Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004
MR TIM
DAVIES, MS
SHEENA PICKERSGILL,
MR GEOFF
GARDNER, MR
JOHN SYKES,
MR ALLAN
EDMONDSON AND
MR STEVEN
SALMON
Q120 Chairman: You have got the school
travel plan initiative. It is all legislation free. You can get
on with it and have got on with it. Not one of you yet has said
you could not do any of this without this important new Bill that
is going to make your lives so much easier.
Mr Sykes: Surely the Bill is about
unpacking the procedures around the three mile entitlement, as
far as I can see that is the Bill, that is what it allows authorities
to look at. It allows the flexibility to move into those areas,
fundamentally that is what the Bill is unpacking. My concern about
the Bill is that it does not have those additional holistic overviews
of other things which are happening that should be built into
pilots. We have done a lot of research with University College
London around linking our messages around health, independence
and safety. Those three areas are key areas for most parents and
most parents will react to those key areas at some stage in their
child's development. What this Bill does not seem to pull out
is that is an important issue to address for whatever pilots come
out of this programme—and I do also have the same concerns
about funding, I think if you do not fund the front end of the
pilots then the pilots are going to be quite difficult. Perhaps
the Bill needs to be slightly more prescriptive in terms of the
wider elements that are expected within this, otherwise what you
are going to get is a series of pilots that start to unpack school
travel around secondary children on buses and that will be it.
If that is what the Bill wants to get to, fine, but for me it
needs to be much broader than this.
Q121 Helen Jones: I want to follow
up what John and Geoff have said because I would like your opinion
on what more can be done in the Bill to encourage those other
elements of transport that you are talking about. Most of us on
this Committee can remember the days when most children walked
to school or cycled to school. What does the Bill need to encourage
that? Does it need more funding for providing things like bike
sheds? Does it need more funding for providing safer walking routes
to school? John, you are an engineer and Geoff, you are looking
at the wider aspects of transport, can you tell me what is needed
in the Bill to bring in those other elements?
Mr Gardner: We have been thinking
recently in terms of an holistic model for reducing travel and
I think that is important because a lot of what has been happening
up to now has been solutions driven. We have thought of Walk to
School Week, so let us do that and then we have thought about
school travel plans and then we have thought about yellow buses.
There is a lack of knowing exactly how all these fit together.
The model we have been using in the meantime I think would be
an ideal opportunity for some real research, using proper experts
in behavioural studies to get a grip on what is going on in this
whole area. We are thinking in terms of three Ns, the Need to
travel, the Networks for the non-car users and then the Niceties
and up until now the niceties involve school travel work in the
classroom. What I would like to see is the need to travel monitored.
I know we cannot put the parental choice genie back into the bottle,
but I think we should be looking out for the worst market distortions,
the cases where we have got village schools that are full to the
local villagers because people are travelling from another town
because it is such a good school and those cases need to be monitored.
With the networks we need to be very careful we are not building
schools behind fences because a lot of our housing estates are
now what they call "secured by design", which means
they are full of cul-de-sacs with fences at the end, you can see
the school over your fence but to get to it entails a half-a-mile
detour. I think there is scope for more studies at this stage
because it is early days. Safe Routes to School was not even mentioned
until about 2000, so it has been a very steep learning curve.
I think a lot more could be done in terms of advising us as to
how all these things fit together and then what we might do about
them.
Mr Davies: I believe school travel
plans should be made compulsory and should be included in this
Bill because I think there is a danger that schools will not be
committed to them otherwise and then there must be a commitment
enforced on schools to maintain the plan for the long term because
there is a real danger that the initial enthusiasm wanes and they
drift away.
Mr Sykes: I think the positive
thing about the Bill is it clearly says that DfT and DfES are
working together and I have been working in this field for about
ten years now and that is a real bonus.
Q122 Chairman: They genuinely are,
are they?
Mr Sykes: Yes, and I believe that.
What this Bill needs to look at are the other activities like
school travel planning, where the finance of that sits currently,
the fact that there are bursaries that exist until 2006 and what
happens beyond that. The Bill needs to be making those links with
work that is going on to make this overview which is part and
parcel of the whole thing. The key to that is flexibility about
local transport plan funding. There is a grey area for me around
local transport plan funding in terms of whether it is delivered
for capital works on the ground and yet one or two authorities
manipulate it in quite different ways to make it available for
what are called softer measures, the promotion, the marketing,
whatever. This is not particularly clear in the guidance that
is coming out. Looking at how you link local transport plan funding
into this programme and how that can be sourced and used is very
important.
