Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

First, I apologise again for my premature interjection earlier. I was given the wrong running order. I should have checked it; I was stupid. I am going to speak to Amendments 7, 17, 18, 19, and 20, which are in my name, and talk about the potential effects on working men and women who run this fantastic service that we all rely on so much.

Although existing legislation extends service notice periods, they are much shorter than the time required to roll out franchising. There is no doubt about that. I believe that procurement of services takes around nine months, followed by a further nine months for mobilisation. Amendment 7 addresses the risk that unsuccessful or unscrupulous operators could run down services prior to new franchises, affecting service continuity and potentially putting members’ jobs at risk. Therefore, will the Minister commit to assessing whether further regulation is needed to ensure service continuity where local transport authorities pursue franchising?

Feedback from those involved in the rollout of franchising in Manchester, the only area outside London yet to implement franchising, is that early and meaningful engagement with trade unions is vital to its success. The Department for Transport has said that it would “expect” all local authorities to engage with trade unions. However, expectations are not enough. Amendment 17 seeks to learn from the experiences of Manchester and ensure that all local authorities take a consultative approach with the unions and have a joint staff forum in place as recommended. This ensures consistency across the country and best possible outcomes for franchising. Will the Minister commit to publishing a code of practice or guidance for local transport authorities to follow as part of the franchise process?

Finally, my Amendments 18, 19 and 20 would strengthen staff protection in areas where local authorities implement franchising. As the Bill reverses the ban on new local authority bus companies, Amendment 18 seeks to ensure that provisions around the transfer of staff apply. There is a risk that bus operators under franchise contracts will seek to drive down pay and conditions in a race to the bottom or employ new starters on inferior pay and conditions.

Amendment 19 proposes that workers’ terms and conditions will be maintained for the duration of the franchise to prevent the creation of a two-tier workforce by ensuring that new staff are not employed on inferior terms. Although TUPE will apply when services transfer to new operators, these regulations need strengthening so that staff are protected not just at the point of transfer but throughout the franchising process.

Amendment 20 would establish that as soon as a local authority launches its franchising consultation, the full coverage of TUPE will apply. Will the Minister commit to bringing forward the regulations or statutory guidance around protections for staff that Amendments 18, 19 and 20 seek to address?

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 61. I was very pleased to hear the Minister say that the Bill is about safety. All my amendments are about safety, but this is the briefest. It is very simple and builds on Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to make sure that those who make these decisions are qualified to do so. My amendment would simply ensure that franchising authorities responsible for the design have the appropriate IOSH and NEBOSH certificates so that they can judge what is and is not safe.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendment 6, which seeks clarification following the debate on changing an “auditor” to an “approved person” in assessing bus franchise schemes. It would ensure that within three months of the Bill becoming an Act, the Government will publish the qualifications required for an approved person under the Act and would also lay a regulation with that information in it prior to the commencement of the clause. This is because Clause 9 amends Section 123D of the Transport Act 2000 to remove “auditor”, a term synonymous with an appropriate level of qualification, registration and probity, with the more generic term “approved person”. An auditor, by contrast, must be a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.

The Minister said in response to my noble friend Lady Brinton’s question at Second Reading:

“The intention is not to deregulate approved persons but to widen the range of them. I completely agree with her that they should have some qualifications. An unqualified person should not be able to make a judgment about whether a franchising scheme is right”.—[Official Report, 8/1/25; col. 790.]


The powers and responsibilities of the approved person are significant. Clause 9(2)(1) states:

“A franchising authority, or two or more franchising authorities acting jointly, may not proceed with a proposed franchising scheme unless they have obtained a report from an independent approved person on the assessment of the proposed scheme (see section 123B)”.


I understand why the Government would like to broaden the scope of those able to provide assurance that an approved person will have, at the very least, a CIPFA qualification or its equivalent. However, one of the problems of loosening very specific language in previous legislation is that without sight of exactly what the new qualifications are some organisations will take advantage of the new scheme. From these Benches, we would want any new franchise proposal to have been assessed and reported on by a qualified person because this is about significant public money and assurance. On that point, I hope that the Minister can clarify today what qualifications the Government would expect for such a person in order to reassure these Benches.

