UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 509-v

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

DRAFT SCHOOL TRANSPORT BILL

 

Wednesday 19 May 2004

MR STEPHEN TWIGG, MP and MR DAVID JAMIESON, MP

Evidence heard in Public Questions 442 - 566

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 19 May 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Valerie Davey

Jeff Ennis

Mr Nick Gibb

Helen Jones

Mr Kerry Pollard

________________

Witnesses: Mr Stephen Twigg, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, Department for Education and Skills, and Mr David Jamieson, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport and Shipping, DVO Agencies and European Minister, Department for Transport, examined.

Q442 Chairman: Can I welcome Stephen Twigg and David Jamieson to our proceedings. I have to tell you, David, you will be competing for air time when Stephen gets going. He answers questions well but fully!

Mr Jamieson: Thank you, Chairman. It is a pleasure to be here this morning especially as seven years ago I used to be a member of the Committee. We had some very interesting reports, but nothing with the depth and interest that you have had in recent years.

Q443 Chairman: Do you want to say anything to begin with or are you happy to go straight to questions?

Mr Twigg: I would like to say a couple of things. First of all, I would like to welcome the work that you are doing as part of the pre-legislative scrutiny on this Bill. Clearly what I would want to emphasise is that the Bill is part of our broader strategy that we set out last year in terms of school travel schemes. The system that we have got at the moment and that we have had for 60 years is one that serves a small minority of pupils, around one in ten of the school population and the focus of the Bill is very much on seeking to address the needs of all pupils and their families and, in particular, to address those two and a half million daily school journeys that are done by car, something like one in three journeys, many of which are journeys of between one and three miles. What we want to do is to work as far as possible on a consensual basis, across parties, working with schools, head teachers, local government and the churches to try to reach some kind of agreement about how we can improve the system for the future and I very much see this as part of that. I know that last week you had the representatives of the Local Government Association here and I think their evidence very much reflected the fact that this is a piece of work which local government has asked us to undertake and which we are very pleased to be taking forward in partnership with local government.

Q444 Chairman: David, do you want to say anything?

Mr Jamieson: If I may just make a few remarks. I am grateful for the opportunity to appear with my colleague in front of the Committee on this small but very important Bill. I think this is a good opportunity for my Department to demonstrate its support for the School Transport Bill. From the transport perspective, we welcome the opportunity that the Bill would bring to a local authority to come up with innovative ways of meeting the need of pupils travelling to school and, in particular, reducing car dependency could relieve pressure on our transport networks and, just as importantly, encourage healthier and more independent forms of travel for young people to schools. We will be working very closely with the DfES in taking forward the pilot schemes and we share the overall aim of ensuring that they should enable more children to travel to school not only by bus but we also hope that more will be able to travel by foot or cycle as well.

Q445 Chairman: Thank you for that. The first question I wanted to ask is, are we all wasting our time? I was with the Secretary of State for Education and Skills in Thurrock on Monday morning. He did not say anything to me at that time about this Bill being scrapped, but later in the day I was contacted by the media to suggest that that indeed is what is happening to this Bill, that because it seems that the official Opposition may not support the Bill then the Government will walk away from it. Is that true?

Mr Twigg: It would certainly be a dramatic start to our proceedings this morning if I suggested that and it might even have resulted in a rather brief session. What we have sought to do, Chairman, as I said in my opening remarks, is to work on a cross-party basis and certainly in local government, as was reflected last week, there is cross-party support for this from all three main parties and the independent group. What Charles Clarke and I have sought to do is to see whether we can build a similar level of consensus here in Parliament, hence the meeting that we had last week with Tim Yeo and Tim Collins and the media reports are pretty accurate. Tim Yeo indicated that the Conservatives will oppose this at Second Reading and Charles and I expressed our disappointment at that. We are not, on the basis of that, deciding to withdraw the Bill. We want to proceed with the process of scrutiny and consultation that we are undertaking. I have had a number of meetings with relevant stakeholders, many of whom have been before this Committee and we will then consider where the Bill goes in the light of your work on this Committee, the other scrutiny and the consultation.

