Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 339)
WEDNESDAY 12 MAY 2004
CLLR TONY
PAGE, CLLR
RAMON WILKINSON
AND CLLR
PATRICK COLEMAN
Q320 Chairman: Ramon, let us hear
from you.
Cllr Wilkinson: I do not entirely
agree with that, of course. I think that parental choice, or "parental
preference" are the words we should be using, is important
and I think that a transport policy should recognise that. It
is a difficult one. It puts us into all sorts of difficult areas
as you heard from the churches speaking to you this morning about
what they would want and each individual group with a vested interest
will come back with why they should be seen to be different. Surely
that is a matter for local discretion. I think it is a matter
that if the Government allows that flexibility to go down into
working out those sort of policies, the right policies for the
right areas, then that is the way I would want to go forward.
I do not like this `one size fits all' at all.
Cllr Page: We are not devising
a template. We are not asking the Government to devise a template
for new home to school transport arrangements. We want to see
pilots come forward which are genuinely innovative and have as
many restrictions removed as possible and that is why we are pressing
a number of amendments on the Government to allow that. The more
you constrain the experiments, the less variety there will be
and the less value.
Cllr Coleman: I need to stress
that I was not talking about denominational choice as I said right
at the beginning of the discussion. It is a separate area for
local negotiation. There appears to be a fair amount of freedom
to do what you want there at the moment and you fight it out and
argue it out and work out answers for your own communities. Leaving
denomination issues aside, by and large, it is very tricky to
see how you could introduce parental choice into transport subsidy
without a huge increase in subsidy and arguably risking the quality
of education as people move from trendy school to trendy school.
Chairman: We are the Education and Skills
Committee and we have just completed and are writing up at this
moment a rather lengthy report on school admissions, so you can
see why we are interested in how this meshes with admissions because
we certainly does and the cost implications are tremendous.
Q321 Jeff Ennis: Going on to the
meshing in with other Government policies, obviously the Tomlinson
report is trying to build up more of a vocational education system
within mainstream schools which this Committee fully supports
and we are looking at models whereby a student might be in a secondary
school studying one subject and then going down the road to a
further education college to study a vocational course or wherever,
so you are going to have greater movement and liaison between
all educational establishments at secondary school level. How
much is that going to impede authorities going into pilots and
is the Government not being contradictory here?
Cllr Wilkinson: I do not think
it will impede Government, I think it will inform it. In fact,
I have just left a meeting with the minister, Ivan Lewis, about
that very subject. Access to the opportunities afford by the 14-19
is absolutely critical, there is no doubt about that, and it is
completely new to us to actually deliver children or young people
to the site of a modern apprenticeship or a 14 or 15-year old
going into further education into further education colleges with
a home base as a secondary school. We are hoping from the LGA
point of view that one of our pilots or a number of our pilots
will actually look at that. It is being addressed by one pilot
which is the Wolverhampton experience. Wolverhampton has looked
at the whole of the City of Wolverhampton and they now have a
single curriculum across 14-19 looking at the provision in all
the establishments including further education and including modern
apprenticeships and including all of the secondary schools whereby
they are able to deliver children to different educational establishments
for blocks of educational time. So, you might have a block of
two-and-a-half hours on a Wednesday morning where children go
off to work practice, they can go off to vocational courses, they
can do carpentry, plumbing, engineering, law or whatever, then
they come back to their school as their school base and then they
go off somewhere else. A very, very innovative scheme. I think
it is very limited in application because Wolverhampton happens
to be a very discrete educational area and I am sure that in Cambridge
we would not do it, looking across the morality of Cambridgeshire.
It might work in Cambridge City, for instance, where you could
develop that. Part of the whole of that process is looking at
delivering the children to and from educational establishments
where the need arises and I think that is quite an exciting activity
and is one that we are watching. I have seen three presentations
at Wolverhampton on that and I am very impressed with that but,
again, one size does not fit all.
Cllr Coleman: I think again it
is an example of why authorities may be encouraged to try for
pilots because of this change in travel patterns and change in
demands which, in some sense, we have to meet.
