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Mr. Kidney: As the crow flies.
Mr. Hurst: My hon. Friend says as the crow flies, but it is more like as the weasel runs. The road route was clearly more than 3 miles, so the field route became the designated route.
People have to have a clear track to follow, so those of us who thought that the route was not suitable for children, whether or not they were accompanied, decided to walk along it.The route began in a dark and overgrown avenue of trees that gave out on to open land. Heavy ploughing meant that inches of mud accumulated on children's boots by the time they reached school, and the route also crossed various ditches and a stream.
On that walk, we had the great advantage of being accompanied by a lady who is now a leading spokesperson on education in the county of Essex. I know that at least one other hon. Member in the Chamber today knows the lady to whom I am referring, and we were able to show her how unsatisfactory the route was. Until then, she and her colleagues had maintained that it was perfectly suitable. However, we came to a great gaping ditch about halfway along, and that caused this lady county councillor to say that she had made up her mind and that the route was not suitable.
County hall officers are always looking for ways to exclude routes that hitherto had been considered suitable for free school transport. That is the problem,
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and I think that county councillors need to be more astute when it comes to using their judgment about what is suitable for this purpose.
In some ways, this Bill is a lost opportunity. It is not terrible, and it does open up other options, but local authorities that do not wish to take advantage of what it offers can stay with the present statutory scheme. While that scheme persists, free school transport will still be available, although authorities that wish to explore other possibilities can make application to that end to the Secretary of State.
What we need to do is clear enough. We should retain the present statutory scheme and the option of providing free school transport over the sort of distances that have become hallowed by time should remain enshrined in law. Given the great big budgets required to run western Governments these days, it does not seem unreasonable to devote as much as an extra £100 million to this purpose. That would mean that the amount of money spent on non-special schools and non-special needs children would be increased by 50 per cent. That would make a colossal difference to the numbers of children who can use free school transport. It would help the problem of road congestion enormously and greatly reduce air pollution—and all for £100 million. I know that it is not my money, although I am a taxpayer so part of it is mine. What is a relatively small sum in the overall scheme of things would make an enormous difference to the transport and education structure of our country.
4.34 pm
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD): I feel that I should contribute to the debate because the Secretary of State did not understand the problem as it confronts people in rural areas such as Northumberland. He regarded those who were anxious about it as "dishonest", a word that is scarcely in order. He does not grasp the problem.
The Secretary of State and Ministers will explain that the Bill introduces pilot schemes, but lying behind it is the worry, rightly expressed by the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson), that before long it becomes an assumption that local authorities should be carrying out a pilot scheme and, if they are not, their funding in the local government grant system should be affected accordingly. That decision will not in practice be taken by the Ministers on the Front Bench, but by Ministers in the Treasury or Ministers who succeed them. At some point, the pressure is likely to mount.
For the Bill to be acceptable to people living in areas such as Northumberland, there has to be a powerful statutory guarantee that under no circumstances can the statutory right to free school transport for children living a long way from school be removed. We do not have that guarantee. Instead, the Secretary of State believes that he is offering people in Northumberland something wonderfully new—flexibility—that will enable school transport in Northumberland to be organised differently.
I understand the motive behind that. In some urban areas, it may be possible to balance the interests of those who live a mile and a half from school with those who
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live 3 miles from school, and to get a system of local school transport that, at a relatively small charge, might be attractive enough to get some people who use cars to take their children to school to use the school bus instead. But that is a world away from the situation in somewhere such as Northumberland, where a large proportion of children are entitled to free school transport. That is very expensive for the county council because the distances involved are long and in some cases the journeys are complex. I explained in an intervention that it sometimes involves a combination of buses and taxis in addition to the help given by the parents to get the child to the public road, which may be 2 or 3 miles away from where they live. The school transport process is expensive.
It is impossible to imagine how the supposed flexibility could enable Northumberland to do something that it has not been able to do so far, which is to find a way of transporting children to school from remote locations at minimal cost. Frankly, there is no way of doing that. The numbers involved in each journey tend to be relatively small and the cost of providing for them is large. Nothing that the Bill enables the county council to do will remove the difficulty of that task or make it cheaper to carry out.
The only thing that the Bill could do is encourage Northumberland to set up a scheme in which this expensive process also has to have added to it the provision of free school transport for children in urban areas who live close to school. The total cost would be met out of a combination of a charge and the existing expenditure. If that is attempted, there is no way in which it could be done over a county such as Northumberland at a charge that would encourage anyone to take their children to school by public transport if they had any choice in the matter. The costs simply do not add up. They are too large in a rural area.
It has been pointed out that the local authority in Northumberland is planning changes that will increase the number of journeys that are eligible for free school transport because it will increase the number of children between nine and 11 who, instead of walking to the middle school, will have to be transported to a high school 10 or 15 miles away. There are arguments on both sides, which the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Twigg) knows about because I have exchanged many letters with him on the subject, but one of the disadvantages of the change is that it increases the school transport bill by more than any gain made at the first school. So another group of parents and another two years of the age range become the subject of free school transport and, under the proposed system, they become the subject of charging if Northumberland introduces such a scheme.
People in Northumberland view the scheme not in the abstract, but on the basis of experience because over the past few years charges have been introduced for the education of young people between 16 and 19. We are seeing some pernicious consequences, including some young people who are reluctant to continue with courses because they are imposing on their parents the burden of the transport costs of getting to school or further education college, both of which are often a long way from home. Many of those families have not only 16 to
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19-year-olds but younger children, and when one of these schemes comes into force, they will face a transport charge for each child.
People are not impressed to be told, as Ministers have said in letters to me, "Oh, it's all right because someone in the 16 to 19 age group can meet the cost from the education maintenance allowance." Of course, they are not all entitled to that, and those who are say, "How is that fair? The allowance is supposed to enable young people to go on courses, to buy books and to meet ancillary costs. All the others can use it for that, but I have to use it to get to school." There is a sense of injustice and unfairness surrounding the allowance because it is now a school transport allowance for some, but for others it is money available for other, helpful educational purposes. It is no answer to the problem.
People in Northumberland see the danger that the county may be under increasing pressure to take part in a scheme, and if it does children who now get free transport for the long distances to school will not get it in future, so the same people who suffer all the other disadvantages of life in rural areas, such as the difficulty of taking part in after-school activities, will face extra costs. The supposed flexibility to which the Secretary of State refers offers no means whatever of reducing the cost of transporting children in rural areas the long distances to school. At no point in his speech or in any other that I have heard has an answer been produced that would enable Northumberland to provide the school transport that people need at less cost than at present.
Every September, I find myself involved in many correspondences and disputes between parents and the local education authority about the proposed school transport arrangements for their children. Usually, the dispute takes the form that what the LEA is suggesting involves an hour and a quarter journey to school and an hour and a quarter back, because of several changes of taxi and bus. I approach the county council, which says that it has to try to restrict the cost of the scheme, and if the child shares a taxi or spends part of the journey on a bus, that reduces the cost. The result is an unacceptably long journey, beyond the statutory times.
Year after year, the county tries to restrain the cost of school transport, but in practice there is no cheap way of providing it. Schemes of the kind envisaged in the Bill cannot work in a rural county such as Northumberland, and if there is increasing pressure to introduce such schemes, rural families will suffer greatly instead of receiving their current entitlement to have their children transported to school without charge.
4.43 pm
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