Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540 - 559)

WEDNESDAY 19 MAY 2004

MR STEPHEN TWIGG AND MR DAVID JAMIESON

  Q540  Chairman: Have you talked to Peter Lampl and the Sutton Trust about this? He certainly seems to be very much in favour of the Yellow Bus Scheme and also good training of the drivers who drive those buses.

  Mr Jamieson: The training of drivers, all drivers, some of them on public service vehicles, where at certain times of the day they are getting large preponderance of children coming on to the bus. Those drivers I think would also benefit from some extra training in those circumstances. But clearly those involved with the Yellow Buses are probably easier to control for the driver because they tend to be smaller and more self-contained. They are not double-decker buses. I think, because of the type of buses they are, children have a different expectation of what their behaviour should be on those buses. They are expensive; it is not a cheap option.

  Q541  Chairman: I thought they were very cheap to buy.

  Mr Jamieson: The whole package of buying them and running them is not cheap. There may be very few other uses that they can be put to. Across the Atlantic, the Americans and Canadians, with the staggered hours that they have, make better use of them: they can use them for many hours during the day. We do not have that generally in most areas, so, therefore, there may be limited use during the day for the buses and that is why they tend to be an expensive option.

  Q542  Chairman: It seems to me you are pre-judging a proper evaluation of the Yellow Bus Scheme that you have in at least two areas of the country into which you are putting millions.

  Mr Jamieson: No, we have some experience of the Yellow Buses already and we know that they are very valued by parents; that they are a good option; that they are a safe option. But I am saying that it is not a panacea across the whole country because there are cost implications. You must appreciate the Yellow Bus has become to mean something that looks like the American bus, and it is not entirely replicated here. Sometimes they are not actually yellow but they are a dedicated school bus. There are different levels of these which operate. Clearly, if there is a bus that has been designated for use by children and meets all the other requirements for use as a public service vehicle, then of course it can be used in the rest of the day and that would be very cost-effective for authorities to do.

  Q543  Chairman: Stephen, you looked a bit shifty when I asked if you had met Peter. Are you avoiding him.

  Mr Twigg: Not at all, no.

  Q544  Chairman: Have you met him?

  Mr Twigg: I have met him, yes. Not recently and not about this, but . . .

  Q545  Valerie Davey: Could I go back to the comment you made very early on, David, about clause 4 in this bill and the fact that if people charge, it would have to go to the Traffic Commissioner. Could you explain that and does it fit into the context of who ultimately has, as it were, insurance liability for this?

  Mr Jamieson: It does not affect insurance liability. Currently, where there is free transport then the service does not need to be registered with the Traffic Commissioner. We are saying that where children are going to be charged—it is just a legal matter really, and it is a small bureaucratic matter really, it is not a major issue—they would not have to register with the commissioner. It would be different, though, in the case that Jeff was raising where then you are charging other members of the public to come in, because then it has to comply with some of the competition laws. Obviously we need to be more careful there. We could not have unfair competition with some other user who had a registered bus service.

  Q546  Valerie Davey: Ultimately, if children are travelling on a bus, whether it is, for want of a better word, a "school" bus or a public vehicle, the regulations lie with the owner of the bus and the people who are responsible.

  Mr Jamieson: Yes. The operator of the bus is responsible for making sure that the vehicle is insured and kept into a proper condition, yes.

  Q547  Mr Chaytor: Given the manifest success of bus policy in London in recent years with a regulated regime, why can all the other conurbations not benefit from that?

  Mr Jamieson: By taking it back into public ownership is not necessarily a way of getting better use of the funding. London is unusual and special as a city in Great Britain, and probably in the world. It has very special needs. There are different needs in different parts of the country.

  Mr Chaytor: What are the different needs between London and Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds?

  Q548  Mr Pollard: Or smaller cities, like St Albans.

  Mr Jamieson: Generally, the traffic problems are different.

  Q549  Mr Chaytor: Is it an issue of difference or scale and volume?

  Mr Jamieson: I think it is scale. There is different usage here; there is massive tourist use of public transport. It is entirely different and has a different history to it. We do know that the current system is working extremely well in many areas outside of London. We are seeing patronage in some areas going up very substantially, with operators bringing in innovative ideas for running buses. I think we are mindful, in using some of the funding we have for buses, that we should be looking at different and innovative ideas for providing transport. In some cases, "demand buses" for getting people from estates outside of cities and into the centre where they can call back a taxi bus. But just having a scheduled bus which part of the day may be carting fresh air around is not actually an option. That does not tend to happen in London because people are travelling 24 hours a day—

  Mr Twigg: And the air is not fresh!

  Mr Jamieson: Well, nor in one or two other cities outside of London. But you can see that there are clearly differences there. For children, particularly, there are issues to do with children travelling in the evening for social or pleasure and going into town centres. Some of the buses finish at eight o'clock at night, which is wholly unsatisfactory for teenagers who want to go to a library or the theatre, or whatever children do in the evening. In some areas it is impractical, but where authorities have used funding intelligently and sensibly, they have looked at demand services which run when the passengers want to use them and not when they are scheduled on a timetable.

  Chairman: It sounds wonderful, but when one walks around a real town on a real day, as I did on Saturday, one finds that they have closed five post offices because the central one would do, and the bus company then closes two of the bus routes and people cannot get to the one post office that is left.