Q322 Mr Gibb: Mr Coleman and Mr Page,
you mentioned restrictions in the 1944 Act but, on the charging
issue in the 1944 Act and the requirements not to charge three
miles, two miles etc, what other restrictions in that Act are
there that you are talking about?
Cllr Coleman: I think we are really
talking about that, charging, it has to be two miles, it has to
be three miles. If you get into arguments about how you measure
it, it is just arbitrary.
Cllr Page: I do not think there
are any other aspects that we have referred to.
Q323 Mr Gibb: So, really what you
want is the ability to charge that you do not have at the moment.
Is that what you are saying?
Cllr Wilkinson: If you have an
educational transport, my understanding is that it does not have
to be registered with the Traffic Commissioner but, by doing so,
it means that only children can go on to that bus—
Cllr Page: That is not the Education
Act, that is the Transport Act, that is transport legislation.
Mr Gibb was talking specifically about the 1944 Education Act.
It is only the charging powers of that or the charging restrictions
that are imposed by that legislation.
Q324 Mr Gibb: So, the thrust of where
the LGA and therefore, by extension, local authorities are going
to go as a result of this Act is that there will be more charging
for school transport. Is that the net effect of this Bill?
Cllr Page: Not necessarily because
the pilots would enable charging to be made, not necessarily in
all cases but presumably there would be a number of authorities
that would be looking at charging pupils who currently receive
free provision, but the point I was making earlier is that one
of the ways of making this a more palatable option is by actually
offering more than just home to school transport and that is one
of the tricks that local authorities will have to look at to ensure
that, in introducing charging, they are actually giving a broader
value to the child and to the parents than just that journey from
home to school.
Q325 Mr Gibb: I am quite interested
in what the effect would be. I am interested in Mr Coleman's view
as well because it was you who mentioned restrictions in the 1944
Act in particular. What effect would that have on people using
their cars if you were engaging in more charging?
Cllr Coleman: We have some experience
of this with the post-16 charging that was brought in because
we have discretion to do it and, as I said before, most rural
areas now, due to the years of capping, were forced or felt themselves
forced to bring it in. At £200 a year with protection for
lower paid people, there is a risk that you will encourage teenagers
to drive to school in the sixth form and in further education
colleges in old bangers unsafely the moment they get their driving
licences and you cause car parking problems at the school as well
as increasing congestion and adversely affecting air pollution.
So, you have to have a balance in how you set the charge. My interest
is much more in, can I, through a pilot, find a way to raise a
small amount of money from existing or future people that would
have been entitled to free transport under the old Act, and thus
free up seats and provide capacity for all the people living less
than three miles from the school who are currently driving in?
They are driving in because it is convenient, because they are
in villages where there is not much of a bus service to get to
and from the school and all the rest of it. I want to get those
cars off the road without penalising drivers and possibly, through
some flexibility through a pilot—I do not know until somebody
does the work—I can thus make the money go further, help
more people, clear the roads of some cars, get people into the
habit of using buses and extend support beyond that rather small
percentage of children who get all the support at the moment to
those who arguably get none and whose parents are already driving.
Get the balance right, I quite agree. Charge too much and people
will say, "I'll drive them in", particularly in the
more prosperous areas where perhaps people have a spare car at
home and both parents are not working, though that is not as common
as we think. So, it has to be something that is worked out and
reviewed but, arguably, it is worth a try and, if people do not
want to try the pilot, they do not have to.
Q326 Mr Gibb: So, the broad thrust
of where local authorities are likely to go—
Cllr Coleman: I could not guess!
Q327 Mr Gibb: Judging by what the
three or two of you in particular were saying is that you are
likely to reduce the subsidy for the long-distance journeys and
use that money therefore to try and encourage the more numerous
but shorter journeys to get those people—
Cllr Coleman: That is one part
of the approach, certainly.
Cllr Page: A small proportion
of school children currently get a large subsidy. It is not as
though the subsidy is going to a huge number of children.
Q328 Mr Gibb: Presumably they have
long distances to travel because of their special requirements
of the type of school they want to go to.
Cllr Coleman: They have long distances
to travel because they live in a village five miles from the town
and the only school is in the town.
