Bus Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Berkeley

Wednesday 20th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, Amendment 123A would insert a new clause, “Passenger representation”, which tries to give bus passengers the same information—and credibility of information—that rail passengers get through Transport Focus, whose responsibility has recently been widened to include information about roads. This goes a bit wider than that, however, because local transport authorities need to set up mechanisms whereby passengers who are affected or who might use services can have credible information about proposed or actual services, as they have for rail services, and about reliability, quality and what happens when something goes wrong—as we discussed on today’s first Question.

It does not really matter who provides the services, whether it is a franchise, partnership or something else, but it is important. This could be done nationally, through Transport Focus or Bus Users UK, or locally, with co-ordination by a national body. Either way, there is a need for something like this and to have a requirement for it in the Bill. I beg to move.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to support the principle of the amendment that my noble friend Lord Berkeley has just moved. We have had debates about inserting references to passenger representation at various points in the consultations on the Bill. My noble friend’s amendment seeks to state this as a general principle so that, in effect, there would be in every area some form of passenger representation to cover the involvement of passengers in the development and continued operation of the franchise, partnership or contract. Further, passenger representation should be part of the general decision-making process as we go forward, not simply in the original consultation.

In addition, my noble friend’s amendment refers to a complaints system. It is vital that there should be within this industry a system for complaints to be rapidly dealt with by the operator and, if necessary, the transport authority. To do that, there needs to be an effective passenger body. It could be a national body or a combination of a local body and Transport Focus nationally. On earlier parts of the Bill, the Minister very gratifyingly showed some encouragement to those of us who were arguing for engagement of passenger representation. I hope that in his reply the Minister can tell us, or at least give a general indication—tonight if possible but certainly before we get to Report—how the Government will bring forward amendments on Report to reflect that commitment to passenger representation and the ability of such organisations to deal with complaints with bus operators. It would be very useful if we all received a letter before Report setting out all the points at which this would be reflected in the Bill.

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[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, Amendment 128 calls for a strategy for the bus sector to be part of the Bill. It is fairly short and to the point. My noble friend Lord Berkeley has tabled a couple of rather more comprehensive amendments which express the same objective.

When I first thought of this amendment, I thought of tabling it before Clause 1. I may have to reflect on that after this short debate. The Bill is quite technical and procedural, changing contractual arrangements and introducing new technology such as ticketing systems and so forth. What it fails to do is give a clear indication of the strategy for the bus sector in terms of raising usage, extending buses in much-neglected rural areas, the nature and quality of buses, and their environmental impact. We need a strategy. We need the Government to come forward with a bus strategy that makes sense of the Bill in a broader dimension.

We can come back to this on Report. Obviously, we are nearing the end of today’s proceedings so I will not speak at length but it seems a missed opportunity not to require the Secretary of State to come up with an overarching strategy that would convince people that we are really serious about modernising, extending and making more environmentally attractive our bus services throughout England. I beg to move Amendment 128 here, at the obscure back end of the Bill, but the Minister may encourage me to put it right at the front of the Bill because that is really where it should go.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 128 and will speak very briefly to my two amendments. Several of us spoke about this at Second Reading. I agree with my noble friend that the bus sector needs a strategy. After all, rail passengers have a strategy. Rail freight is having one soon, I am told. There is a roads strategy. There are strategies to do with most things in transport, except buses. I really think it is time for it and I will certainly support my noble friend if he puts a nice amendment down as Clause 0.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, I am not sure you can have a Clause 0, can you? I bow to the wide expertise around the Committee. You can certainly get “zero” fizzy drinks or whatever but let us not open up that debate. I am grateful for the courteous manner in which the amendments were introduced. This group relates to proposals to introduce requirements to produce new national strategies for bus services, and looks to place requirements on local authorities to increase the number of passengers using bus services.

I have said before—indeed, it is a sentiment shared across the Committee—that we want to see more people using buses. Perhaps the recent influx into the Chamber is reflective of that sentiment among noble Lords. Of course, I agree with the intention behind Amendment 129 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Buses help people get around and should be an integral part of any public transport system. Public transport works best where it is considered holistically, with bus services integrated with cycling infrastructure, trains and trams, or in the form of park and ride facilities. I agree that authorities considering any of the new tools in the Bill should be looking to improve their local bus services and to encourage more people to use public transport.

However, I am concerned that this amendment may bring unintended consequences; for example, a local authority may introduce a new tram system and may look to increase the overall number of journeys made using public transport but the proportion of journeys made by bus may decrease. It may be more sensible, therefore, to encourage authorities to address the issue of increasing the number of public transport journeys rather than just journeys made using bus services. I trust that this gives the noble Lord sufficient reassurance of the seriousness with which I intend to consider the aims of Amendment 129, and hope he will agree not to move it.

Amendments 128 and 130 would require the Secretary of State to develop and issue a national bus strategy and a bus services investment strategy for England. As I have said in previous Committee debates, devolution is an important theme, which has informed the development of the Bill. The Bill is all about providing authorities with new tools to enable them to improve their local services in the way that best suits their area. It is not about imposing particular models.

Central government has a valuable role to play in setting the wider agenda through policy initiatives such as the low-emission bus scheme and our total transport pilots, which I mentioned in the previous group of amendments, but I do not think that centrally determined strategies for local bus services would help authorities address particular issues relevant to them and their area. As such, it does not seem sensible for central government to set national strategies when it is local authorities and bus operators working together that will be designing services and setting standards locally.

Additionally, I have previously explained that my department helps support local bus services outside London by paying some £250 million per year of the BSOG. As I said in the previous group of amendments, we are already reviewing the BSOG system, with the aim of ensuring that funding is targeted where it is most needed. It is through that work that we should establish and set out central government’s priorities and objectives for the funding provided. I trust this gives the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Berkeley, sufficient reassurance to withdraw and not move their amendments.

