Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I reiterate the regret, expressed by the Front-Bench speakers from all parties, that Lady Randerson is not with us. We shall all miss her. Another person I shall miss is my noble friend Lord Prescott, whose funeral comes in a few weeks’ time. I served as a Transport Minister with him, and he would have some firm views on this Bill, I am sure.

As the Minister has indicated, buses remain, despite everything, the public transport form used most in this country, but the difference between the bus service in London, where I spend half the week, and the rest of the country, including the rural area in which I live, is stark. We need to extend some of the aspects of Transport for London, which the Minister is familiar with. I had occasional complaints about London’s transport during his time there, but in general it is much better than the situation in the rural areas of the south-west and many other areas of England and Wales.

That is wrong and this Bill begins to change it. The fact is that successive regimes have not taken the opportunity to improve the situation significantly. I acknowledge that the 2017 Act, to which reference has been made, made some improvements in franchising; on the other hand, it effectively closed down the scope for direct ownership of municipal bus companies, which this Bill, thankfully, revises.

I emphasise my support for the Bill and my respect for the Ministers—the previous Secretary of State and the current one—who have got the Bill into the legislative programme at a very early stage. That means we can work it through, address the secondary legislation that will be required and get a good bus service operating in most areas of the country within the lifetime of this Parliament.

I agree with the framework, although it will need some tinkering with, the relationship between franchising and local authority ownership, and the role of the Department for Transport. The framework is right—though like the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and others, I would have preferred to see more substantial support, and definitely multi-annual long-term funding and some rationalisation of the form in which funds come from both local and national government—and, in general, the Bill is moving in the right direction. However, I wish to raise three issues which are not significant in the Bill, and might well require yet another Bill—the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, has already used my joke in that respect—but which need to be part of the reformation of the bus system in the country outside London. Broadly, they involve the passenger relationship, in particular the ticketing system, the workforce and environmental provisions. I will take those quickly, one by one.

Concerning the passenger system, the majority of passengers outside London—certainly in rural areas and in many of our smaller cities—travel for free because they are old-age pensioners or students. People are not attracted to getting on the bus, so they use their cars in areas which would, objectively, be much better served by them taking the bus to the shops or to work. Among the reasons for this are the unreliability and frequency of the bus, and the interchangeability of the bus on routes that they have to take.

I referred to my time as a Transport Minister. I had one achievement that I have been very proud of: I was the very first person to use an Oyster card. I think it was in 1999, at St James’s Park station. We introduced that and extended it from the Tube to the buses and suburban trains. We need a similar system in other parts of the country, so that you would buy one ticket that you can use for a month or a year, and buy it at whatever regularity you feel fits your purposes, and then move from one bus to another without any difficulty. The cost is relatively small. Many of us will have realised that, once we have an Oyster card, we use it and use the car less, and probably walk less as well. We need something similar for areas outside London, particularly outside our cities.

A couple of years later, I introduced another system: the over-65 pass—or the old gits’ pass, as I used to call it, though I do not use that phrase so frequently these days. We introduced in a transport Bill in 1999 that these passes would be valid throughout the country. Although I occasionally face consternation from bus drivers when showing them my Dorset pass, it allows me to travel anywhere in the country for free. We need the same for those who do not qualify as students or old-age pensioners. They would have to pay for it, but the convenience that results would be a big attraction. We could regain the millions of bus passengers who have been lost over the last 40 years since deregulation and the growth in the use of cars.

We also have to ensure that we have an adequate workforce. The workforce has declined by 25%, in line with the usage of buses. The key factor here is that most of the drivers are relatively old and will retire relatively soon, while new drivers coming into the trade are relatively few. We need a system that attracts younger and newer drivers, as well as getting other drivers back into the bus trade. That is essential if we are to expand the whole range of services, which I hope the Bill will lead to. As far as this Bill is concerned, the only reference to training relates, rightly, to the safeguarding and protection of passengers. That is important, and I am glad to see it in the Bill, but we need a provision to ensure that there is adequate training across the country for drivers, mechanics and other staff, so that we have an adequate workforce for this service.

The third area, the environment, is mentioned in the Bill but not sufficiently. It is interpreted explicitly and specifically in relation to having zero-emission buses. That is an important aspect of the environment—it is right that it should be in the Bill and I agree with the timescale—but it is only one aspect. It will be important to see on our streets, as we are beginning to see in London, zero or near-zero-emissions buses, but that is only part of it.

Another serious issue is that buses contribute to congestion and pollution, particularly on our urban streets. That requires a rather better system of traffic management, which preserves and extends bus lanes, rather than what is happening in many of our cities at the moment. That is partly because of the extension of cycle lanes—I see my noble friend Lord Berkeley sitting here—but these should be introduced at the expense of motoring lanes, not bus lanes. The result, in London and elsewhere, is buses being delayed in traffic in what were previously free-flowing bus lanes. We need to make sure that traffic management in the towns and cities in which our buses have been constricted gives priority again to the introduction and sustaining of bus lanes.

Those are some of the things which I hope the Minister will assure me can be introduced within the framework of the Bill by secondary legislation, rather than in an additional Bill. They are essential to attracting people back to using buses, and to ensuring that buses are not idling in their lanes because of traffic jams, polluting the atmosphere, as well as holding up the rest of the traffic. We need to make buses much more attractive in this respect, so that they are quick, reliable, clean and healthy. If we can do that, and get at least a significant proportion of people back into using buses, then this Bill represents a very good start. I congratulate Ministers on it and will support it.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Grand Committee

[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.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a couple of brief points. I apologise to the Committee that I am Boxing and Coxing with another meeting this afternoon and that I did not table my amendment for today’s Committee. Formally, I support Amendment 17 tabled by my noble friend Lord Woodley, but I will put it in a broader context.

The amendment deals with the relationship between franchising companies and franchising authorities and the trade unions, which is vital, but, as I said at Second Reading, we need a provision for planning the workforce of bus services across Britain in the same way that we do in other industries. I say to the Minister and his colleagues that the Government are attempting major reorganisations of several industries—energy, railways, buses—yet in the proposed legislation, there is no clear commitment to forward workforce planning. I would have tabled an amendment to that effect, and I hope that the Government will come forward with that in any of the Bills that I refer to, but particularly this one.

The workforce in buses has declined by 25% over recent years. With all due respect, it is a very skilled but elderly workforce. Not many new people are coming into it. We need a new forward system as part of this Bill and the processes it starts to ensure that there is an adequate workforce-planning dimension. Part of that involves the arrangements with the trade unions, which my noble friend Lord Woodley points out in Amendment 17, but it is broader than that and has to be national as well as local. I hope that before the Bill reaches its final stages it will have a clear strategic commitment to workforce planning for bus services.