Q446 Chairman: We have worked out that we have cost about £50,000 in consultancy fees so far in looking at this Bill, so you can probably split that between the two of you if this Bill does not go through. We have had a lot of evidence already and, of course, both Charles Clarke and you, Stephen, gave evidence to the Transport Select Committee and you have seen their report. The thing that comes through consistently here in terms of the evidence that we have taken - and I have to say that the LGA session was the most positive towards the Bill and there have been a lot of negatives as well - is why have the Bill. There are lots of innovative schemes up and down the country. Local authorities are introducing all sorts of interesting schemes to see if they can tackle this problem and they do not do not seem to need legislation to do it. Why introduce a simple but quite complex piece of legislation in the sense that it is an innovative piece of legislation and have the trials and pilots if you can do it without legislation?

Mr Twigg: I think it is fair to say that there is a lot of good work going on in schools and local education authorities already and we certainly want the Bill and the pilots around the Bill to go with the grain in that respect and there is a lot that we can learn from them. What local government has said to us, and we agree, and again it is reflected in the evidence that they gave last week, is that the ability to have a careful charging policy that goes beyond existing charging policies is important if local government is going to be able to try out some innovative schemes. So I think it is fair to say, and the point has been made by a number of Committee members in previous sessions of this inquiry, that the key element from the Education Department point of view that requires the primary legislation is to enable the charging outside of the statutory distances and that is why we need legislation. If we were not legislating I have no doubt there is a great deal more we could do and a lot of that is happening already. I think the combination of the good work that is happening out there already with this legislation will enable us to maximise the impact and learn some lessons. We are criticised from two different perspectives: one is to say why do it at all, you can do a lot already within existing legislation; the other criticism is we are not going far enough fast enough, why are we simply piloting it, why do we not come up with something ourselves and have that as a national system. In a sense we have struck a quite happy medium where we are not seeking to impose something because, frankly, we do not know what we would impose, there is not a consensus in that respect about what a new national system would be, but we do allow the innovations of local government to be tested out through the pilots and I think that combination does make sense.

Q447 Chairman: If there are too many people taking their children to school, if it is urgent in terms of the environment, it is urgent in terms of children's health, it is urgent in terms of congestion, 2011 is a hell of a long way off to wait to get some substantial change. Many people think it is not fast enough. If you have got a real sense of urgency then why not introduce this legislation and say to every local authority "Go ahead, guys, pilot away"?

Mr Twigg: I think we are moving pretty quickly. This is a system that we have had for 60 years. Through this draft Bill we are setting up the opportunity for pilots over a period of five years. If we had set a timescale that was much tighter than that people may well have criticised us for a rush job and seeking to get things changed overnight.

Q448 Chairman: We are supposed to be a radical government, are we not?

Mr Twigg: We are also a government that wants to do things that work. We want to make sure that we have pilots that, first of all, have local buy in, we want local authorities to be fully consulting at the local level to ensure that there is that local support and that there is sufficient time for us to be able to test the effectiveness of the pilots, both locally evaluating but also for us to be doing that nationally as well and I think the length of time that is provided in this makes a lot of sense.

Q449 Chairman: Minister, you used the term "buy in". We have had a lot of evidence here of local education authorities saying they are not interested in a buy in, there is nothing in it, in fact there are a lot of negatives because there is no money in it. Why would they buy in to a pilot to do something that is going to cost all of them a substantial amount of money? Even the LGA say none of these pilots is cost-neutral. Why would they buy in if you do not give them the stimulus and attraction of some money with it?

Mr Twigg: Because they have said through their Association that they want to be able to do pilot changes, that they regard the present system as unsatisfactory because the cost of home to school transport has spiralled so much over recent years and because, like us, they recognise that a doubling of the number of school car journeys over a 20-year period is not something that we want to support or sustain. I have had meetings with the Local Government Association where they have said to me privately exactly what they have said to you publicly and if I were them I would be pressing for money for pump-priming of these schemes, but we are talking about an area of work that already involves a very substantial amount of money, £500/£600 million a year being spent on home to school transport and I think the potential benefits that will come to local government from these schemes actually means that they will come up with the very small amounts of money that they have identified for pump-priming from their own budgets. I will have to consider this more broadly in terms of the schools' budget in the DfES.

Q450 Chairman: Yes, but they are doing this and taking money away from other things that they should be using the money on..

Mr Twigg: The alternative is that we take money away from other things that we should be spending money on centrally.

Q451 Chairman: You should be asking the Department of Transport and the Chancellor for extra money.

Mr Twigg: I think the amounts of money we are talking about for pump-priming are really quite small.