Q123 Chairman: Tim, you gave a figure
of £2 billion for school transport costs, whereas other evidence
we have got is that it is actually two-thirds of a billion.
Mr Davies: Yes, Chairman, you
are correct. It is the material issued by Government as the preamble
to the bill which quotes a figure of £2 billion as the amount
of public sector funding going into passenger transport in total.
The figures for mainstream school transport, which we are probably
utilising now for the majority of transport for children, is in
fact about £200 million. There is another £400 million
approximately, going towards the transport of special needs children
and that makes up the £600 million which is usually quoted
for public sector expenditure on school transport.
Q124 Chairman: In paragraph 19 of
your evidence you say, "The aim of obtaining best value from
the £2 billion spent on school transport annually can best
be achieved by the setting of flexible and meaningful local targets
that reflect each LEA's circumstances."
Mr Davies: By referring to the
£2 billion it is bringing in the total position which has
been mentioned about linking with health, social services and
local bus services.
Q125 Chairman: But it is not school
transport?
Mr Davies: No. The £2 billion
is the wider figure.
Q126 Chairman: The one that is banded
around is that the annual cost is around £600 million.
Mr Davies: That is right. Paragraph
19 in our written evidence clearly requires additional wording
for clarification.[2]
Q127 Mr Pollard: Could I congratulate
John Sykes on the groundbreaking work he has done in my authority
over many years. In Hertfordshire we do Virtual Bus which we piloted
many years ago and we were called the loony Left-wing council
for even pursuing that topic, car sharing, cycling, safe routes
to school, a whole range of things. One thing that is not in the
Bill that I would like to ask you about is school-to-school transport.
We have a lot of sixth formers flitting all over the place from
one school to another and it seems to me that we could do something
like Beaumont, Sandringham and Verulam in my constituency, which
is a Microsoft link-up, where you can have a teacher in one school
and be taught in another school by these link-ups. Should that
sort of thing be included in the Bill as well?
Mr Sykes: It is a useful concept
and it is something that we would pick up as part of our school
travel plan work. This is another aspect of the Bill that is a
bit concerning in terms of the whole issue around changing school
finishing and starting times and what knock-on effects that may
or may not have. In an area where you have probably got one operator
and a tight knit area then the flexibility is quite high. In an
area where you have got several operators and schools all with
different starting and finishing times, it sounds great on paper
but in practice it is quite difficult. Using your example, the
only way you could do that is to link those schools together as
a school travel plan exercise and work them together as a cluster
and then try and make those changes across common ground. It is
important to make those decisions. I think the Bill ought to start
giving some framework and some ideas around how that could be
tested. I am not quite sure the Bill gives enough of that sort
of flavour.
Q128 Mr Gibb: May I pick up on John
Sykes' point about having staggered starting and finishing times.
Does that not conflict with other objectives of the Government,
which is that schools are going to start to have to share their
specialised teaching and there may well be a need to move a child
from one school to take specialist lessons in another school and,
therefore, they need to have co-ordinated lesson times, which
will contradict a staggered finishing and starting time?
Mr Sykes: Yes, there are issues
around staggered starting and finishing times.
Q129 Mr Gibb: What is the answer
to that?
Mr Sykes: The answer to us is
working on school travel plans with clusters of schools with a
common ground, so the schools that do share the facilities or
pupils then move between certain schools. You work that as a cluster
of schools and you identify it in those terms and then you try
and work the operators around that. It is really challenging stuff.
Q130 Mr Gibb: Is it not the nearest
schools to one another that are going to be the ones where you
will require staggered finishing times? They are the schools that
will need concentric timetabling.
Mr Sykes: I do not disagree with
what you are saying. We have been looking at pilots to see what
they come up with. In our own authority we are searching for ways
around this issue of how do you mix staggered times with the school
curriculum, with the school demand, with the operator demand.
The only way we have managed to do that is by working in common
clusters as far as we can.
Mr Gardner: One of the biggest
changes in the whole transport sector needs to be borne in mind
here because it could be enormous and in a way I am hoping it
will be enormous, it is moving away from the idea of transport
to access. In LTP2, which starts in 2006, we are supposed to be
looking at accessibility planning and that will mean we are looking
at access to learning, not necessarily school transport. We are
thinking of running a psychology tutor up the Dales in a car rather
than bussing the kids down who want to do that particular A-level.
Q131 Mr Gibb: So a tutor will only
teach a small class of 3 or 4 instead of a class of 15 or 20?
