Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether independent assessment processes exist to monitor the changing costs for local authorities' expenditure on taxi provision to schools.

Education is a devolved matter, and the response outlines the information for England only.

Local authorities are responsible for arranging home-to-school travel for eligible children and use a mix of in-house services, passes for free travel on public transport and contracts with private transport operators. Such contracts are a matter for the council and the operator. We encourage councils to have robust arrangements in place. We would expect single-occupancy taxis to be used only when no other solution is appropriate. We are supporting councils through a new home-to-school travel data collection to support benchmarking and publishing guidance to support joined-up decision-making.

We have committed to reform the special educational needs and disabilities system to enable more children to thrive in local mainstream settings. This will mean fewer children will need to travel long distances to access education, reducing the burden on local authorities. These reforms are set out in the Schools White Paper, published on 23 February.