Q452 Chairman: That is not what the LGAs said. They said they were in favour of this but they wanted money.

Mr Twigg: I know they said that, I read the evidence and they came and said that to me, but I think they also talked about £100,000 or £200,000. We are not talking about masses of money. We have had expressions of interest from two dozen authorities. We have a good range of authorities across the country already expressing an interest in taking this forward. I am sceptical of the suggestion that us not coming up with pump-priming will mean that we do not get authorities volunteering, I think we will and we are already seeing signs that they are.

Q453 Chairman: What is emerging is presumably what Tim Yeo and his team were asking you in that private session, ie is this about saving money or is it about cutting down on congestion?

Mr Twigg: It is about cutting down on congestion and, in particular, it is about reducing the car run to school which has doubled over the last 20 years. This is most explicitly not a cost cutting exercise.

Q454 Chairman: The LGA were licking their lips about saving money.

Mr Twigg: What they have to do with the money, if they raise some money through charging, is they have to then use that money for their school transport schemes. They cannot use the money to cut the council tax or put in another programme within education or in another part of the council's spend. We are not saying we want to reduce the amount that is spent in this area, we are saying that we do not think we are getting the real impact that we should be getting for such a substantial amount of public spending and that is why we want those authorities that choose to try out a new charging system to use the money they raise from that to improve, in particular, the bus transport that they provide for pupils and the wider local community.

Q455 Chairman: What people have said to us, experts in transport policy, is that the central flaw of the whole idea of the Bill is that here you are trying to cut down the school run, especially the longer journeys and you are going to do that by introducing charging. It does seem as though the very thing you want to do is going to have the reverse effect in many ways because more people, especially on the longer runs, will switch to private transport, they will switch to the gas guzzling 4x4s or whatever. Although the LGA scoffed at the academics, the serious transport academics of the highest level, the professors of transport, have said to us the central flaw is you could well have the opposite effect to the one you intend.

Mr Twigg: I am not going to scoff at that because I think it is critical that we get this right and it is part of the reason why we are piloting this rather than introducing a new scheme straightaway, because clearly there is a level of charge at which that effect would happen and we want to ensure that those authorities that go down the route of charging those who currently are not charged do so at a level that does not have that effect because our main purpose in doing this is to reduce the school car run. Most of those car journeys are actually within the statutory limits, so there is a potential effect with respect to those that currently get free travel because of the statutory limits, but actually most of the home-to-school journeys by car are conducted within those limits. The potential positive side is that we actually get better bus services available at the local level for the kids who live within the statutory distances and, therefore, they are not using the car and that is what we do not know, that is the balancing act and that is what we are piloting.

Mr Jamieson: It is about reducing the car run which potentially will reduce the congestion, but I see much more to flow out of this than that. What we do know is the most dangerous time for children on the road is between eight and nine in the morning and three and five in the afternoon and, of course, those are the times when they are coming to school or going home from school and the number of vehicles that there are on the roads then increases the risk to children, if they are pedestrians or cyclists or even if they are actually in the car, so it is a road safety issue as well. There is also the other issue of pollution around schools particularly in the afternoon and in the winter. If mums or dads are waiting outside the school with the engine running sometimes for up to half an hour this is causing a considerable amount of pollution in the immediate vicinity of the schools, so we have a concern about that. The other one I mentioned earlier is that if we can encourage more children to walk or cycle rather than use the car or even for short journeys use the bus then that would be better for their health. I feel the frustration in that this may take a long time to roll out. It has to be seen in the context of the school travel plans which we have about 3,500 of in place now. They are looking at better ways that they can travel to school, better ways of using resources. It seems to me that what we are dealing with here is not necessarily more money but actually making much better use of the money that we are ploughing into the system at the moment. I do worry that there are billions of children perhaps who in some ways do not have access to the bus because it is there for the children over three miles or over two miles in the case of primary children. What we need to be doing is looking at innovative ways of attracting some of those children who are currently living just that bit too far to walk, particularly in rural areas where there is no lighting and footpaths, being able to use the school bus. That would reduce the number of children using the car and increase the bus patronage as well.

Q456 Chairman: You and I share a concern for transport safety, David, and we know that a child on a bus is much safer than a child in an individual private car, but making more kids pedestrians on roads that have no paving or cycling paths is a dangerous mode of transport in the modern age, is it not?