My noble friend Lord Goddard clearly set out Amendments 2 and 12, which aim to ensure that we learn from the Manchester franchising experience and that best practice is shared more widely, making franchising more dynamic and responsive. Clarity is absolutely needed on whether there is a minimum period from which services or changes to services proposed by a franchising authority may be enacted. I hope the Minister can answer this point and provide much-needed clarity today.

Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, regarding the qualifications needed for officials working in franchising authorities who will be responsible for designing, negotiating and enforcing any franchising schemes, is welcome, given that it is important that staff have a clear understanding of health and safety issues. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, raised a number of points linked to employment rights, and I look forward to hearing a response to his specific concerns.

The amendments in this group from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are a mixed bag, with many seeming, quite frankly, to be trying to put more obstacles in the way of any local transport authority that wishes to introduce franchising. They feel like an ideological response rather than genuine concern about bus service provision across the country. The noble Lord suddenly does not seem to believe in localism. I am not sure that he would have had the same opinion in his previous life as a local councillor and a deputy mayor of London.

If all local transport authorities want to move towards franchising, so be it. This is about devolution and local authorities deciding what suits their local communities. It is highly unlikely that everywhere will move towards franchising, but they should have that option. To want potential intervention from the Secretary of State feels an unnecessary and bureaucratic top-down approach, whereas this is supposed to be a bottom-up approach to bus services. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the points raised.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff sent me a paragraph from an email from a member of staff in memory of Baroness Randerson, which I will read:

“Baroness Jenny Randerson was a dear friend since I started at the Millbank House Cafeteria in October 2011. I met her sister, husband and grandchildren from Brussels. She supported me when I had my hand surgery. She checked up on me by email. We joked and laughed and she was always positive. I did also send her emails to complain about the number 3 bus”.


So it is to buses we turn, with Baroness Randerson very much in our minds.

I must declare an interest: I love bus travel. The majority of my daily travel to your Lordships’ House is by bus and, as such, I welcome the Bill. I thank all those who sent me briefings: Tom Kearney, of LondonBusWatch; Kevin Mustafa, of the London Bus Drivers’ Bill of Rights campaign; and, as ever, the excellent House of Lords Library. I also thank the Minister and his team for the excellent collaborative briefing of yesterday, which was incredibly useful all round.

I always tell a visitor to London that the best place to see London is from the top of a bus. The 76 route is difficult to beat, particularly the view from the top deck when travelling over Waterloo Bridge at night. The Minister must take a lot of credit for the improvement in bus services in London. When I first came to London in the late 1980s, I used to wait a long time for a number 1 bus, then five would arrive at the same time. This is now unusual. We can look at bus times on dot matrix at bus stops or on our phone. London buses are iconic and work very well, but we need to take care before we send that model around the country.

As the Explanatory Notes say, and as the Minister repeated:

“The passenger should be at the heart of any process”—


but what about pedestrians and other road users? In the Bill, safety is about only crime on buses, and our thoughts are obviously with the family of the teenager killed on a bus in Woolwich yesterday. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, has alluded to already, according to TfL’s own figures, in London, an average of three people a day are hospitalised after a bus safety incident, at least one of which is a collision. About every five to six weeks, someone is killed in a bus safety incident—again, mostly from collisions. We know this because TfL is the only bus authority that publishes its safety figures. As we talked about in the briefing yesterday, the Bill mentions data usage but does not mention types of data. I urge the Government to put a necessity to publish quarterly bus safety performance data, as TfL has done since 2014, into the Bill. If we are to learn from accidents, we need to know where and how these incidents happened.