Q329 Mr Gibb: And they are going
to have to pay from now on?
Cllr Coleman: If the lobby in
a local area were strong enough and if the arguments were made
strongly enough, people might run a pilot in which people had
the same sort of protected right as I, as an old British Rail
employee, have and say that it only applied to new children on
the basis that, when we bought our house in the countryside, we
did not know that we were going to have to pay 50 pence or 25
pence or £1 or whatever for our school transport. A similar
argument applied to post-16 charging when it came in but, in the
end, I think most people accepted that those were the days when
we were just cutting everything, so it was just part of an `oh
dear, it is another thing to hit us with'. It might be harder
now.
Q330 Paul Holmes: A number of the
witnesses from whom we have heard have said that one of the problems
with the Bill is a lack of clarity about what its purpose actually
is and how you would judge the success of pilots. For example,
is it about environmental issues, getting more people out of cars
and into buses and healthy options or is it about saving money,
cost cutting, or is it about educational purposes? So, which is
it and how are you or the Secretary of State going to judge whether
a pilot scheme is successful if the Bill has not really made it
clear about what the purpose is in the first place?
Cllr Coleman: That is the trouble
with an enabling bill allowing for experimentation and innovation.
You cannot say what is going to happen until you suck it and see.
It is a very good point that it has to be monitored and evaluated.
Until I came in today, I was thinking that we would do a partnership
with Bath University or somebody near us and get them to do some
work because they have done some good social services evaluation
for us in the past. When I heard that the academics are telling
you that it is going to fail before they know what it is, I began
to wonder whether I would look elsewhere. Certainly, if you set
a pilot up, it would be helpful if the local authority setting
up the pilot actually wrote down their objectives in advance in
order that the thing can then be measured against in terms of,
did we achieve these objectives? Nobody is interested in cost
cutting in this area. There is not that much room to cut costs.
We have other issues to address like, do we have enough quality
bus suppliers in every part of the country? Are we getting decent
competition for the market that there is? We have one or two capacity
issues in certain parts of the countryside to address in terms
of suppliers. In terms of improving education, you could argue
that children who travel on a bus that they have paid a bit towards
are getting a social education on the bus going to and from school
which is different from that which they get in the back of the
four-wheel drive being driven by mum at high speed on her way
to work. I am not certain whether it is an improvement to their
education given some of the things that happen on school buses
which we are seriously concerned about and which we raised in
our evidence about bad behaviour. It is the little bit of secret
garden that is still left in my view, the bit between the home
gate and the school gate on the bus.
Q331 Paul Holmes: Which was a big
issue that some of the heads we heard last week raised.
Cllr Coleman: CCTV is an example
of things that can be used. We do not want to get into that but
it was raised in the evidence.
Cllr Wilkinson: What you have
said we have grappled with for many months at the LGA and I am
sure that most LEAs are thinking about that. What is the purpose
of the Bill? What are we seeking to achieve here? When I started
my evidence to you, I said that the Government was in some difficulty
over whether they prescribe what it is they seek to achieve or
they give flexibility to allow LEAs to be innovative and creative
about how they come forward to wrestle with not only getting people
out of cars but all the issues that Cllr Page has talked about
because there are some consequences behind all of this and what
we want to do is to try to tease out all of those in order that
we actually come out with a composite package, a community package,
not just a home to school package. By doing that, by allowing
that flexibility and freedom, it does, I think, give an opportunity
for LEAs to do it, but it does put us into this difficulty of,
what are we seeking to achieve here? When the Government gets
the pilots submitted to them because the Secretary of State has
to approve each and every pilot as I understand it, I think from
that the DfES will then begin to put together what it is they
are seeking to achieve from those cluster of eight, ten or 12
pilots.
Cllr Coleman: I do not think they
should be tough about keeping the number down.
Cllr Wilkinson: Strangely enough,
I actually welcome the opportunity for flexibility and creativity
and I am comfortable and I think the LGA is comfortable at this
stage, but we would not want it to go on beyond the examination
of the pilots. I think then we need the Government to come and
say, "This is the direction we ought to be going, this is
the purpose of it, let us move along with these pilots",
but I am concerned about the monitoring and evaluation. I think
the Government could actually do a lot more on that. They do not
need to know what they are. What we need to do is to look at the
framework in which they are going to be monitored and evaluate
it.