Mr Jamieson: It is partly because there is a lot of congestion around schools. What I have seen in some areas where there have been positive efforts made to reduce the car run is the number of cars around the school at those sensitive times being reduced very substantially. Our role here is through local transport plan funding. These are not just issues necessarily to do with buses. It may be that authorities, and many of them do, look particularly in the vicinity of schools where they can create 20-mile an hour zones, where they can improve footpaths, where they can improve the cycle tracks, but all of these things are possible now, authorities do not have to wait for this Bill or wait for the pilots and they are doing it and improving the circumstances around schools to make the journey safer and better for children.

Chairman: Let us go back to the purpose of the legislation.

Q457 Mr Chaytor: Minister, this week the DfES announced the grants to the first batch of extended schools and in the press notice that went with it the intention was clear, that all schools should ultimately be able to apply for extended school status. If all schools are going to take on this role and, therefore, their opening hours are going to be longer and the variety of functions taking place on the school site is going to be enhanced, does that make it easier or more difficult to implement the kind of school travel plans you want to see?

Mr Twigg: I think in some respects it makes it more difficult for obvious reasons. Clearly if children are all arriving at the same time and leaving at the same time it is easier to plan the transport. The growth of extended schools actually makes it more important that we do what we are doing. We have a rural schools group in the Department that consists primarily of people working in rural schools and we discussed the School Transport Bill and some of the concerns that have been reflected in evidence, for example from SHA, were reflected in that discussion. One of the heads there made the point that the current system is very limited because it provides that free journey in and out in the morning but it does not necessarily have the flexibility for children and young people who are particularly leaving school at different times because of after-school activities. If we can achieve what we are aiming to achieve, which is to free the system up and to have more money in the local system partly through charging, then I think there is an opportunity for those children who stay behind after school to be able to get subsidised transport which at the moment they would not have access to.

Q458 Mr Chaytor: On the question of the Bill itself, would it not be simpler, quicker, cheaper and easier to legislate for no parking zones around schools, say within 100 metres or 200 metres? Would that not kill a large part of the morning school run at a stroke?

Mr Jamieson: No, I do not think it would because what would happen then is people would park, as they do in many parts of London, some way away from the school and clog up the roads there and walk their children down the road into the school. That would just create another problem. Some of the funding that we provide is for local authorities to look at making safer zones around schools and many of them have. There is not one solution to this because all schools will be different and the circumstances outside a school will be very different one to another. If an authority sees a particular problem outside the school that perhaps the head or the governors have identified or the parents, for example speeding, it may be possible to put a 20 mile an hour zone in or in some cases it may be appropriate to close certain of the roads around a school. Those are things that would have to be decided locally. What you suggested is perfectly possible now but I certainly would not recommend it as a blueprint for 24,000 schools.

Q459 Mr Chaytor: Apart from the charging issue, is there anything else in current legislation, either the 1944 Education Act or the Transport Act, which needs repealing?

Mr Jamieson: The one thing that section 4 of this Bill does is it removes the need for an authority to register a bus service with the traffic commissioner if they are making a charge. If they do not make a charge they do not have to register it currently. This is a small but important part of the Bill and it means that they do not have to go through the registration process with the traffic commissioner. That is another small legislative change that is needed.

Q460 Mr Chaytor: Why not move to a new School Transport Bill that tidies everything up rather than inviting these pilot schools? What some of our witnesses have found difficult to understand and what the Committee finds difficult to appreciate is this unusual process of picking a number out of the air, 20 pilot schemes, why 20, why not 30, rather than repealing all the problems in current legislation in one Bill and then just allowing local authorities to get on with it.

Mr Jamieson: I think there is a feeling that we have a Bill in front of us and this is the only show in town, which clearly it is not. This is a lot of very good work going on at the moment with authorities and with funding that we have jointly provided through our departments for improving cycle sheds, for example, and facilities for children to walk or cycle to school. There is a lot already going on that does not need any legislative changes but it needs good guidance, it needs the sharing of good practice. We have good practice guides for authorities. The positive way forward is to look at good examples of how schools or local authorities have improved the circumstances for children travelling to school and then sharing that information and expertise.

