Bus Services Bill [HL]

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the introduction of the Bill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am interested in accessibility, but also in the integration of services. I declare an interest as a board member of Transport for London. I hope the Minister does not think me presumptuous but I was going to offer an answer to the noble Lord, Lord True. Unfortunately he is not in his place at the moment but I will make sure to speak to him afterwards.

The Bill does not have an impact on the operations of Transport for London—it applies outside London—but TfL has offered support to the cities that wish to be able to specify service quality and introduce integrated fares and ticketing. It has provided a lot of support to Transport for Greater Manchester, with detailed advice on the technical aspects of franchising, stakeholder engagement and communications. It has worked with the Urban Transport Group to make a case for local control. It has also offered MPs and Peers a visit to the control centre—if anyone has not done that, it is a really interesting experience to see not only how complicated the system is in London but how well it can work.

I also declare an interest in that I am a regular bus user in London, though not in the north-east where I live because of issues with access, routes and timetabling. I am hugely fortunate in that I have a car; but as a disabled person, if I did not have access to a car I would find it almost impossible to get to work or even to have a social life and be an ordinary member of the public.

I believe that there is massive potential for integrated travel. In Committee, I would like to explore further provision of an Oyster-style payment while making sure that discounted travel for disabled people is not lost as part of the process. I would not want to exclude disabled people from using public transport on cost grounds. Cost has been raised with me by a number of organisations and individuals.

I would like to explore a few issues further. There is little mention of Ring and Ride or Dial-a-Ride in the Bill. This is where I am quite conflicted, because as a disabled person, I am very fortunate that I do not have to use Dial-a-Ride. Although the booking system in London has improved significantly, it still relies on availability, which is not always good. However, with another hat on, I wholeheartedly support the use of Dial-a-Ride because there are still a number of people who, whether because of a psychological or physical barrier, would find it difficult to use transport even if it were more accessible. We could be much smarter about how we use Dial-a-Ride, whether it is for visits to hospitals, schools, work or college. The National Union of Students has said that 45% of students whose weekly fare is between £10 and £19.99 have considered giving up their course because they cannot afford it. For disabled students who do not qualify for higher-rate personal independence payment, this can make it difficult for them to travel and creates yet another barrier to getting disabled people into work.

I will be very honest: I never used a bus at all until London won the right to host the Olympics and Paralympics. When I met the then Transport for London commissioner, Sir Peter Hendy, he asked me whether I used buses. I said I did not think that I had or was likely to, as they were not accessible, and in his inimitable style, he marched me out of the reception and made me get on a bus. He showed me how easy it was to use buses. However, having grown up without the experience of using the bus—and having no idea of how to use a bus timetable or navigate my way round London—I realised how difficult it is for some people to see it as a serious option.

A number of disabled people regularly tweet and post on social media about the general difficulty of using buses and how they have been made to feel. A member of the public called Mike Hughes, who is visually impaired, tweeted information about his daily bus journey for a whole year and even I, as a person with some understanding of the issue, found the challenges he faced incredibly interesting. It is not just about accessibility to the bus but about making sure that the camber of the pavements is right, the kerbs are dropped and have the correct height, and tactile paving has been provided. I should add that although tactile paving is good for visually impaired people, it can cause difficulty for wheelchair users. We need to think about all these other things as well to make it possible for disabled people to use public transport.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who unfortunately is not in her place, raised some really valid points about insurance and the ability of disabled people to travel together. My husband is a part-time wheelchair user so on the days when he uses his chair, I would not be able to travel on a bus with him. I was tempted to make an offer to the noble Baroness—that we should leave here and see how far we can get on a bus if we travel together. It is about having flexibility and empowering the bus driver by providing the appropriate training to make decisions regarding the size of the chair, scooter or buggy. Unfortunately, an awful lot of what we have heard in the press recently about disabled people using public transport and buggies on buses has turned the issue into an argument of us against them. That is really unfortunate because, in a great many cases, it does not need to be like that.

The case of Doug Paulley v FirstGroup has already been raised. One of the issues here is that the Public Service Vehicles Accessibility Regulations, which make it unlawful to refuse a wheelchair user, have no enforcement body. Perhaps that is something that we can sort out through the regulations or guidance accompanying the Bill. It is completely crazy that under the PSVA regulations, you can be directed to leave a bus if you are causing a nuisance, if the condition is likely to be offensive, or if the person may soil the vehicle or the clothing of another passenger, but not if you are blocking a wheelchair user accessing transport. That is something that I would very much like to explore further.

As for my own personal experience of travelling on buses, fairly recently I was trying to get a bus into central London. A mum with a buggy was already on the bus. She had a four year-old, a two year-old and a baby in the buggy, and the bus driver very kindly asked whether she would take the baby out of the buggy. My personal view was that that was not a safe way for the mum to travel with two toddlers. Unfortunately the bus driver was not able to let me—or did not feel comfortable letting me—and the buggy fit in the space together, even though that would have been the perfect solution because there was space for us to do that. As a disabled parent, I never try taking my daughter in a buggy on a bus, but I would like to see what would happen, or who you would have to leave behind, if a parent had to do that. It is just about making sensible decisions about how disabled people are able to travel. The situation for me in London was absolutely fine, because a bus came along less than five minutes later, but that does not happen in the north-east of England where I live. That is one of the reasons why we have to be really smart about how we do this.

Transport for London is being very proactive in one area. I was recently at a conference where it brought parents and wheelchair users together to discuss lots of different options. One thing that came out of that was that TfL recently launched a competition looking at the best size of buggy to take on a London bus. It is not advising people which buggy to buy, but about what is the most sensible size. Again, this is a really positive step forward.

I welcome provisions in the Bill around customer satisfaction. It is massively important to measure that, but if disabled people cannot get on a bus, then their customer satisfaction does not count. Again, it comes back to the point that if we are really serious about getting more disabled people into work, we have to make travelling better for them. The consequences of not being able to travel are that they will be very isolated and kept away from society.

A number of noble Lords have already raised issues around training, which is massively important. On my journey here this morning—which 99 times out of 100 goes without a hitch—there was that dreaded moment when the ramp did not quite work. The bus doors would not close and the ramp couldn’t come in. Although I am very resilient, even I felt this sense of dread that I was stopping a fairly full busload of people from getting to their jobs. However, it was handled brilliantly in that the bus driver did not treat me as if I was a hindrance: he explained to the other passengers what was happening and sorted out the problem, so that in less than a couple of minutes we were moving again. But these are the sorts of barriers that disabled people face. You do not want to get in the way of other people, and that is sometimes how you feel.

The audio-visual announcements are incredibly important for me as well. The rules say that a wheelchair user on a bus has to face backwards, which means, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, that you cannot see the signs. I leave it to your Lordships’ imaginations to think about this, but when buses are very full and people are crammed in, you cannot physically see the signs anyway. If you are going on a new journey, you have no idea where to get off, and even if you are going on a journey that you do very regularly, it is quite difficult to look out the window and take a guess about where you are. For me, the audio-visual announcements would make a big difference to everybody.

Finally, I am very keen on looking at the opportunities that open data provide with the development of new apps. It just makes it very exciting in terms of being able to give disabled people lots of new information to help them decide how to travel. That gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can encourage more disabled people to think about how they use public transport. I very much look forward to the next stages of the Bill.