Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300 - 319)

WEDNESDAY 12 MAY 2004

CLLR TONY PAGE, CLLR RAMON WILKINSON AND CLLR PATRICK COLEMAN

  Q300  Chairman: It is very interesting that it is a matter of priority when here is a bill that only gives a pilot in 26 series and which is not really going to take effect for a very long period of time.

  Cllr Wilkinson: That is the way to do it!

  Q301  Chairman: You are talking about 2011. If it were a priority for Government, you would rather ask, why pilots and why this drawn-out length of time?

  Cllr Coleman: It is a priority to address the issue and addressing an issue through pilots, innovation, experimentation and local discretion is exactly the right way, particularly from my own political perspective, to go about doing things. It may take quite a bit of time but, if it goes through and we get these pilots running, we will see just what we can produce suited to local areas.

  Q302  Chairman: You all represent different local authority areas; will you all be bidding for pilots?

  Cllr Coleman: I cannot say. I am encouraging my authority but I am an opposition member.

  Cllr Wilkinson: Cambridgeshire went through their cabinet system two weeks ago and they said that we would be bidding for one of the pilots.

  Q303  Chairman: What about Reading?

  Cllr Page: That remains to be seen. We are certainly looking at it. I think the point to make in response to what you have said is that this is an area of great sensitivity, as you have just heard. The early days of the Thatcher Government addressed this issue and it ran into the buffers.

  Q304  Chairman: I remember that Mark Carlisle resigned over it.

  Cllr Page: Indeed, Chairman, and I think you were a Member of the Commons at the time, so your memory is better than mine. It is a subject where the provision varies enormously and, as with public transport provision across the country, you get areas where there is a good infrastructure and you get areas where there is very poor or non-existent transport and I think that because of this diversity of provision and the huge range of circumstances locally, it is appropriate that the Government should proceed with pilots that address this huge swathe of diversity from deep rural areas where there may be virtually no public transport provision to the metropolitan areas and London where there is a good infrastructure and where the response can be different.

  Q305  Chairman: We are well into this inquiry now and I have to say that the evidence we have had so far does not show a great deal of enthusiasm for the Bill or even the way in which the Bill is being introduced in terms of pilots. Indeed, none of the LEAs we have interviewed so far have said that they would be interested in bidding for a pilot, partly because there is no money in the pilots.

  Cllr Wilkinson: Now I think you have struck the note! I was going to put a condition on ours that obviously the LGA and all LEAs are pushing very hard for pump priming and that for the Government to say this is cost neutral is a nonsense and I think we all know that and that, if you are going to do this job properly, as we need to, then we do need some pump-priming money in order to get it going. I hope at the end of the day there could be some savings in all of this to be redistributed within the transport facilities for LEAs but, in the early stages, the collection of the data, the development of the whole of the project and to push the project through, the Government are looking at this on the cheap and I do not think that LEAs are prepared to do that. Funding is a big issue.

  Q306  Chairman: The Secretary of State might say that there is a whole diversity of provision out there as you have said. There is some very good practice because local authorities have the ability to be innovative and flexible and do interesting things in the provision of school transport even under present legislation, apart from charging. We have had evidence from lots of areas where they are piloting the yellow bus and they are piloting different kinds of flexibility across social services and health and there is all sorts of interesting stuff going on out there without this Bill.

  Cllr Wilkinson: There are two issues there. I think the first is that one size does not fit all. If you look right across the spectrum of LEAs in this country, all have different needs and I think these will emerge when the pilots start to come forward. The second is that, in terms of finance, if we look just at Cambridgeshire, for instance, we are spending over £12 million every year just on school transport and that is rising by between 7.5 and 10% every year. Over the last three years it has risen over 17%. There is little that we can do about that because of the restrictions that are placed upon us by the 1944 Act in particular. So, unless that is released, I think we are going to find ourselves year on year just pumping money into home to school transport when we could be innovative but we are not allowed to be because of the legal constraints.

  Q307  Chairman: We just had the Catholic Church in front of us complaining that actually local authorities are becoming much meaner in some areas and reducing and withdrawing the ability to give transport to Catholic schools.

  Q308  Cllr Wilkinson: That is a pragmatic financial decision and I think that all LEAs are looking at that issue because whatever you put into the home to school transport, you take out of the core funding going into schools. Those are the sort of issues we are grappling with at the moment and having the constraints of the 1944 Act and later Acts is not helpful for us.