Mr Twigg: There is a lot that we are doing already and that can be done without legislation. With respect to the idea of a general piece of legislation rather than pilots, I suppose I am repeating something that I said earlier and it belies the reminder that the Chairman gave me that we are a radical Government, but I think we are being cautious about this because there is not a consensus about what the nature of such legislation would be. The Transport Select Committee referred to the Danish example and Denmark has gone down a particular route which we can certainly take a look at and I know that Nick, in questions to our officials, asked about whether we had a view about an appropriate walking distance in 2004 compared to the ones in 1944. It is difficult to come up with something like that. That would be an option, to reduce the distances. If you reduced the distances and kept it free then it would cost a lot more money, but you could reduce the distances and bring in some sort of national scheme for charging. I am not sure we either have the evidence for that or anything like a consensus for doing that and for that reason it does make sense for us to pilot a number of different schemes in different areas.

Q461 Mr Chaytor: Do you envisage that the charging regimes will be fixed or variable?

Mr Twigg: What do you mean by fixed or variable?

Q462 Mr Chaytor: Would you encourage a fixed fee of £1 per day or should it be variable according to the distance from home to school that the pupil is travelling?

Mr Twigg: I think we would want to look at a range of different options on that. First of all, we would not necessarily look at the same charge in different parts of the country because we want to take into account equity considerations and I do not think we would want to say that because you live ten miles away you should be paying twice what someone who lives five miles away pays. I think we would want to look at some fixed schemes, but if an authority could come forward with a convincing argument as to why they wanted some variability we would be willing to consider that. We have also said that we would want to take into account family size because clearly if there are a lot of children at school in the family then to charge exactly the same amount to each member of the family could (a) drive them into the car or (b) have a very negative effect if they do not have a car.

Chairman: Kerry Pollard has made this point many times as he has seven children.

Q463 Mr Gibb: Let me pick up two of the things that you have said, the first is that only one in ten benefits from free travel and most car journeys take place within the statutory walking limits. Is the purpose of the Bill to charge for the longer journeys and then to use that revenue to try to subsidise the shorter journeys within the statutory limits, so in essence you have fewer long journeys provided by public transport or transport schemes and more of the shorter journeys and the net effect of that would be fewer car journeys?

Mr Twigg: That is right. Clearly there are a number of other features of school transport that we are keen to address through this process, but in terms of that which is a consequence of having legislation and making changes to the charging regime, the impact that we are seeking to bring about is a reduction in the car run, it is a greater use of buses as well as walking and cycling and the means by which that would be achieved is exactly as you describe, yes.

Q464 Mr Gibb: Is there not a danger in that philosophy that you are basically reducing parental choice in the type of schools they go to particularly for those people on low incomes, because it is the long journeys that are the expensive ones to provide unless a state has some way of subsidising them, and if you reduce that subsidy the people that will suffer are the people that want to go to a Catholic school or to a music school or a language school and the people on low incomes will not be able to afford to make those journeys? So there is a very regressive social agenda going on here at the same time.

Mr Twigg: I hope not and that is certainly not the intention. I had a meeting yesterday with the Catholic and Anglican Churches and they expressed some similar concerns and obviously we have to reflect upon that. There is no suggestion of charging the full cost of the transport, so the subsidy would certainly still be there under any scheme that any local authority wishes to come forward with. The whole area of travel, for example, to denominational schools is a complex one because the present legislation does not provide free transport, it is discretionary and whilst most authorities choose to exercise that discretion either by providing free or assisted transport costs for pupils to go to their nearest relevant denominational school, we are increasingly seeing authorities cutting back or removing those provisions. I think there is an issue as to whether we are moving forward with this legislation or not and there may even be potential benefits for children who are going to denomination or indeed other schools from this legislation if we can get the improvement in bus and other services that we are seeking to bring about. In terms of it being economically regressive, we have said as a bear minimum that those children eligible for free school meals who are currently benefiting from free transport must still do so and we have also said that we will look very positively at schemes that take a wider definition of poverty because obviously there are families that do not qualify for free school meals but who, nevertheless, are poor. We would look kindly at schemes that take that into account. There will be beneficiaries in terms of those who may gain access to subsidised transport who live within the limits and they will be from a range of backgrounds. I see no particular reason why they are any less likely to be from some of the poorest families. It may even be that they are slightly more likely to be from some of the poorest families.

Q465 Mr Gibb: To the extent that you are mitigating the effects of what I have been describing, you are reducing the cash available to reduce the number of shorter car journeys, are you not, so the net effect of the Bill may be negligible if what you say is right about mitigating those effects?

