Community Transport

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lilian Greenwood]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that during this important debate, we can begin to get the assurances we need from the Minister.

The UK has taken a unique approach to community transport by legislating for a relatively light-touch, affordable regime through the section 19 and section 22 permits of the Transport Act 1985. It is widely acknowledged, including by the Government, that the regime has provided an effective framework within which not-for-profit organisations can safely provide community-based local transport services. The Government have also very broadly accepted throughout that the long-established permit regime still achieves that. Furthermore, they accept that developments in the sector that have led to the current situation have been not only supported by official guidance, but explicitly encouraged by local and central Government for many years.

Not-for-profit community organisations have been encouraged to become more professional in outlook and, in the face of growing pressure on local authority budgets, to become more financially self-sufficient. Community organisations have responded to that call by quite properly and, I stress, in accordance with the official guidance, developing their operating models to deliver services via a mix of grant funding and local authority contracts.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the changing situation in local authorities—I have seen it in Cambridgeshire—whereby mainstream services have disappeared to be replaced by not just voluntary, but professional schemes, has led to those problems?

[Lilian Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is right. Many community organisations, some very successfully, have achieved greater self-sufficiency and sustainability by cross-subsidising what can be thought of as core community transport services with income from contracts for school and social care transport, for example.

And so to the bombshell of last summer. At the end of July, in what the Department seems to have hoped would be a relatively innocuous letter from a senior official to issuers of section 19 and section 22 permits, it set out a new approach, which was contrary to the official guidance that had been applied for decades but in line with a new interpretation of EU regulation 1071/2009, which has been in force since 2011. This is the crux of the matter: there is a potential misalignment of the relevant sections of the 1985 Act and its associated guidance and practice, and EU law.

The European regulation defines three derogations from the operator and driver licensing requirements on the mainstream commercial sector: where organisations are engaged in road passenger transport services exclusively for non-commercial purposes; where they have a main occupation other than that of road passenger transport operator; and where organisations have only a minor impact on the transport market because of the short distances involved. Member states can choose whether to apply the third derogation.

The Department’s letter noted the findings of a DVSA investigation into the licensing arrangements of an individual community operator in Erewash, Derbyshire—I see the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) is present. Essentially, that investigation, which was conducted in response to a complaint from a commercial operator, found that as the operator in question held a number of competitively tendered local authority contracts, it could not be considered to be operating for non-commercial purposes.