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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