We also know how important drivers are to the services. The Bill mentions staff in relation to training, but not driver safety and well-being. What about drivers who are under increasing pressure to keep on time, handling radio and text messages while on the move, especially in the new 20mph zones? Should driver welfare not be enshrined in the Bill? As someone who knows better than anyone how to drive a bus, perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

I quote the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, in Oral Questions:

“Bus companies sharing their data has been an enormous problem—anyone in the north of England knows that that helped prevent us bringing in an Oyster-style ticketing service across the north. It is crucial that we get this right and that all companies are obliged to share the information”.—[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1824.]


It is not clear from the Bill what information is to be reported. I have already talked about safety, and, as we discussed in the briefing, the difficulties of introducing Oyster-style ticketing—or the Oyster-style ticketing of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—in other regions. I urge the Government to encourage this, as it has been revolutionary in terms of travel in London. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild England’s bus network based on the excellent London model. Let us just make sure that that model is as good as it can be.

Bus Funding

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The funding provided by what is effectively a £1 billion settlement will allow local transport authorities in all areas to spend this money in the best possible way. I am very sympathetic to rural areas, where services have disappeared in the past, and I have explained some of the reasons why recently that might be the case. There is capital funding in this settlement for zero-emission vehicles, as there should be. It is for one year, but the spending review in the spring will no doubt give direction for future years. The equitable distribution of this through this serviceable formula is much more likely to result in service patterns across both rural and urban areas, which will be sustainable into the future.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, on 5 November, London bus drivers marched on Westminster to complain about their working conditions, including that most routes now have toilet facilities only at one end, meaning that drivers have three hours between toilet breaks, that the headway driving system sometimes requires drivers to break the speed limit, and that conditions within cabs can become unbearably hot or cold. In all this talk about funding, could the Minister assure us that drivers will not be forgotten?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord might know that, for some years I was responsible for the London bus service. I am not any longer; the Mayor of London is. I would question some of the things the noble Lord has asserted, simply because I know through prior knowledge that we spent an awful lot of time and money providing far more toilet facilities for bus drivers in London than anybody had done before. I would question whether any responsible operator licensed by the traffic commissioners would commission schedules which expected buses to exceed the speed limit.

What I would say to the noble Lord is that it is very important that bus drivers are paid properly and looked after properly, and that their scheduled and actual hours comply with the law. To that end, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency will inspect those operations, whether in London or elsewhere. The traffic commissioners will take action against operators that do not comply with the legislation in respect of the operation of urban bus services.

Pedal Cycles

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe, for initiating this important debate. I am a cyclist in London, my children cycle to school and my wife cycles to work. We all agree on the benefits, and obviously more people should be encouraged to take up cycling.

Life has got better for us cyclists. Low-traffic zones; new cycle paths and superhighways; we can buy our bikes tax-free on the bike to work scheme. E-bike hire has given us another option for one-way trips. But there is a problem. There is anarchy in London—and other cities, I suspect—as my noble friend Lord Birt so graphically described. We have got to a stage where, on a cycle journey, it is more unusual to see someone stopping at a light than jumping it. Red lights have become optional. People go the wrong way, as we have heard, down one-way systems, regularly riding on the pavement. Untidily parked rental e-bikes and scooters are causing problems for those with visual impairments and mobility problems.

The author Douglas Adams described one of his characters as stepping off the pavement and being shouted at

“from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit”,

and this attitude seems to pervade all cyclists, whether on Lime or in Lycra. There seems to be an attitude that cyclists are above the law, and there seems to be no way of enforcing it, as my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe so powerfully showed.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, pointed out, Cycling UK says that if you introduce measures, cycling rates could drop by 36%. How do we balance the rule of law with encouraging people to use a bike?

Over the past 10 years in London, about two cyclists were killed or seriously injured in bus crashes every month. In London, in 2022, TfL buses accounted for less than 1% of road traffic, but 40% of cyclists’ deaths were caused by them. We still do not know enough about the causes. I join my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe in his plea for better data. Can the Minister comment on that? Cycle deaths in rural areas are also a real problem—I wonder whether this is more to do with the heady cocktail of V8 engines and an ageing population. The good news is that, in the UK, there was a 23% drop in cyclist fatalities between 2013 and 2023, but I wonder whether this trend will be reversed.

