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Mr. Atkinson: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Our constituencies are in the same county and we encounter the same problems. Members with rural Welsh constituencies also encounter those problems. The Bill will mean a hugely expensive burden for people on very low incomes.

The hon. Member for South Dorset talked about imaginative solutions. I have racked my brains to think what Northumberland county council could do differently. It is Labour-controlled, so I hold no particular brief for it. It also proposes to move from a three-tier education system to a two-tier one. Northumberland is a large rural area and the same sort of buses will have to transport the same children down the same roads. If the council charges for school transport, it will encourage more people to drive their children to school rather than put them on the bus. One of the features of rural life is that car ownership is high. Low-income families who would not in other circumstances have a car, or would have only one car, need one or two cars—the second is often old and expensive to run and maintain—because it is the only way that they can get about. If a charge is applied, the number of children on the buses will fall and costs will
 
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go up.The Transport Committee worked out that a charge of more than £1 a day would cause school bus use to fall. That would be a problem for Northumberland county council, which would face increased costs and the law of diminishing returns.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) suggested that the Treasury would seize on the Bill as a way to reduce the money spent on education. The Secretary of State pooh-poohed that suggestion, but we know that that is what the Treasury will do. If LEAs have the ability to impose a charge, the Treasury will expect them to do so. If they do not impose a charge, that will ultimately be reflected in the grant they receive. That is as certain as day following night.

Northumberland was a pilot area for the introduction of the education maintenance allowance of some £30 a week. That was very successful to start with, except that the county council then said to anybody over 16 that they now had to pay for their school transport. Another feature of charging that affects lower income families is the discounts for the length of ticket purchased. An annual ticket is cheaper than a monthly, weekly or daily ticket. Therefore, the families with the least money, who cannot afford an annual ticket, have to pay more than those with the most.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) pointed out, the bulk of school transport cost benefits those with special educational needs. As the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) will know, counties such as Cumbria spend, on average, £6,000 per pupil with SEN a year. Northumberland spends just over £5,000. That is a huge amount but the Bill will do nothing to change that. The Bill will place a heavy charge on rural families who can least afford it. It will ultimately reduce such choice as rural families have in education terms. It is ill thought out and offers none of the imaginative solutions that the hon. Member for South Dorset kept mentioning. Therefore, we are right to oppose it.

4.23 pm

Mr. Alan Hurst (Braintree) (Lab): It is always a pleasure to speak on Bills of this kind. I listened with some trepidation as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State used the word "deregulation". If there is one word that I do not like to hear in connection with buses of any kind, it is deregulation. To those of us who purport to represent rural areas—my rural areas, although they include some 42 villages, are nothing compared with some of those we have heard about today—the deregulation of buses was not the greatest thing to happen. In north and central Essex, it meant, first, that the supply of bus services diminished and, secondly, the cost to the taxpayer increased immeasurably. The word "deregulation" is not greatly encouraging and if I may offer my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State some humble advice, perhaps a better word might be used in future.

The Bill is certainly not the nightmare that has been depicted by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Any scheme that is proposed will have to be approved by the Secretary of State and if it were as black and scary as those portrayed by some Opposition Members, I am certain that my right hon. Friend, or any successor, would not approve it.
 
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The Education Act 1944 was a great opportunity for working people, especially those living in rural areas. I am not of such an age that I know what happened before 1944 and how children of secondary age actually got to school. There must have been some transport provision, and I would guess that it was made at the discretion of county councils operating in the best interests of those who lived in their area.

Although 1944 was only a year before I was born, it seems a different age. At that time it was much easier to walk along a country lane. I say nothing of rapscallions or ruffians; I am talking about the flow of vehicles on the roads.

Mr. Beith: There were two other important differences before 1944. The first is that, certainly in my constituency, there was a school in every hamlet and every small village, in walking distance for most people. Secondly, most children left school at the age of 13 or 14.

Mr. Hurst: Indeed. Towards the end of the period, the school leaving age had reached 14 and secondary schools had been established.

If our forebears thought it sufficiently important to provide free school transport in 1944, how much more so now, when the dangers on the roads are so much greater and many roads and lanes are so inaccessible? I am sure that my right hon. Friend introduced the Bill because there has been a chipping away at the spirit of the 1944 Act over the past 10 to 20 years. Essex county council, which was referred to earlier—unfairly favourably, I think—has been chipping away at the Act's provisions in implementation.

In practice, not many years ago, even children in the county aged over 16 who met the distance qualification would have received assistance for transport to school. It was not until last year, when I was fortunate enough to secure an Adjournment debate on the subject, that those who attended denominational schools in the county received free school transport, yet the present administration has chipped away at that and begun a charging regime. It was not long ago that children up to the age of 11 gained the same advantages under the legislation as those aged eight. Over time, that provision has been chipped away.

It is said that the provision of transport is expensive. The figure for the whole country is about £600 million a year, but, as has rightly been pointed out, two thirds of that is spent on transport for children who attend special schools and for those who have special educational needs. Members on both sides of the House have said that there will be no interference with that provision and that it will remain sacrosanct, so the amount of the budget spent on those who do not attend special schools or who do not have a statement is about £200 million a year. When I read that last year, or the year before, the Government spent £13 billion on computers, £200 million seems a small amount for something as important as home-to-school transport.

Another problem is that county council officers, some of whom in an earlier age would have been explorers in darkest Africa, love studying maps to show how children in village A no longer qualify as there is a shorter route, or because it had been wrongly measured on an earlier occasion. In my area, there was a
 
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campaign, led partly by me and partly by the late and much-missed Liberal councillor for the village of Rayne, Tony Meadows. In 1971, a new high school was built and to persuade the villagers of Rayne to send their children to it, the council said it would provide transport. School transport was provided between 1971 and the mid-1990s, then someone in the county council measured the route and found that it came to 2.8 miles. As a result the transport was withdrawn. However many times Tony Meadows and I walked those lanes, we were not able to make the distance greater than 2.8 miles: indeed, a new piece of road reduced the distance to 2.7 miles, which made our case even weaker. However, the route was not safe to walk. No sensible person would walk along it on a darkening December evening. The county council said that it was all right as long as children were accompanied, but drivers of oncoming vehicles would not see pedestrians in the road if they were dazzled by the headlights of traffic coming the other way in the gathering gloom. The lanes are becoming more dangerous every year.

The great people at county hall have a wonderful enthusiasm for geography, and the same must be true in other county councils. Sometimes they discover that it is possible to find routes that are shorter than those used hitherto. The most astounding example that I came across when I served on the county council concerned the route between the village of Silver End and the town of Witham. Generations of children had enjoyed free school transport along those roads, but someone at county hall discovered from a map that some old tracks and lanes led across fields. Measurement showed that those tracks' total distance was less than the road route—


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