Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 35 to 39, which I have put my name to. I have no problem with any of these amendments, particularly Amendment 56 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in which she talks about data, which I will get on to later. I apologise for degrouping, which I know has been weaponised recently. I degrouped mine because there is a subtle difference, and I did not want the two amendments to compete with each other.

Rather controversially, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who said that floating bus stops are discriminatory. They are not: they are dangerous for everybody. I cycle, walk and catch buses. I avoid floating bus stops if I can because they are just terrifying. We have a chance to set a template here. I keep banging on about this. London works really well, and we are moving this out to other parts of the country. Accessibility and inclusive design need to be there, so that we can put it out to everybody.

Guide Dogs for the Blind and UCL did a lot of research recently, which they sent us, on floating bus stops. We should get people back on the buses any way we can. There are people sitting here who cannot use buses any more. We will talk later about rural areas, but buses are the ultimate form of travel. They should be quick, easy and pleasant to use. We must do everything we can do to make that everybody’s experience.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the debate. The debate about floating bus stops—I heard the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and others—all depends on the dimensions and who is around.

The noble Baroness mentioned Westminster Bridge, where the floating bus stop is on the far side of the bridge. The cycle lane there is a complete waste of time because it is full of pedestrians. The pedestrians are going on the road. It is a question of how much space is allocated to cyclists, to pedestrians, to people trying to get on and off buses—often with wheelchairs, which need to be level—and to vehicles. We have something to learn about that.

The opposite example is the other side of Victoria Station, in London, where, probably 20 years ago, a mayor put in a cycle lane but it was so narrow that you had to slow to a dead stop before you could turn a little corner. It is a question of design. A moratorium on these floating bus stops would be a great shame. Many cycle lanes, floating bus stops, and so on need a regular review depending on how many people are using them and how safe they are. Safety has to be balanced between cyclists, people in wheelchairs, able-bodied people and the foreigners who do not understand that we keep left, before we make changes. There are good places for floating bus stops and there are probably some bad ones.

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[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 22, which is a delicate, small nudge that suggests that, if you are trying to replace bus services or create new ones, looking at previous scrapped bus routes might be a way forward because, presumably, they were the last to go. I do not live in a bus desert, but obviously a lot of people do so outside London. It is a sad state of affairs when people are forced to use their cars, as so many are in the countryside. Bringing back bus routes that existed and were clearly used before various cuts would make sense.

The CPRE report, Every Village, Every Hour, nearly four years ago, set out what a comprehensive bus network for England could look like and the scale of investment needed, which, of course, is a bargain in how much it benefits communities, social enterprise and so on. If the Minister has not read that report already, I suggest that he does so. I agreed also with the previous amendments.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, to which I was delighted to add my name. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, criticised the Bill on the first day in Committee as being mildly nostalgic and backward-looking, a sort of return to the Attlee Government. I have quoted him so many times on this that I really need to start paying him royalties. However, I would like the Bill to be nostalgic and backward-looking. I would love it to go back to the pre-Beeching glory days when buses turned up on time with smiling children. I do not know whether that actually existed.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

It did.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I will not comment on the noble Baroness’s age. The Bill is an opportunity to help breathe life into rural areas, to get children on buses going to schools and to get people to hospital. We keep banging on about the elderly and people with disabilities who rely on buses to get to hospitals and GPs. This amendment and Amendment 49, which is not in this group, are absolutely right. I would like to hear how the Government are looking to regenerate areas of so-called social deprivation. I realise that, with bus companies, there is an issue with funding, but I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of mankind to work this one out.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 22 in the name of my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I do so because, in simple terms, it seems logical and sensible to go to what we could describe as the Beeching bus routes. They obviously had sense and users at the time. It seems a logical place to stop, alight from the vehicle and consider how they could be brought back into being. When the Minister responds, will he agree that when considering the cost of not having such bus routes, that cost should be measured economically and also socially, environmentally and psychologically, not least the impact on the mental well-being of that local area?

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, at Second Reading I expressed very serious concerns about part of Clause 24. In opposing the clause standing part of the Bill, my approach has been not to rewrite what the Government have proposed in the Bill—and therefore to provide them with an alternative policy—but to ask them seriously to consider and explain their current policy as it stands in the Bill. To that extent, this is like my previous clause stand part probing notices. But, on this particular issue, it is very clear that we are likely to come back on Report with specific amendments to change the text of the Bill, unless we hear something that explains it more satisfactorily than it has been so far.

My understanding is that Clause 24 inserts into the Transport Act 2000 a new obligation on the holders of PSV operators’ licences in relation to training. I have no objection at all to the idea that there should be an obligation to train staff, and I have no objection to Clause 25, which has a similar sort of effect but relates to training about disability. All of that is to the good.

My specific concern is with subsection (2) of what would be new Section 144F in the Transport Act 2000, where the training requirement under consideration is specified as:

“the person has completed training the aim of which is to assist the person to identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences that would cause a victim or potential victim of the offence to fear for their personal safety”—

that, after all, is a large number of criminal offences—

“and … anti-social behaviour, within the meaning given by … the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003”.

The person to whom this is directed can be only the driver of the bus, as buses run with one person operating them almost exclusively in this country. So the driver of the bus is expected to be trained, and the public are encouraged to think that the driver of the bus will be trained, to a point where they can

“identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences … and … anti-social behaviour”.

That potentially places a burden on bus drivers that is wholly inappropriate, given their role and their salary, and given that they will almost certainly be on their own on that bus when something happens. Many of the incidents that one can easily envisage would be encompassed by this training would be incidents that, as I said at Second Reading, the Metropolitan Police Force or another police force would respond to with one, two or three uniformed officers. Yet the implication is that a bus driver on their own will be able to

“identify, respond appropriately to and, where possible, prevent … criminal offences … and … anti-social behaviour”.

The Minister well understands bus operations—that goes without saying—more perhaps than any other Minister who might come here would understand them, but he cannot seriously mean what it says in the Bill. It is possible that he will say, “Oh no, you must misunderstand—when we talk about training and identifying, that is all really so that the drivers know how to report it to the appropriate people”. They have radios and they can communicate to their higher operator and the police, and things like that—and that is the appropriate response that we would be talking about here. But that is not what the words say; they say “where possible, prevent”, which goes a great deal beyond simply telling a bus driver to operate responsibly and take note of what is going on.

I am utterly baffled by what the Government are considering here, how it would work in practice and how these words are appropriate in this Bill. Something should and could be included, I agree, about training drivers so that they can identify, respond to and take account of this sort of behaviour, which is sadly all too common on buses nowadays. But the words as they stand put bus drivers in a completely impossible position. Apart from anything else, it would make recruitment very difficult indeed.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I have had conversations with bus operators and bus drivers, who are very worried about this issue. Bus drivers tell me that the very act of opening a door to walk out and face a passenger is seen as aggressive. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is absolutely correct on this one.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I completely agree with his sentiment, but I think that he has misunderstood what this clause seeks to achieve. There is absolutely no intention whatever that, as a result of this clause, drivers or other staff should be asked to put themselves at risk.