It is hard to argue for better education for motorists if cyclists are not going to behave better. What is the solution? As ever, it is education—but I would say that because I am a teacher. Bike helmets are a really good idea, and we need to campaign for them to be worn regularly. We need to persuade cyclists to ride defensively to minimise risk. We need more cycle lanes, more cycle zones at lights and more cycle traffic lights, which give cyclists a head start—sometimes it is safer to jump the lights than do a Formula 1 start at junctions. We need to separate motor traffic from cycles as much as possible, especially in rural areas, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and my noble friend Lord Burns said. Can the Minister update us on the progress of cycle lanes?

As we talked about this week at Questions, road surfaces need to be much better. My wife was cycling home recently and her front wheel went into a pothole. She went over the handlebars and did quite a lot of damage to her face—it was very lucky that there was not a car behind her. I thought that electronic chips on bikes might be a solution—it works for my cat. I had a conversation with a friend who was involved in the setting up of the congestion zone, and she convinced me that that was expensive and unworkable—although it works for cats.

As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, we need to use common sense and to encourage more people to cycle, but in a way that promotes safe and legal cycling, so that those of us who enjoy it so much can welcome a new breed with a clear conscience.

Bus Franchising

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his comments. I particularly note his support for the effects of the initial tranches of franchising in Manchester, which have indeed increased service and produced better reliability. He refers to the very old organisation of public transport in Manchester. Many of those magnificent vehicles are in the Manchester transport museum at Queens Road.

These days, the increasing number of combined authorities are of a good size to take advantage of this Government’s franchising proposition. It is, in effect, bringing together local authorities of sufficient size to be able to take advantage of the benefits of a network. I do not have an answer to whether this will allow individual local authorities to join together, but I am happy to write to the right reverend Prelate about that.

The right reverent Prelate raised the subject of the integration of rail services. We have already made a lot of progress with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, and with the Mayor of the West Midlands, in integrating rail services into the local transport network in information and in ticketing. Although this is not the subject of today’s discussion, I have no doubt that there will be some announcements on that. He is right to aspire to an integrated local network that is modally agnostic and includes rail and, in Manchester’s case, metro and buses.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, if we are going to use TfL and the London bus network as the example for going around the country, the dread problem of safety goes around again. Carrying on from the question I asked the Minister earlier this week, it often seems that in London—where, from memory, someone is killed by a bus every six weeks—the bus companies investigate their own incidents, with the DVSA checking for legalities. Who will be responsibility for safety in these franchises, and will they have teeth?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

One of the benefits of London’s large system of bus franchising is the work that Transport for London has done on the design and safety of bus travel. The noble Lord has to remember that those vehicles are on the road for 18, 20 or 24 hours a day, and they form a major part of the mileage of vehicles in London, even though their numbers are fairly small.

A significant amount of work has been done on the safety of driving and drivers, and on the design of vehicles. I know that has been shared with manufacturers and bus operators across the country, and with organisations such as Transport for Greater Manchester and the Urban Transport Group. I would expect more of that to happen.

The safety of buses is considered by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Authority, which is an executive arm of the Department for Transport and has the power to investigate serious bus accidents, which it does. It has the power to prosecute the drivers and operators of those vehicles. None of these proposals would alter its powers to continue to do so.

Local Bus Sector

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The programme to reduce emissions from the bus fleet has been carried out by successive Governments over many years. There is no doubt at all that government intervention has created both cleaner diesel buses, which now meet that Euro 6 standard, and an increasing fleet of electric buses, which are the modern equivalent of tram-cars. This Government hope to continue that, subject to funding, because it is clearly a very important contribution to air quality in urban and other areas.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, while we talk about support for buses, I think we ought also to talk about support for bus safety. I quote the BBC website from this morning:

“At present there is no independent investigator and no independent recommendations when it comes to bus collisions. The families want to know why there is one policy for trains and another for buses”.


Perhaps the Minister could comment on that.