Bus Improvement Plans

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, we asked the local transport authorities to be ambitious and, goodness gracious, they were. That is absolutely right. Indeed, I am not sure I have ever done a competition in the Department for Transport that has not been significantly oversubscribed. In aligning the amount of money we have, we have to really look at how that money will be used and whether it meets the requirements in the national bus strategy. I will mention no names at all but, for example, one local authority bid to build a new road from the bus funding. That does not necessarily strike me as exactly what we need out of the bus funding. My officials are making sure that the areas we fund with taxpayers’ funding get the best bang for our buck.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

Is not all this bidding for money a bit demeaning for local authorities? Would it not be much better to give them powers over all transport in their areas to get on with the job, and give them the money to do it?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

To a certain extent, that is the direction of travel we are moving in— particularly for the large urban areas. For example, Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire—the combined authorities—receive pots of funding that they can use in a very integrated way to establish their integrated transport networks. CRSTSs, which are part of the money we are giving to places such as Manchester, match up with funding from BSIPs, so there is a lot of interrelationship between the different pots of funding. I take the noble Lord’s point, but we have to balance that with making sure we get really good value for money for the taxpayer.