Bus Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Berkeley

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall intervene briefly to underline one particular point. I agree that pretty much everything the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has said should be taken into account in the setting up of partnerships and in franchising.

There is one point that should be emphasised here and elsewhere in this Bill, and it relates to advanced ticketing and smart ticketing. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, was kind enough to remind me just now, although I acknowledged it on Second Reading, that part of my work as a Minister years ago was never implemented. A big chunk of the failure to implement it is why we have this Bill now, and I congratulate the Government on putting it right. One part was successful, however. I was the Minister overseeing the invention and early implementation of the Oyster card. In 1999, I made the very first commercial use of the Oyster card at St James’s Park station down the road.

The Oyster card has utterly transformed public transport in London. There are other factors, but it is at least part of the reason why we have seen such an enhancement of the use of the buses, and indeed the whole transport system, in London, compared with other parts of the country, both in the cities and in the countryside. It is so much easier to make complex journeys, or even a single journey, within other towns and across the countryside if you already have an advance card. As the noble Baroness said, most buses, even some relatively elderly buses on our rural roads, have the machinery to cope with this or can be adjusted to do so.

This ought to be one of the legacies of this Bill and be writ large across the whole of the bus system throughout the country, with some interaction with other forms of transport as well. It should be developed as rapidly as possible. It should be one of the major achievements of this Bill and of the Minister and his colleagues in the department.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, one thing that my noble friend has forgotten is that these Oyster cards should possibly be called Whitty cards, rather like the bicycles that are called Boris bikes. I am sure he would not want to be related to Boris in that way, but they are a great success.

I am pleased to be able to tell your Lordships that the local authority in Cornwall is going to implement a similar thing. It is very long and based on customer focus, but I will summarise it. The big double-decker buses will have wi-fi and tables so that you can put your laptop on them. They are going to run very frequently on the main routes. Smaller buses will go into the smaller areas. They will link in with the railway timetable, and I think that the operators’ ability to talk to each other will be unique. They are proposing a single ticket structure—one standard, one band. I hope my noble friend will appreciate this. It is going to happen within the next year or two.

This is a real example of a local authority taking an initiative. It sees that where you have several different operators, as there are at the moment, they never fit with the train timetable. They are going to. Nor do they fit with the ferries to the Isles of Scilly, but I am not going to go on about that now.

Amendment 54A in my name and some other amendments propose something on the quality of standards and on frequencies. We should probably also include interchange points, but we have not done so yet. Maybe we should also add something about a percentage of the population not having to walk further than X miles to a bus stop and an hourly or better bus service. There are what you might call faster services between the major centres of population—plus ones that you might say wiggle between villages and take a lot longer, although they do get there for people who do not have access to public transport. I believe that TfL has a bus services plan, involving the public transport accessibility level, which takes this into account, as does Transport for Greater Manchester.

Not all these things need to be in the Bill; the amendments here are perfectly adequate. However, they and the initiative that Cornwall County Council has shown would mean that neither partnerships nor franchises would provide a much better quality of service for all types of people who want to use it. The irony is that although it has been suggested that Cornwall will be able to have franchises in the same way as authorities with mayors—we will come on to that later—it is confident that all this will happen without the need for a franchise.

It is encouraging that the Government have produced a structure. I am sure that we can improve it, but at least it is there, and it should enable the volume of bus passenger traffic to go up, which is what we all want, with a much better quality of service. I commend what Cornwall is doing, but I hope that the Government will seriously consider adding something about the standards and the frequency of service, as well as the quality, and perhaps come back with their own suggestions on Report.

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[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group which go in broadly the same direction as that of the noble Baroness and were intended to apply to existing as well as new vehicles. It seems extraordinary to me that the Bill as first drafted does not contain a need to have regard to environmental standards—even through the word “may”. Over recent months there has been increased attention to air quality in our cities and sometimes in our countryside as well; quite rightly, because the health effect and the environmental effect of air quality deterioration, plus the Volkswagen scandal, and so forth, have underlined the need to move more rapidly on all sources of air pollution, in particular in relation to vehicles.

I should declare that I am the current president of Environmental Protection UK, the successor organisation to the National Society for Clean Air; it was the leader of the successful lobby that led to the Clean Air Act 50 years ago this year, which seriously cleaned up visible forms of air pollution and, indeed, many invisible forms as well. We need now to finish the job and we have the technology, both in retrofit, as the noble Baroness has said, and in new standards. Buses may not be a huge component of air pollution but, per person and per trip, they are large contributors if they are not treated or the standards are not met.

I hope that the Minister will take away, if not the wording of any of these amendments, a need to write into the Bill, both in this section and the subsequent section on franchising which my second amendment deals with, that some of the requirements must relate to the environmental standards of the vehicles and the total environmental impact of the fleets of franchisees or contract holders. If it does not, it is a serious omission and a serious lack of joined-up government between the Department for Transport, DECC and Defra when we are trying to tackle both climate change and air pollution. Whatever final form of words we come up with before the Bill leaves this House, this ought to be reflected in both sections of the Bill.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I have my name to two of these amendments. I support what my noble friend has said. Let us remember that even in London, which probably has some of the newest and now cleanest buses in the country—even if they do not have any air conditioning, which does not seem to affect the emissions, luckily, but does affect the passengers—the then Mayor of London, who may even be our next Prime Minister, had to cover up the monitoring stations along Euston Road before the Olympics in order to keep the levels of pollution below those which had occurred in Beijing during its Olympics. With all the money that TfL had and has, it had to fiddle that. It was not a problem caused by buses but by other vehicles, but it was still a fact. It happens in many other cities and it is essential that some regulations or clauses such as those proposed by these amendments are included in the Bill.