Bus Services

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley. The Committee’s inquiry has been one of the more enlightening and intriguing it has embarked upon since I joined it after the election. It certainly brought home to me the fact that buses should be part of total services, and that many people depend on them. In a relatively deprived constituency such as mine, where many people cannot afford a motor car or are not well enough or active enough to drive one, buses are essential. Extracting a definition of a socially necessary journey from some of the commercial operators who appeared before us was frustrating. They squirmed but could not provide an answer. They won the award for worst witnesses of the year so far.

The inquiry enabled me to mull over the Government’s role in bus services. Is it appropriate to expect a Minister in Whitehall to pull a lever, and to raise the quality of services throughout the country? It is an unavoidable truth that local bus services are best controlled by local councils, or some locally accountable body. Ever since the Committee’s first inquiry on economic growth in transport, we have heard talk of new regional bodies that will allow transport decision making closer to the ground. However, we have yet to see anything beyond potential names emerging from the Department, and I would welcome more guidance from the Government on when there might be progress.

The Government’s other role is to set a good example. As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) said, we had some truly lamentable examples of consultation, and calling some of them consultation was a joke. It was a case of “We’re removing the service, and if the passengers don’t like it, hard luck because we’re doing it anyway.” That is not consultation; that is “get lost” or “get knotted”. Nevertheless, central Government have a role to play.

I was bored one Sunday afternoon, so I started looking at the Government’s official response to the report. I sat at my computer trying to open complicated Excel spreadsheets of statistical data. I am sure it is a marvellous resource if someone has a spare lifetime to get to grips with it. I was intrigued to note that a review is being conducted of what data are being collected. I hope that most of them do not disappear as part of some review. I was struck by a few statistics. I wondered why 77% of Scottish buses have ITSO card readers, but only 18% of buses in English non-metropolitan areas have them. I thought that that was an interesting difference.

I also noted that English non-metropolitan areas have now seen the third annual decline in a row in the number of overall passengers. For the first time, concessionary fare journeys dipped in English non-metropolitan areas over the past year. I know that statistics are not everything. I noted that in Blackpool, passenger journeys had dropped from 16 million five years ago to just 14.5 million in the past year. I know why: we have had major civil engineering works and it has been impossible to get anywhere in the town centre. Statistics can be a little misleading at times and do not always paint the whole picture, but they struck me as interesting examples of some of the trends in bus ridership.

I raise those statistics, but I do not want the Minister to think I oppose what he is doing. I think that what the Government are doing is fair and balanced and reflects where we are as an economy and as a nation within the global economy. There is a healthy dose of localism in what the Minister proposes. I also recognise the Minister’s own deep, personal commitment to buses and to public transport more generally, and I praise him for it. I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside on the importance of the Competition Commission’s report, which is continually forthcoming. If I believe what I read in my newspapers, I hope it will criticise what seems to be an utterly dysfunctional market in certain parts of the country.

The Minister will not be surprised to learn that I wish to devote the bulk of my remarks to community transport. Rather than re-rehearse my ten-minute rule Bill, which called for the extension of the concessionary fares scheme to community transport, I want to reflect on some of the Government’s responses in the ninth special report. Like the Minister, I share the desire to put community transport on a more sustainable footing, requiring less public subsidy and building on the social enterprise model. In the long-term, that has to be the way ahead.

I welcome the dedicated £10 million fund for community transport. I welcome, too, the efforts of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with the rural social enterprise fund. However, we must also acknowledge that community transport is not just a rural phenomenon —it matters greatly in urban areas, too. In some ways, for more vulnerable, marginal groups, it matters more in urban areas.

