Bus Services Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Julian Knight Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting : House of Commons
Tuesday 14th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Andrew Jones]

The hon. Lady makes a point about the value of local bus services. I agree that many people rely on them. Some communities are connected only via buses in the world of public transport. We are talking about automatic access—franchising is a significant jump for an authority that wishes to go down that route. I am quite relaxed about who franchises. We have a suite of powers and the Government are neutral.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

I wonder whether the Minister is familiar with the experience of the future mayoralty in the west midlands. The Mayor will give accountability to the process and, effectively, big decisions will be made at that level. Local people can therefore have a better input into what happens across the whole region.

[Andrew Jones]

I was coming to the point my hon. Friend has made and made very well. Mayors will have access to significant budgets, which they can commit to bus services if they wish, and will be responsible and accountable for a decision to move to a franchising model. This is a question not of some areas having fewer rights than others, but of ensuring that the governance arrangements are in place when making that significant jump.

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[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why there is so much hope attached to the Bill and to the idea that we can go back to having a comprehensive local public transport system that delivers for people. The truth is that we have had a 30-year experiment with an unregulated market, the end result of which is exactly as my hon. Friends describe. This a chance to move forward. In some areas the Government are responding, but in many other parts of the country, it looks as if the hurdles will be too high.

The Minister talked about local decision making and accountability, saying that the Bill is about enabling new opportunities and giving local authorities new choices on how to improve their services. However, as has been said, taking the decision out of the hands of local communities and putting it squarely in the Secretary of State’s hands does not seem like localism to us. It seems particularly peculiar that a local authority must seek consent before taking even the preliminary step of preparing an assessment of a potential franchising scheme. How on earth can a local authority present a compelling case to the Secretary of State to gain approval if they are prohibited from even assessing a scheme?

We understand the Government’s point that strong governance and accountability are key to making franchising a success, along with a commitment to improving transport and to a coherent economic geography. However, we do not understand—my hon. Friends have made this point well—why the Government believe that those things can only be achieved with an elected Mayor. Why are Mayors seen to be more accountable than other elected local authority leaders?

I turn again to my personal experience, because for some reason Cambridgeshire seems to be at the heart of many of these issues. In my area in a few weeks, we will have elections on the same day for a Mayor of Cambridgeshire, who will have powers to franchise buses, and for a county council for Cambridgeshire, with a leader who does not have powers to franchise buses. A great irony is that the current county council leader put himself up for selection for Mayor and made the final shortlist. Therefore, in a few weeks’ time we could have had the same person being elected on the same day to two roles, one of which one would be deemed sufficiently accountable to franchise whereas the other would not. I am not going to tease the Minister by pressing for a reasonable explanation.

[Julian Knight]

The hon. Gentleman seems to suggest that all the power rests with the Mayor. In the West Midlands combined authority, the Mayor is effectively first among equals. The leaders of all the councils who make up the authority have a say in decision making.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Surely that is the case in other places as well. In my area the leader of the county council, who is a Conservative, has been elected and the choice will be made again in a few weeks’ time—however, we shall see what happens in the local elections. I think the local electorate are confused about the situation, based on my experience of what we are seeing on the doorstep, but I think the Minister can see the point. For many people it seems irrational to have so much invested in the mayoral issue.

In reality, we all know what is going on: franchising is being used as a bargaining chip to convince some combined authorities to accept a Mayor that they do not necessarily want as part of their devolution deal. Without going into the chequered history of those negotiations over the past year or two, one could say that they have not always been easy or straightforward. We think that the approach being taken is wrong, which is why we oppose it. Beyond that—this goes back to the points being made by my hon. Friends—the trouble is that what is happening denies bus passengers in many areas the prospect of better services.

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[Bridget Phillipson]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, who speaks from the Front Bench, I welcome the Bill and the measures that it introduces. I have spent a lot of time in my seven years here campaigning on bus issues due to the local problems that we face. Any changes to the current system are to be welcomed. I wish areas well with the automatic powers, as they proceed in improving services for local people. Of course I want that for my community, too. Although I understand the Minister’s point that the steps that he described in the process are not intended to be hurdles too difficult to overcome, I hope that the Government will remain committed to delivering that.