  Cllr Coleman: We would like to make a very clear distinction between the main focus of the Bill and the issue of denominational transport. How you set up any support, if you do support denominational transport, in your local authority is entirely a local matter. It took a long campaign in our own county until 1988 to get the ten free miles system in. We reviewed it in 1993 and decided that it would save us about £66,000 to wipe that out and that it was not worth the pain and unhappiness. Since then, we have improved our partnership with the churches, despite the pain of grant-maintained schools, and we now, I think, have a much more satisfactory situation. As long as you are working in a partnership, you have to measure up the gains and the minuses. The point about cost neutral is that the benefits of a pilot, assuming pilots come forward—and, if they do not come forward, fair enough, the local authority does not want to take the risk—we are not just talking about cash, we are talking about improved air quality, reduction in congestion, improving social habits, children learning to use buses alongside adults perhaps and spreading the benefits of public spending beyond a minority. We were given the Hampshire figures: 170,000 children in Hampshire and only 15,000 get free transport and that costs £20 million. There is a perspective that says that, on a two and three mile basis when transport habits and travel habits and walking has changed so much since 1944, surely that deserves a review, but you are immediately stopped from doing a review because of the Act. We wanted to start changing that in 1997—

  Q309  Chairman: I do not think that anyone in this Committee would disagree with that but we have had some of the leading experts on transport saying to this Committee that what this Bill actually would like to deliver is more people going on to the roads, taking their children to school, which would outweigh beneficial effect at all. That is from the leading transport people, some of whom advise you. They are telling us that the thrust of this Bill will put more children on the road taking their children to school.

  Cllr Page: I would be interested to see that evidence because we have already given evidence to Mrs Dunwoody's Select Committee on this issue and one of the points we have been pressing is the fragmented regulatory regime outside of London which actually is completely hostile to integrating public transport and one of the points that we would like you to consider and reflect upon, as we made to the Transport Select Committee, is that the issue for travel for children at school is not just an issue of home to school transport. It is of encouraging and enabling school children to have greater use of public transport outside of school hours in order that they can make better use of extracurricular facilities, they can travel in the evenings and at weekends and, if you can sell a home to school transport benefit as part of a wider package, in other words that the parents are buying for their children the freedom to be able to travel much more than just home to school, then there should not necessarily be that transfer to the private car. The comment I think you are alluding to is the view that has just the narrow home to school transport focus and a charge simply related for that journey. If you are buying a season ticket or getting some form of discounted travel which enables and encourages the children to make better use of local public transport, then that surely is in the interest of the children and the community and that is one of the things that we would like to see. That requires a change to the regulatory regime outside of London if you are going to make better use of that money because you are going to have to integrate public transport and provide assurances and stability to the operators. It is a point that the Transport Select Committee has embraced and I am pleased to say, Chairman, that, as of yesterday, we had a letter from the Department for Transport who have picked up on the recommendation of the Transport Select Committee and they are convening a group to look further at recommendation 13 of the Transport Select Committee which addresses this point. So, we would emphasise that we are looking for a package that encourages children and addresses their mobility needs and perhaps children in higher education as well should be given that facility in order that they can make good use of public transport and hopefully encourage its development.

  Cllr Coleman: I am amazed that you have academics who can tell you how a pilot is going to work before anybody has written a pilot! Call themselves academics, I will not employ them to do the monitoring and evaluation! If you are negotiating and consulting local communities on how you are going to make some changes, you take all these factors into account and you make a balanced judgment. This is going to be a local authority initiative enabled by the Government. Some will work, some will not. Those that do not work very well will have to be changed or dropped. Anybody who is not responsive enough gets voted out. That is the system I understand and those of us who are not brave enough to take on a pilot will not do it. Let us be a little more relaxed about all this resistance to all change. I think everybody agreed that we need some change. Pilots and taking our time and being sensitive is the right way to do it. Looking at things holistically, would it not be nice if you and Mrs Dunwoody's Committee were sat here together in order that we work across all our boundaries which is also quite a handy way of doing things. I think it is just a case of being a little bit robust about the criticisms that are being made because it just shows that all the previous initiatives have always been cost cutting and service cutting and people think it is going to happen again.

  Chairman: Patrick, that is exactly the game we play in this Committee. We ask you questions and put you on your mettle and we have been successful; we are getting some good answers.

  Q310  Valerie Davey: You are here representing the LGA. There have been pilots on transport. What is your analysis of what is coming forward from your members as best practice?