Mr Gardner: Yes. That is the intention,
to work out what is the optimum situation and if children are
having difficulty accessing the type of learning that we want
them to have then we will have to look at different ways of giving
them that access, not necessarily of transporting them to that
point. On the business about transporting within schools, one
of the key things I would like to see arising in terms of a legislation
change is a move towards a health impact analysis because at the
moment a lot of our teachers are running scared of risk assessments,
they are paranoid about risk assessment. I go into schools and
say, "Why don't we encourage children to walk?", and
they say, "We would rather not because it sounds a bit risky."
What I would like to see is a health impact assessment for encouraging
walking.
Q132 Mr Gibb: So there is a risk
in not walking?
Mr Gardner: Indeed.
Q133 Mr Gibb: Let us talk about some
of the initiatives that you have been carrying out in the last
few years and how you have measured the impact of those schemes,
whether they have worked. Have they simply displaced congestion
from one bit of North Yorkshire to another? Have they worked to
reduce congestion?
Mr Gardner: One of the schemes
we are working on at the moment is called The Five Minute Walking
Zone. This came about because we had an advertising campaign,
we used marketing specialists and all the rest and one of the
things they said was you do not so much want to be promoting the
benefits as downplaying the drawbacks. We are funding two psychology
PhD students at Sheffield and Leeds Universities and they talk
about "perceived behavioural control", basically you
have got to make people think it is going to be easier than it
is. We came up with the idea of saying that if we mark out to
people that the school is only five minutes away then that works
in two ways. If you are inside the zone you are under extreme
pressure not to tell your children, "Oh, we haven't got time
to walk, it will take 20 minutes," because they are going
to turn round to you and say, "Well, we did this in a lesson
the other day and we measured it ourselves and it is only five
minutes". If you live outside the zone then there is no reason
on earth why you cannot park on the edge of the zone and walk
the last five minutes. We are doing that in two ways. We are mass
marketing it out to every school in the county with instructions
on how they can do it themselves, and we also work in depth with
schools using our specialist teachers. We did not use our school
bursary money to appoint a transport planner, which I think a
lot of authorities did, we got part-time teachers. We have been
completely inundated. We advertised two posts last week and we
had 32 applicants.
Q134 Chairman: To do what?
Mr Gardner: To do school travel
work. These are part-time teachers who are going to work in the
Highways Department on school travel initiatives. They go out
to the schools to do a five minute walking zone and they make
it part of the lessons. They do numeracy activities based on the
number of steps, the kids are given stepometers and then they
do debates about the pros and cons and all this sort of stuff.
Q135 Mr Gibb: Have any of these schemes
been in place for a while so you can measure the success of them
or not?
Mr Gardner: Measuring is a funny
business. I used to work for the Transport Research Laboratory
and to measure the effect of this statistically we would have
wanted a cohort study of about 100,000. At one school however,
we did go from 60 cars at the school gate down to 6 in the week
this was promoted.
Q136 Chairman: How far is the Metro
scheme in West Yorkshire and the Hertfordshire scheme being monitored
for effectiveness? Is it being monitored in a proper way?
Ms Pickersgill: It is very important
to us that we measure success so that we do see more children
travelling on safe routes and on buses rather than cars. Perhaps
I could tell you a little bit about how we are measuring our success.
We kicked off with two pilot schemes in West Yorkshire. Metro
covers the five districts of West Yorkshire. The first one was
in Hebden Bridge, which was two yellow buses, in February 2000.
Q137 Chairman: We have all that information.
Ms Pickersgill: Initially the
two pilot schemes, one in Hebden Bridge and one in Ilkley, were
averaging around a 50-60% shift from car to bus. You will see
from the evidence I have submitted that that has increased over
the two years up to 61% in Calderdale and 68% at Ilkley. This
is just measuring the shift from car to bus which is an important
measure in itself.
Q138 Chairman: It is not just a shift
from cars to buses, there is 25% not accounted for. Where are
the rest coming from? On Hebden Bridge, in the second set of bullet
points, it says, "On average 68 children use the buses per
day; 50-60% bus riders formerly travelled by car (20% by bus)."
Where are the rest coming from?
Ms Pickersgill: 40 to 50% travel
by car and the rest by bus. The remainder must be from other modes,
they must be walking or whatever.
Q139 Chairman: So you might be putting
people off bikes and walking onto your buses because they are
more effective?
Ms Pickersgill: That is a risk.
We try for that not to be the case.
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