Change has been a long time coming, and hopefully we are now getting there, but I hope that the Minister and his colleagues will see the measures through, particularly in areas such as the north-east. We have a combined authority covering seven local authority areas, with an integrated transport authority. We have Nexus, which the Minister will know has other powers, such as the operation of Tyne and Wear metro. We have an extensive network that in many senses works well. What we do not have is the powers we need to make sure that bus routes serve the needs of local people. That is not simply about making it easier for people to get around—although that would be wonderful, because it is not often very easy, frankly, to get around on local buses in my constituency—but if we are to thrive as a region and if we are to create the jobs and support the businesses and the growth that we all want to see, we need a transport network that allows that to happen. In too many parts of my constituency, where buses are the only means of transport, that is incredibly difficult.

To give one example, Doxford international business park in my constituency houses thousands of employees with many big international firms. I frequently visit businesses there, and employees, many of whom are shift workers, often tell me that it is incredibly difficult to get a bus after 8 or 9 o’clock. That holds back investment and makes it difficult to retain staff. Although the transport authority is looking at proposals to extend the Tyne and Wear metro, as I know my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge is well aware, in the short term we need bus services that will allow people to get to work readily and inexpensively, which is not currently the situation.

On Second Reading, many of us talked widely about the failure of deregulation and the fact that it did not deliver on its promises. I will not dwell on that, other than to say that, in the case of the north-east, on every test that was set out for deregulation back in the 1980s, deregulation has been an unmitigated disaster and has had the reverse effect to the one intended. More than 30 years on from all we were promised about greater efficiency, lower fares and greater passenger numbers, the opposite has happened in the north-east. We have got less competitive services that are less efficient, more expensive and less convenient for the people I represent. Of course, it has given operators the freedom to do exactly what they like, when they like, at a time when we put tens of millions of pounds into local bus services.

Operators receive significant taxpayer subsidy with little accountability, and when things go wrong and operators cut routes arbitrarily with little notice, often affecting the most vulnerable in our community, there is no recourse. We can have dialogue with the operators—I meet them regularly to make the case—but ultimately it is an entirely commercial decision over which local people have no say. It is a source of real frustration that when minor changes to routes can result in local people being cut off from hospital services, GP appointments and the ability to get to local shopping facilities or schools, the operators can say, “We’ve heard what you had to say; unfortunately, we are pressing ahead regardless,” and there is no opportunity for local people to influence that in any meaningful sense.

We are talking not simply about routes that are unprofitable, but usually about the fact that they are not profitable enough. Outside London, big operators such as Stagecoach have made considerable profits, far greater than they make in London. I do not seek to deny operators the right to make a profit. My point is that they make a decent profit in areas such as London under a regulated service; they could do the same in the north-east. The profit margins would perhaps not be quite as high and would not be the double digits that they are used to—no one would seek to stop them running a competitive or profitable service—but if we are going to give them significant taxpayer money, the least we can expect is that they take on board the concerns of local people and use that wisely.

[Julian Knight]

The hon. Lady is making a very good speech and I sympathise in many respects about the lack of accountability when bus service routes are cut; my constituency has suffered in the same way. Does she agree, though, that this is almost an argument for combined authorities and Mayors, with their buying power, and the idea that they can bring these companies to heel, through their powers and through the threat, for example, of removing the franchises?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The inconsistency in the Government’s approach is the patchwork way in which they have brought about these different devolution deals. From what the Minister had to say earlier, I am still none the wiser, really, why Cornwall presents an exceptional case when an area such as the north-east does not. We have a combined authority; what we do not have is a Mayor. I believe there should be accountability and that can come in many different forms. In the west Midlands, it will come through the election of a Mayor; in the north-east, it was a widely held view that a Mayor would not offer that same accountability and there was not broad support for a Mayor covering such a big region. However, we do have a combined authority and an integrated transport authority, and we have the structures in place that will make franchising work and give local people the confidence that there will be accountability in the process. That will differ, but I have difficulty in understanding why different models are acceptable in different parts of the country, other than for the obvious political reasons that spring to mind.