Cllr Page: There are issues of
health, environment, congestion and education and all of those
were referred to by Charles Clarke when he spoke to us last year
and it was very welcome to hear him ranging over all of these
issues. The issue of cost cutting is not one that has been mentioned
by local authorities. Delivering better value for money and using
the existing kitty more effectively is certainly high on the agenda.
Certainly when it comes to trying to knit together the extra money
that is being given for the development of school travel plans
and school travel coordinators and building more of this into
the school curriculum. One of the things that I have been impressed
with are those schools that actually take the planning of school
transport into the classroom and involve the children and then,
through the children, influence the parents. There is a lot of
work to be done there and the additional resources the Government
has given to assist school travel plans could bring forward some
very innovative proposals. So, that is the sort of approach that
we would want to see and it is up to the local authorities to
set out what their objectives are, as Ramon said, and if an authority's
objectives were solely to cut costs, I doubt very much whether
the Secretary of State would be too enthused with such a pilot
and, frankly, I am not aware that any of our members would come
forward with such a narrow focus.
Q332 Paul Holmes: Insofar as the
Government has said what it wants the Bill to achieve, the Secretary
of State said to the Transport Committee that they were going
to encourage people to go to their neighbourhood school, but how
does that work if the Government is at the same time expanding
specialist schools, which means parents saying, "I want to
go over there to the engineering school" or "over there
to the modern language school"? How does it work if the Government
is massively going to expand faith schools which, as we have already
heard, means children travelling a long distance in different
directions or city academies. So, on the one hand you have the
DfES saying it wants all sorts of different schools and people
moving all over the place to them but then the Secretary of State
says that this Bill is to encourage children to go to their
neighbourhood school. There is a direct contradiction there.
Cllr Wilkinson: Yes, frankly there
is.
Cllr Page: You have yet to see
him on this Bill.
Q333 Paul Holmes: Next week.
Cllr Page: In urban and suburban
areas where you have some form of public transport infrastructure,
there is potential to offer travel season tickets and such like
to children, subsidised perhaps, which would address some of that
and working with the operators to ensure that that is run to these
various establishments when they are required to which you cannot
do within the current regulatory framework outside of London and
it is that point which you must not forget, that in many areas
where there is existing public transport infrastructure, it could
be hugely improved through the direction of resources towards
subsidising children and doing deals with the operators as well.
Again, that cannot be done within the current regulatory framework,
which is why we want to see that flexibility introduced and it
is a major omission in the Bill as it currently stands. In deep
rural areas, that problem is pretty intractable.
Cllr Wilkinson: I think the contradiction
manifests itself in the debate between urban and rural settings,
quite clearly. In an urban setting, I do not think the issues
are as great because if you only have one secondary school that
has one specialism within 15 miles of the houses . . . If, for
instance, you are at Wisbech and you do not have choices, you
do not have preferences at Wisbech; you have one secondary school,
unless of course you have a transport system that will enable
you to go to the second secondary school 10 or 15 miles away.
So, there are big issues around that. Again, I think the local
flexibility will address that. We already have in post-16 because
a lot of our young people from the Fenlands want to go to Cambridge
City to the sixth form colleges and, to enable that to happen,
we offer a discount fare to those young people to go from the
Fenlands to Cambridge City.
Cllr Coleman: In my own town,
we have three secondary schools. Two of them have a specialism;
they happen to be close together; the other one is a mile or two
away. The staggering of school hours might, depending on the exact
nature of the catchment area, allow us to keep school transport
costs to a lower level than they would otherwise be if you have
people choosing between those three schools on other than their
neighbourhood basis coming in from the villages, so that the bus
would bring all the children in the early-start schools and the
later-start schools second. Even that example could be quite tricky
to negotiate. I cannot actually see it, even though we have quite
a good partnership, because secondary schools really are their
own empires now, they really are confident self-governors, whether
they are foundation or community.
