has to take it to the Secretary of State. That is absolute nonsense. I was a Minister of Transport in a Labour Government a long time ago and this system does not work. You need to get somebody who knows the situation locally, understands it well and can take a decision. Okay, there are always a few problems and occasionally things go wrong, but pushing it up to a civil servant and then to a Minister, who probably has no knowledge of the situation you are talking about, does not work. All it does is congest the Government at the top level.

I saw the other day that Prime Minister David Cameron was complaining that in comparison with Angela Merkel, he had much more to do because he had to take decisions about education, transport, the NHS and so forth and she did not; in Germany it was all farmed out to the Länder. This is why. We are taking all these absurdly detailed decisions at government level. Although my experience is quite different from that of the noble Lord, Lord True—his is extensively in local government, mine is not—from the point of view of a government Minister, it is nonsense, frankly. It simply does not work.

The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, tried his best to give a reason, which was about accountability. There is no difference between the accountability of an elected mayor and that of an elected councillor. It is a simple fact. They are both elected; they are both responsible to the local electorate. There is no distinction that I can see. I am not surprised that the Delegated Powers Committee said that there was no adequate explanation. I looked through the Explanatory Notes, hoping to find some rationale for this procedure, and there is none. Therefore, we have a real problem here and the Government really have to think again.

Another difficulty is that quite apart from overcentralisation, the British Civil Service seems to go in for too much complexity. If we raise the bar too high, either because things have to be processed up or because we put in a lot of regulations, which are sometimes unnecessary—they are no doubt sensible in some ways and no doubt advisable; none the less there is more and more regulation—it becomes likely that lots of local authorities which could use these powers will simply say, “Oh, it’s too much trouble. We don’t want to bother with all that. We won’t do it”. There are easy ways to get out of it and then blame the Government. When people ask, “Why isn’t there a decent bus service here?” they can say, “Because the Government made it so complicated”. It is an easy way out for them.

Therefore, while, like my noble friend Lord True, I am in no way criticising my noble friend on the Front Bench, who has his job to do and who does it extremely well, I believe that between now and Report in September the Government should look at this and extensively modernise it. If they do not, I do not think, frankly, that they have much chance of getting it through this House.

[Earl Attlee]

My noble friend Lord Horam observed that the Explanatory Notes do not justify the policy, but my understanding is that that is not the purpose of Explanatory Notes. Explanatory Notes, as I understand it, tell us what the Bill does and how it works and do not seek to justify the policy.

[Lord Horam]

It is not just that the Explanatory Notes, which should explain what each clause does, do not explain why this does what it does; the overview, which we also get, does not explain it either.