School Transport

Debate between Lord McCabe and Nigel Evans

Thursday 25th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Walker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) on securing this important debate. I doubt whether a single Member has not at some time or other come across the vexed issue of school transport, usually at some kind of advice centre.

I will quickly cover what I understand to be the duties and powers of the local authorities in England to provide home-to-school transport under the Education Act 1996, as amended; I am sure that the Minister will confirm this. The “Home to school travel and transport guidance” for local authorities provides further clarification. The guidance was updated recently—only in July last year—and it covers the statutory duties that a local authority must abide by when making home-to-school arrangements. It also provides local authorities with advice on discretionary powers to make provision for children where there is no statutory obligation; the hon. Member for Ribble Valley focused on that point.

The guidance applies to the vast majority of schools—community, foundation, voluntary, non-maintained and special schools, referral units, maintained nurseries, city technology colleges, city colleges for the technology of the arts, academies, free schools and university technology colleges. An independent school can also be covered if that school is named in the child’s education, health and care plan, so the guidance is pretty comprehensive.

Three main issues affect the arguments about the provision of school transport. First, there is the cost. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley and I might not have identical views, but we all heard his point about that issue. I am concerned that the cost is borne increasingly by impoverished local authorities. Secondly, there is the allocation and provision of school places, which seems to be resulting in an ever-increasing number of children in some parts of the country having to travel substantial distances to school. Finally, there is the question of safety and the emphasis on motor transport rather than walking or cycling. That point was alluded to by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss).

As the pressure on public spending intensifies, many local authorities have found themselves facing funding reductions of about 37% over the period 2010-11 to 2015-16. Many hon. Members will recognise that those cuts are not applied fairly across the board, with reductions that can vary from 5% to 40%. Needless to say, councils with the greatest needs and deprivation, such as my own in Birmingham, are required to take the largest share of the cuts. It is hardly surprising in those circumstances that local authorities are finding it harder to provide school transport. The Public Accounts Committee report of 28 January this year warned that further cuts might undermine the viability of not just optional services, but even some statutory ones.

When it comes to school transport, that is exactly what is happening. It is often a case of local authorities tinkering with the distance rules as a means of excluding people. In essence, there is an attempt to save costs. Schools have plenty of other pressures, not least the pensions issue that is looming for the Minister, but they are sitting on quite large reserves. The Department for Education’s figures show that 4,400 academies, as of March 2014, had reserves of £2.47 billion; some way behind are the 18,700 local authority maintained schools, which had reserves of £2.18 billion.

I meet plenty of local authority leaders who ask me why schools, given that they are sitting on these reserves, should not pay for or at least contribute to the transport costs, while local authorities are facing such cuts.

[Mr Nigel Evans]

I am a former school governor and I was on West Glamorgan County Council. In many cases, schools save that money for capital projects, some of which can run into millions, so that money would not be available to spend on other projects.

[Steve McCabe]

I am also a former school governor. I acknowledge that there are other pressures in schools. I was pointing out that they are sitting with reserves. Local authorities have largely been encouraged by the Secretary of State to use up theirs.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the problem, with which I totally sympathise, of parents being asked to pay £500. I do not know whether he saw the recent article in the Bournemouth Echo; I am sure he is an avid reader of it. It highlighted the plight of parents whose children attend the Parkfield free school. The school was set up and is now having to move to a more satisfactory base. Unfortunately, its new location is not particularly well served by public transport. There is a business willing to provide a school bus service, but at a cost of £650 to the parents. Neither the school nor the local authority feels able to subsidise that transport cost. When I read about that and as I listened to the hon. Gentleman, I wondered whether he was simply describing the shape of things to come.

Given the importance of getting children to school safely, I wonder whether the Government need to look again at the guidance, even if it was reviewed only last year, and at the funding arrangements. As to the suggestion that we might perhaps extend the travel distance or cut some local authority officers’ salaries, that might be one approach, but perhaps the Minister could also consider whether it is right for the duty to rest solely with local authorities.

We all tend to look a bit nostalgically back to the time when many of us would have walked to school, but at that time, of course, the concept of a local school was common. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley referred to problems of choice and locality, and the confusion over preferences and allocation of places. I certainly recognised what he was describing, but I suggest that the pressure on school places results largely from the imbalance in current provision, which results directly from Government policy. It has resulted in additional capacity in some areas and insufficient places in others, often in areas with the highest numbers of children.

Some Members, including the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey), have spoken of the barriers to children’s attendance at grammar schools and other schools of their choice, and that is certainly happening. In other cases, the capacity argument means that children are sometimes forced to travel great distances to school.

I know that the Minister is fond of reading the Daily Mail; in March, it reported on a mother from south London who complained that she was forced to drive her son 25 miles to his current school because she cannot obtain a place at the local school, which is down the road and round the corner. We hear stories repeatedly about children who must make journeys involving several buses, after they fail to get a local place. That pressure is added to by admissions policies that often result in children in the same household attending different schools. Again, that is a point to which the hon. Member for Glasgow Central drew our attention.

Every year at around this time, I am inundated at my advice centres with parents who have experienced the problem of not getting the school of their preference. Can it be right that a five-year-old is expected to make a two-and-a-half mile taxi journey to school, because he cannot get a place at the school nearest to where he lives? What assessment has the Minister made of the pressure on school places and the distance that children must travel? Does the situation mean that, whatever the arguments about academies or free schools, we need a more rational planning arrangement so that we have more school places where they are needed?

It is worth noting that, under the guidance, local authorities are obliged to provide free transport where there is no safe walking route, however close to the school the child may live. There cannot be many of us who have not witnessed the traffic problems around local schools at the start and end of the school day—traffic problems largely generated by parents who not only want to drop off and collect their children, but want to park as close to the school gate as possible.

I was told recently about an incident at one school in my constituency. A parent managed to knock down a child as she attempted that manoeuvre. Fortunately, no serious damage was done, but the stressed driver, rather than apologising immediately, got out of her car and castigated the child for not paying sufficient attention while she was trying to park. That pressure around the school gate is making life far too difficult for too many children.

I note that more than 27% of parents now automatically drive their children to school; 23% of cars on the road at peak times are taking children to or from school, despite 19% of school journeys being under a mile—a distance that I am told people can comfortably walk in about 20 minutes, even if they are not trying very hard.

Clearly, we need to give much more thought to how to create a safer environment in the immediate vicinity of schools and what the Government can do to help to deliver a sensible cycling and walking strategy, as proposed by the Living Streets charity. At a time when we are rightly concerned about childhood health and obesity, it is remarkable how few children walk to school. I am very impressed by Brake and other road safety charities, which have been calling for safe travel zones around our schools. That approach covers speeding traffic, crossings, inconsiderate parking, and cycling and walking. In that context, I welcome the Government’s target of 55% of five to 10-year-olds walking to school, but we will not achieve that without deliberate and specific action. Can the Minister say what he has in mind?

I conclude by asking the Minister to look again at the guidance and whether schools, local authorities and others could be encouraged to share the burden of the cost of school transport. I have given up hope of local authorities getting fair funding deals, but his own Back-Bench colleagues are now asking him to look at this issue. Can he look at the provision of places and the possibility of a more rational planning framework and tell us what parental choice means in this day and age if parents are not able to send their children to the school of their choice, for the reasons that his hon. Friends state? Finally, can the Minister tell us what steps he has taken regarding safer, healthier alternatives for getting children to and from school?