  Cllr Coleman: Our focus is on getting out of this 1944 restriction. Yes, there has been a lot of innovation and yellow buses have been tried in some areas, not my own, but we have certainly been trying to do the social services and special needs integration as far as possible. That is quite tricky. It is one of the suggested questions you might be asking us but there, of course, it is important to put the user's needs first rather than the cart pulling the horse. My impression is of the sort of innovation that would allow us to spread benefits more widely, that would allow us to address the changes in transport use and perhaps get rid of the rather arbitrary thing that says that, unless you live exactly beyond three miles, you get no help and that, after three miles, you get all the help seems to be a little unfair. I think suitable protection is needed for people in low income families. Nearly every authority now charges for post-16 transport in rural areas. That was a huge pain to bring in; I can remember doing it because we were capped and all the rest of it. We immediately brought in with that—we had full discretion—protection for people on low incomes and then we brought in credit card payments as well and that was a real innovation for county councils in 1990.

  Q311  Valerie Davey: So, really looking for an amendment to the 1944 Act rather than a new Act?

  Cllr Coleman: We are looking for a pilot to allow us out of those restrictions to see what else we can come up with and then perhaps you might choose to make an amendment to the 1944 Act when you have monitored and evaluated the pilots and the work that has gone on. It is not something that has to be rushed, it has not to be rushed.

  Q312  Valerie Davey: Could I come back to you, Ramon, because you are the one who is potentially picking up a pilot. Can you tell us a little more about what might happen in Cambridgeshire.

  Cllr Wilkinson: We have only just set to with a small working group to see what sort of pilot it is that we would want to run. We have some guidance but it is very limited. I think that the Government is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if they tell you the pilots that you ought to be running, then you have the nanny state telling you exactly what it is that you should be piloting. On the other hand, they are saying, "It is flexible, it is free. You have a look. You be creative, innovative and come forward with some ideas for us." What we are trying to do is put together something in Cambridgeshire which is going to be creative and innovative but key to it is also addressing the inclusion agenda and also addressing the financial difficulties in which we find ourselves in trying to keep meeting the increasing costs of home to school transport. There are several areas at which we are looking. One is, for instance, cross border with Norfolk and Suffolk, having a look to see how we exchange the children across there and we have just received some information about the independent schools in Cambridge City and looking at the possibility of an innovative scheme that would allow us to use our park and ride schemes going across the City where you get a kiss goodbye at the park and ride and the children then take the school buses. Those are the sort of areas at which we are looking but these are early days and we have only just drawn the working group together and we have 12 months to put it together. I do have some concern about the speed at which this is going, the pace at which we are moving on this and I think I would be one of those who would say that it needs to be more robust because, once you start moving into pilots and they begin to work, some of those begin to work, then I think we have to make some early decisions about those we are going to stop and those we are going to move and drive forward. This is a very, very important early piece of work and I think that the LEAs are up for it, but they do need some help and guidance coming through from it.

  Q313  Valerie Davey: Is this crucial to your plan or crucial to this new catalyst which I think the Bill is providing the fact that you may well be able to charge?

  Cllr Wilkinson: Absolutely. Looking at our current practice, there are some areas where I think it is grossly wrong not to be able to charge in certain circumstances. We also find of course that we are getting opportunities to sell seats on buses and of course we cannot because they are not licensed or registered with the Commission, but we cannot do that, so we have empty spaces going through on buses quite unnecessarily, when we have new towns developing now in the north of Cambridge and, at Cambourne, there is a 5,000 to 10,000 housing development. We can integrate with that our transport plans which will be very helpful indeed but at the moment we cannot because of the constraints that are put on us.

  Cllr Page: I think the key point to emphasise is the point that was made earlier that this money that is currently being spent goes on a very small proportion of school children. In Hampshire it is less than 10% and, in Cambridgeshire, it is one third of secondary school pupils and that, I think, reflects the sort of range but it is still a relatively small minority of children. It is making better value, making better use of that money, and the issue of pump priming is one that is fundamental to this. Many local authorities are holding back to see whether or not the Government will concede that there is a case for some pump priming because there may be savings to be achieved but they will not come in year one, they will come in years two and three and possibly longer. To pretend that somehow you can have a self-financing scheme, self-financing from year one, is really deluding yourself and the impression that the Secretary of State gave to the Transport Select Committee and the officials who gave evidence to you on 31 March about this so-called £2 billion figure that is available to deliver deficiencies is simply a nonsense because this includes subsidies for concessionary travel for senior citizens, £600 million alone. Are we really pretending that there is money to be delivered from there towards home to school transport? There may be if you cut the value of it. Is that what is being suggested? So, the actual kitty available for delivering potential savings and efficiencies is perhaps £300 or £400 million because, even within the existing home to school transport, there is the special needs budget as well which needs to be treated sensitively. So, we would reject entirely the view that there is a £2 billion kitty which could somehow deliver up efficiency savings to pay for this.