Mr Twigg: Yes, it is a balancing act and if we were to go down a route which enabled charging at full cost regardless of the means of the family potentially that would bring more money into the system, although it probably would have the effect of driving more people into their cars. Yes, we are seeking to strike a balance here. The local authorities gave evidence about the level of charging that might be viable and that will bring some money into the system. It will not bring as much money into the system were we to go down a route of deregulating altogether, but I think the potential harmful effects of that would outweigh the benefits.

Mr Jamieson: I think one of the potential benefits here is that for those children who are currently travelling quite long ways, particularly in the winter, let us say a secondary child walking up to 2.9, there is an opportunity here for attracting some of those children out of their parents' cars and onto public transport. I think that is where the advantage lies. For some parents this may actually enhance the choice of schools because at the moment some parents may choose not to send their children, particularly primary children, to one that is just a little bit further away because they know they will not get the free transport, but taking them to one a bit further away where they know a bus at a reasonable cost is available may be very attractive to them.

Q466 Mr Gibb: Have you taken into account this very point about parents dropping off their child on the way to work? They will continue to do that, will they not? Have you assessed the concept that parents will just drop their children off on the way to work?

Mr Jamieson: It will not change every single journey. I think I said to the Transport Select Committee that there will be the morning when the child has the cello lesson and when walking to school is not much of an option. For children with special needs of course travelling by car is very important to them. There may be occasions when it is important to take the child to school by car, if that is an option, but at the moment that is difficult in many schools because of the amount of congestion outside of the school. It is not a matter of taking away all journeys and there may be people that still want to drop the children off on the way to work, but it is looking at flexibility locally and things like flexible school hours or changing the school hours has to be taken into consideration, parental needs, the needs of the children. These are quite complex issues and that is really why we are not setting out a blueprint here. It is terribly important these things are worked out locally and particularly at a micro level with the individual schools and governing bodies.

Q467 Mr Gibb: There was a lot of hostility to parental choice from other witnesses who saw it as a conflict with reducing congestion because the most choices parents have, in theory, the more journeys there will be as people do not necessarily go to their local school. Is your view that parental choice is important or do you see parental choice as contradicting congestion issues?

Mr Twigg: We certainly believe parental choice is very important. I know that in some of the previous questioning the suggestion has been that there is some inherent contradiction or tension between the two policies. We do want to ensure that that choice is available, but we also want to ensure that the local neighbourhood school is of a high quality so that parents are exercising a real choice on the basis of good quality options.

Q468 Chairman: When you met Tim Yeo and Tim Collins was one of the questions the unfairness of the fact that people sending their children to private school do not get any help with school transport?

Mr Twigg: I do not recall that being raised, no, Chairman.

Q469 Chairman: Is there a view that they should have free school transport? Would the pilots allow that?

Mr Twigg: Interestingly, one of the pilots may be considering an option where there is co-ordination between independent state schools. Cambridgeshire - and I believe Councillor Wilkinson was here before you last week - is considering an option where there is some shared transport between private and state schools.

Chairman: We are moving on to pilots, powers and funding. We are going to have Kerry leading us through this territory.

Q470 Mr Pollard: Derek mentioned earlier on about road safety being one of the most important features in this. As a parent of many two things grabbed me. Firstly, taking seven children to school was fairly cheap if I used my own transport. If I used the buses provided by the education authorities I needed a second mortgage to fund it. Secondly, as a parent and a grandparent I feel that when kids are taken from their door and dropped off at the door of the school that is the safest possible option. So I think there is a big challenge ahead there in persuading parents that it is better, safer and all the other things that you have talked about this morning to get them out of the car. Rather than just telling them it is better there has got to be some real incentives to get that step change. We have skirted around the choice thing this morning. Would it not be simpler to overturn the Greenwich judgment so that kids went to their local school rather than all this messing about? I think Nick was hinting at that but did not say it.

