Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for recent meetings with him and his officials. I have tabled Amendment 61 in this group and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his kind comments about my previous amendment—I thought his revised one looked a little familiar.

Amendment 61 is not only about disabled access to buses, which is why I wanted to debate it right at the start of Report. Rather, it would confirm the importance of the Equality Act 2010 in relation to bus operators, local transport authorities and, of course, passengers. The Equality Act 2010 sets out, in Section 149, the public sector equality duty of public bodies delivering services to people. Anyone under it must have due regard to the need, and take steps to advance, equality of opportunity, not only for disabled passengers.

In this Bill, it is the local transport authorities which are under the PSED directly and plan, implement and monitor bus services in their area, as outlined in Section 108 of the Transport Act 2000. LTAs’ responsibilities are not limited to contracting for certain franchised bus services but include the responsibility for planning services for all their passengers, including the non-franchised. That does not mean that LTAs run the free market commercial bus routes, but they must ensure that everyone in their area has usable bus services.

In Committee, the Minister said that the regulation for public sector vehicles—PSVs—includes the duty to make reasonable adjustments. However, in practice, it is often a “best efforts” provision, leaving many disabled passengers frustrated when they cannot access a bus service. The actual compulsory provision includes wheelchair spaces, announcements and visual displays on the next stop, et cetera, and is way stronger than just reasonable adjustments.

I have continued to meet some pushback in meetings with government officials outside your Lordships’ House on the formal powers that all PSVs have to comply with. There seems to be something of a mindset that the commercial bus services are not included, but it is clear that they are covered by the Equality Act, which does not say that the definition is about commissioned or franchised services; it is any bus service that qualifies as a PSV, and its work must be monitored under another part of the Equality Act—the PSED—by the local transport authority, which will assess whether bus services in its area are meeting the needs of the people.

I have checked the case of FirstGroup Plc v Doug Paulley. The Supreme Court’s judgment, delivered in January 2017, sets out in paragraphs 11 and 12 the position that the bus operator had

“failed to comply with its duties under the Equality Act”

and confirmed that it was a public service vehicle under the Public Service Vehicles Accessibility Regulations 2000. The House of Commons Transport Select Committee’s report, Access Denied: Rights Versus Reality in Disabled People’s Access to Transport, published last week, explains in paragraphs 10 to 17 the entirety of the law, including how the Equality Act—and within that, the PSED and the PSV section—and the PSV regulations I mentioned all fit together, as well as retained Regulation (EU) No. 181/2011.

The key to all this is the Equality Act, and my amendment simply restates that, as barrister Catherine Casserley said in evidence to the Commons Transport Select Committee, rights to accessible transport

“should be enforced in the same way as any health and safety requirement. As part of any operation, any business has to comply with a range of obligations. These should be no different”.

The Select Committee concluded that, despite the legal framework, much needs to happen to improve compliance and practice on a daily basis. Disabled passengers agree. We need to remind bus operators and LTAs that the Equality Act duties are at the heart of provision for truly accessible bus services. It needs to be in the Bill.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I have spoken in the House before about the need to increase bus speeds. In discussion, the Minister has come forward with a method of bringing some discipline to local authorities with bad congestion problems that make the running of a proper bus service almost impossible—I note Oxford, Cambridge and London as among those places where this is the case.