Q334 Mr Chaytor: You make it clear
that local authorities are holding out for some pump-priming funding
from the Government. What sort of sum are we talking about? Can
you give us a ball park figure?
Cllr Wilkinson: I think it is
quite difficult to generalise on that. If you were to ask, I do
not think they would be looking for huge sums because they do
not have a major problem in terms of travel because it is such
an urban city but, if you look at Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire,
Devon or Cornwall, we would need to set up somebody to drive this
project forward, so you would be looking, I would imagine, at
£100,000 to £150,000, which would enable staff to be
employed on perhaps a part-time basis.
Q335 Mr Chaytor: Are you saying that
these are one-off costs that will then be lost or are you saying
that the pump priming will be recouped over a period of time?
Cllr Wilkinson: I think it is
spending a penny to save a pound. You are looking here at something
which can actually deliver economies of scale and far better best
practice.
Q336 Mr Chaytor: What is your judgment
about the need for that? If there is no pump priming, do you think
any local authorities will submit bids or are there some who are
still so desperate to get the problem sorted that they will bid—
Cllr Coleman: If there is no pump
priming, it is very hard to defend yourself against the allegation
that you are just trying to cut costs with your pilot and, provided
it is recognised that the return is not totally financial, that
it is return in terms of cleaner air, less congestion, better
behaviour and more efficient use of resources and spreading public
expenditure to help a larger number of people, provided we include
that in the evaluation of whether the money has been well spent,
then there seems to be a lot of opportunities to make that a decent
spend of money. It almost has a symbolic value although it is
a lot more than a symbolic sum. It is a little like the rural
bus grant which is a jolly good idea in my private opinion, which
allowed us to do some really interesting things with rural buses
and I was amazed that they keep giving it. Symbolically, it is
important and it enabled us to do new things and arguably it is
worth its while not just in cash terms. I would not care to look
at the subsidy per passenger.
Cllr Page: We are not looking
for all costs necessarily. It would be nice if the Government
would change its position and come forward with that but realistically
we would be looking for some sort of match funding or reasonable
pump priming grant to get the thing moving.
Q337 Chairman: Is the Government
in a bit of a cleft stick? What it wants is local education authorities
to come forward who really want to do this and who have a problem
but also have some ideas about how they would like to innovate
and they do not want people just queuing up because there is money
in it. So, it may be that the tactic is that the money will come
at some stage but you have to put your project up front.
Cllr Wilkinson: That is all very
well if you look at that in isolation but, when you look at the
cost and the county council budget as a whole—and, as you
know, this year there was a demand from the Secretary of State
to incorporate all head room into our schools budgets leaving
absolutely nothing whatsoever outside and then of course you have
the argument about, you cannot put up your council tax because
there is a cap that goes with that. So, you ended up with actually
no money and, if you want to sponsor this and you want to put
money into this, you can only take it from the education budget
and, in my view, that would deny schools the sort of money. It
may only be small sums but it is important that the schools get
that sort of funding and I think the Government should recognise
that.
Cllr Page: If you imagine that
you may have to have a situation where your local education authority
may have to talk to three or four bus operators. If you want to
try and get bus times changed or extended, bus operators at the
moment cannot be obliged. They may want some assurances in terms
of initial subsidies or indemnities or whatever. That will all
cost money until you start generating the patronage because parents
will understandably be reluctant to necessarily see their children
transferring to buses until the buses are actually there and until
the service is started. All of these changes, and the more radical
they, are will require some form of initial subsidy and, to expect
local authorities to foot that themselves is unrealistic.
Q338 Mr Chaytor: Moving on to a different
issue, in terms of protected children until a charging regime,
are you happy that the free school meals criteria is still the
relevant criteria?
Cllr Wilkinson: Yes. The LGA is
certainly comfortable that there should be some protection for
those children and I am sure that if the Government did not require
that, then indeed all local authorities would want to implement
that as the bare minimum.
Q339 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the
formula for distribution of local government grant, am I not right
in thinking that now the working families tax credit is used as
a component of the formula, not free school meals.
Cllr Page: We may have to come
back to you on that one, if you would not mind.
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