I certainly take the Minister’s point—I assume it is the Minister’s, because it sounded as though he had drafted it—in response to recommendation 13 and the creative imagination that local authorities must apply to circumstances in which they withdraw supported services. Where that is occurring, it makes immense sense for community transport to step in and fill a hole for a relatively small amount of money. I agree with the Minister that that is a sensible and useful way forward for community transport. None the less, I am concerned at the complexity of some of the legislation, which represents a barrier to many volunteers, who get terribly confused, as I continue to do, over section 19 and section 22 services—over who to pay and what to do. It is a technical and complex minefield. I recognise that the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency and traffic commissioners put a lot of effort into trying to guide providers through that minefield, but it is still deeply complex.

At the Community Transport Association’s conference this morning, I heard the Minister’s comments about why he was reluctant to extend concessionary fares to section 19 services. For those who were not there, I will paraphrase his point: it would cause a policy issue to allow those in what is essentially a private members’ organisation, club or society—whatever we want to call it—to have access to a wider concessionary fares scheme. I thought about that over lunch. It strikes me that that is coming at it from the wrong way. Many of those people have to join a dial-a-ride scheme because they cannot access mainstream public transport in the first place. This is perhaps part of a dialogue rather than a direct challenge, but I wonder whether the problem lies more with the Transport Act 1985 and the higher threshold it sets for accessing section 19 services, rather than the reason given not to extend concessionary fare schemes to section 19 services.

I am intrigued—I think that is the correct word—by the Government’s response to the wider issue of concessionary fares. The Department rightly points out that community transport will usually offer a

“more flexible, personal service”,

which could become

“the mode of choice for concessionary pass holders.”

I would not deny that a sudden, rapid overnight expansion of community transport would undoubtedly cause problems for commercially provided and supported services, but I struggle to understand why the provision of a high quality, excellent service that responds to people’s needs should be seen as a problem. I have never been one to believe in levelling down to the lowest common denominator. That is one reason I find myself on the Conservative Benches. I would like other mainstream providers to be encouraged to raise their game rather than be told, “Don’t worry, we are not going to make it too uncomfortable for you. We are going to make sure the community transport lot stay in their box and do not put you to shame.” That would not be terribly helpful.

I understand the Minister’s point about the possible dangers to supported rural bus services, but we must realise, as the report did, that although more people may have concessionary fare cards, they actually have fewer buses on which to use them. That is my underlying concern.

I am thoroughly pleased that the Government have lived up to the pre-election pledges of both parties to protect the concessionary fares scheme. That is entirely right and proper, but we now have to ensure that vulnerable citizens in my and other Members’ constituencies have the services that they need to ensure that they can get to where they need to go. I am not convinced that the mindset of local councils or local commercial providers is such that they understand that vulnerable people need to get to GP surgeries, hospitals and libraries, and that that is where the bus network should go. At the moment, it is a patchwork quilt of constantly changing routes and services that confuses passengers, providers and even Members of Parliament. I ask the Minister to do one thing: hurry up with his consultation toolkit and make sure that passengers are meaningfully involved when local authorities consult on service changes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Maynard]

Will the Minister confirm that it is interesting to note that the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers was fully behind the scheme in the Isle of Wight?

[Norman Baker]

It is important to note that. That is a very relevant point and it leads me on, perhaps, to the points made by the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright). I am sorry that, unlike the Chairman of the Committee, who presented matters fairly and equitably, albeit in a challenging way, he sought to present matters as something of a party political rant. He was keen to say that this was the Government’s fault, but the Government have not cut bus services in Hartlepool—his local council has. Councils up and down the country have not been cutting bus services, and if all the services in Hartlepool have disappeared he needs to take the matter up with his local operator and council.

The picture varies enormously across the country. I am not pretending that it is easy for local councils; it is perfectly true that there are challenges as a consequence of the local government settlement. Cuts have been made across the country in local bus services, particularly in supported ones. The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) said, I think, that the Campaign for Better Transport had found that three quarters of local authorities were cutting back on buses. That is unwelcome, but the fact remains that a quarter are not cutting back at all. Perhaps we should look at them for lessons on how they have managed to maintain their bus services rather than cutting everything in sight, which appears to have happened in Hartlepool.