  Q314  Chairman: The Committee has been given the £2 billion figure and the £0.75 billion figure.

  Cllr Page: Yes, indeed, and the officials who gave evidence to you, I regret to say, seem to have confused capital with revenue funding, which worries me because, when civil servants cannot distinguish between the two, Heaven help ministers when they have to take decisions. The fact is that there are substantial capital resources going to transport but not revenue, yet the officials seem to confuse the two and think that you can just move capital to revenue. Would that we had that flexibility at local level. We do not.

  Q315  Jeff Ennis: I think we can all agree that one of the omissions from the Bill is the issue of pump priming and hopefully that will be addressed in the future. Are there any other omissions as far as the LGA is concerned in terms of what is not in the draft Bill?

  Cllr Page: In terms of the reserved powers to LEAs that are in the Bill, we would wish to see powers given to LEAs to address the issue of school opening hours because, at the moment, the absence of such a reserve power in the Bill we feel might weaken the effective bargaining position. It is not a power that we would wish to see invoked but having the reserved power often acts as an incentive and we would not wish to see a scheme involving a number of schools vetoed by one single school and I think that is a view that we hold across party. We are not looking for a big stick to knock the schools into line, far from it, but the presence of such a reserved power in the Bill we think would facilitate discussions.

  Cllr Coleman: We have gone into a bit of detail in the written answers and techie transport stuff, as I call it, '85 and 2000 Act—

  Cllr Page: The Transport Act amendments I referred to earlier have been picked up by the Transport Select Committee. I do not know to what extent you want to do go into that today but that is an area that we have pressed and the Department for Transport has responded and would be looking at that further. There is one other area that we identified for an amendment to the Bill. We, as an association, would wish to see the roll-out power in the Bill to enable the Secretary of State to roll out—

  Q316  Chairman: Is this in meeting Ramon's point, there is a faster roll-out?

  Cllr Page: No. There is provision in the Bill for the schemes to be rolled out further by the Secretary of State without further evaluation and without recourse to that sort of analysis and we believe that those powers should not be in the Bill and that there should be proper evaluation before any further schemes are taken forward.

  Q317  Chairman: How does that square with Ramon's point where he seemed to suggest that we would not have to wait that long for the process of evaluation and then implementation and the spreading of the roll-out to other local education authorities?

  Cllr Page: The two are not consistent.

  Cllr Wilkinson: What the Government has been saying in their guidance on this is that their expectation is that they would go from 2010-2011 and I think that, if they take that long to deliver through on the home to school transport before they start looking at going nationwide with some of these, then, for me, that is far too long, but there is what Cllr Page was telling you about, that little quirk in there which says that, once this Bill goes through, the Secretary of State no longer has to go back to any parliamentary committees to say, "I am going to do this" and "I am going to do that", he just does it by regulation. There are some concerns about that, that he may suddenly in the middle of a pilot stop something or put it into a completely different direction off his own bat. That would be any Secretary of State and I think that is a power going one too far, frankly.

  Q318  Jeff Ennis: Should pilots aim to provide parents and pupils with efficient and affordable transport to the school of their choice or simply to their nearest school?

  Cllr Coleman: Should school transport attempt to satisfy parental choice? No, it should not. That is one of the easiest questions I have ever had to answer in local government! There is a pretty sound rule which is "designated or nearest school" and most people understand that and that is the one we will stick to, thank you very much, unless you want to give us several billion more pounds to throw away. There is a huge bottomless pit of expenditure if we start to subsidise parental choice with transport, particularly in areas where it can be 10 and 15 miles between one secondary school and the next. Every school is going to be the best school in our county and in the other counties in the rural areas; it has to be. The local school is a specialist school in everything when you get to secondary school and, if people do not like it, rather like if they do not like the state system, they pay their way out of it.

  Q319  Jeff Ennis: Are we all in agreement with that?

  Cllr Wilkinson: No.

  Cllr Coleman: We did give a very firm "no" to subsidy before but there may have been a bit of . . .

  Cllr Page: I think it is the rhetoric you embellished it with!


 
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