  Q550  Jeff Ennis: A couple of years ago, one of the scrutiny committees on Barnsley Council produced a very good paper on home to school transport and some of the problems that were thrown up at that particular time. One of the conclusions they came to was the fact that sometimes you get problems on school buses because of the attitude of some of the pupils at the end of that day, to which you referred earlier. When the contracts were coming up for school transport, you tended to get what were perceived as the poorer operators with the poorer standard buses putting forward to win the contract, rather than the more "quality" bus operators in the area, shall we say. Is there anything within this bill that will ensure that the standard of the home to school transport, in terms of the actual buses, will be improved by this legislation?

  Mr Jamieson: Firstly, I think children getting into the habit and practice of using buses is a good thing. Seeing that buses are of good quality and are good things to travel on I think is a good thing. I do not think it is a good thing, necessarily, for children's only and first experience to be of tatty old buses for them to travel on. In terms of them getting a lifelong use of buses, I think it is a good thing to have more modern buses. I think we must remember that some of the buses that are used are old stock but that does not mean to say they are unsafe. They have to meet rigorous standards of safety. They are checked—they have to have their annual checking—and my department through the Vehicle Operators Services Agency does check quite a substantial number of public service vehicles each year, particularly in the areas where we think there may be poorer standards or where standards may not have been followed through. We have examples of where we have done just that and taken some vehicles off the road. The issue here—and this is where the innovation comes in on the pilot schemes—is how operators can, firstly, use the buses more extensively in the mornings and the evenings for the school run, and how they might then be able to use those buses at other times of the day. That will generally push up the quality of the vehicles they can then provide. My instinct would be that we want children to travel always on modern buses, but I see many of the buses in my own part of the country: they are old buses but they are not unsafe, they are still good quality transport for children to go on.

  Q551  Chairman: Could we draw you out a little on evaluation. Some of our very highly qualified advisors say the Department for Transport does not have the most wonderful track record in terms of a thorough evaluation of pilots but they skimp on the money and the resource to evaluate projects well. How do we know that these projects are going to be properly evaluated so we get maximum benefit from them?

  Mr Jamieson: First, I do not recognise that description of my department. In the pilots we have undertaken, we have evaluated very thoroughly indeed, and we have put out good practice and guidance where that is appropriate to local authorities and others who may be involved in particular schemes. I think it is very important for both departments to work very closely together looking at these schemes. It may be that even in the first year of operation of some of the pilots we may be getting some good messages or bad messages back that we can feed into the system, so we do not have to wait until the very end of the process to know what is going to happen.

  Q552  Chairman: Who is doing the evaluation, then?

  Mr Twigg: That will be conducted jointly between the two departments.

  Mr Jamieson: Yes.

  Q553  Chairman: But will you do it in-house? Will you bring in consultants? Will you put it out to university departments? How will you do it?

  Mr Twigg: I do not think there is any suggestion that we would bring in consultants. I think we would have to have an overall evaluation of a set of pilots and then we will be looking individually at each pilot. I would envisage, unless there are good reasons I have not thought of, that this would be very much a matter of our departments and the local authority working with each other, drawing on expert advice from head teacher associations, local government associations and all the rest of it. I had not envisaged involving consultants or a university but, if that is a suggestion that might assist the evaluation process, we can certainly consider that.

  Q554  Chairman: Something that David Jamieson said worried me a great deal. The Department for Transport has put serious money, millions of pounds, into the Yellow Bus experiment in Calderdale and they have also done the same in parts of Wales. I got the distinct feeling that David Jamieson was saying: "Expensive." Where is the evaluation? Who has evaluated that? I thought it was in its early days. Who has evaluated the quality that, that produced a rather negative response to my question?

  Mr Jamieson: It was not a negative response. I was trying to indicate that the Yellow Bus Scheme is expensive. We must think it is worthwhile, otherwise we would not have put the money into it, but it is an expensive option. It may not be an option that all authorities want to take up. We evaluate schemes either in-house or, if we need extra expertise, we bring it in from a specialist and advisors, and we also sometimes use universities. We have used an eminent professor, for example, to advise us on car insurance recently. So we take advice from sources where it is appropriate.

  Q555  Chairman: You gave the money to the Yellow Bus pilots when?

  Mr Jamieson: This would be in the year 2003-04.

  Q556  Chairman: And you have already evaluated them.

  Mr Jamieson: We have not actually evaluated that particular scheme, but we have other schemes that have been operating in the past of a similar nature, in the last couple of years, and we have some idea how those work. On the basis of that, we then gave the grant aid to Yorkshire.

  Q557  Chairman: You do not know if the Yorkshire one is a good value scheme or not.

  Mr Jamieson: We will not know yet, because it has only just started.

  Q558  Chairman: Yes, but you seem to be very negative about it and it has only just started.

  Mr Jamieson: I am certainly not negative about it because we are putting over £80 million into it.

  Q559  Chairman: I will read the transcript, David. It came over to me as pretty negative.

  Mr Jamieson: If I did, then let me put it right, right now. We put in this substantial amount of money on the basis of some of the other authorities that have been operating the Yellow Bus. We put it in because we think it is a good, innovative idea for us to fund. We want now to see West Yorkshire use the system. We want to see what the pitfalls are, what the advantages are, and to see if that can be rolled out into other areas. If it proves to be good value, both in social terms and economic terms, then we would want to replicate it elsewhere.


 
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