Mr Twigg: Let me talk about the Greenwich judgment because removal of the Greenwich judgment would not necessarily have that effect at all because a lot of kids get into their local school because of the Greenwich judgment if their local school happens to be a local authority boundary. I am not sure it would have quite the dramatic effect that you suggest. You are absolutely right on your first point that the scale of the challenge that we face with regard to persuading parents and those caring for children is big and an important element of it is about child safety and perfectly understandable fears that parents have about safety if their children are going to school on foot or if they are going on public transport. What I think gives me hope on this, and in a sense this is outside of the legislation, is the evidence of some of those schools that have pursued this through particularly Safer Routes to School. There are some brilliant examples and I know you have had them brought to the attention of the Committee by previous witnesses where car use has been dramatically reduced, walking, school buses, cycle routes and all the rest of it.

Q471 Mr Pollard: We heard about it in my own constituency.

Mr Twigg: Indeed. It happens across the country. We talked earlier on about money. One area where we have put in some extra money is the capital grant for schools for things like cycle racks and lockers and those sorts of things and more and more schools are taking up these grants which are available over the next two years and I think they will make a very serious difference. There is £40 million going into that to make it practical for schools to encourage children to cycle and to walk and take the other routes and that will help. I think we then have a broader job of work to do of reassurance.

Q472 Mr Pollard: No mention is made of school-to-school transport within the day and that is a huge cost. Can we look at the radical joining together of schools by using new technology so that kids do not need to be transported. That would require substantial capital investment but it would be revenue friendly year-on-year.

Mr Twigg: That is critical in all sorts of different ways when we look at the curriculum. Members of the committee will be aware that there are some very good schemes where this is happening already, where new technology is being used to enable a lesson to be taught in one school but for the students to be in several schools and that does not even have to be in the country, it can be global and I have seen good examples in assisting modern foreign language learning where that can be done and I think that is particularly relevant for obvious reasons for rural schools.

Q473 Mr Pollard: Peter Housden of your Department suggested that £2 billion was available to do the pilots and yet others have suggested that £650 million is nearer to the mark and even half of that is allocated for special needs, transport and things like that, so it gets smaller and smaller. Is the cost-neutral thing going to feature in all of that?

Mr Twigg: You are right, £2 billion is the total amount that is the system.

Q474 Chairman: But that includes pensioners' transfers to care sessions and all of that stuff.

Mr Twigg: The £650 million is much closer to the mark. It is a lot of money and it has increased significantly above the general increase in schools' funding let alone the general increase in inflation in recent years. I think that is money that could be spent more wisely if we are to achieve the objectives that we are all talking about.

Q475 Chairman: Can pilots involving the staggering of school hours ever work without a designated body or person who has power to co-ordinate?

Mr Twigg: I think they can. I think there is evidence of areas where that is already happening. I know a concern that has been expressed by the headteacher associations is the idea that this could be something imposed on them by central government or local authorities and we are not going down that route because I have certainly got some schools in my own constituency where they staggered the opening hours and it seems to have a positive effect in terms of some of the issues around congestion that we have talked about today.

Q476 Chairman: Who co-ordinated that?

Mr Twigg: The headteachers work very closely together. It is a secondary school with three primary schools. The LGA may well play a role.

Q477 Chairman: They said that is the most difficult area.

Mr Twigg: There is the potential for a very significant amount of money to be saved through staggering because of the way that the buses can be used more effectively and, therefore, the potential for that money to be used to provide more bus services. I think it was Essex who did some work on this which showed that just by staggering by about 15 minutes in the morning they could save several hundreds of thousands of pounds to reinvest in their school bus service.

Q478 Valerie Davey: I am interested that the pilots are coming from LEAs and none from individual schools. Is this the Department's way of saying collaborate between schools as opposed to individual schools making bids?

Mr Twigg: Yes, very much so. Clearly the scale of these bids is going to vary. We are going to have some relatively small authorities that are applying, we are going to have some of the biggest counties in England applying and whether they will run a scheme for their entire county is still up for discussion between us and them. I do think you get benefits from these pilots in terms of evidence. It needs to be collaborated between schools. We are not going to be looking at schemes that are simply for one school. The other associated issue is that we are very keen to have several authorities collaborating with each other around issues to do with cross-border travel by children as well and that is being considered by some of the county authorities in England.

Q479 Valerie Davey: And yet, Minister, you have twice today already mentioned the fact that schools can bid for a cycle shed. Does that not hang rather uneasily? Here we have a minister talking about a cycle shed and LEAs are being asked to talk about big schemes.

Mr Twigg: I think it makes sense for individual schools to develop their Safer Routes to Schools scheme. Involving the pupils themselves in these things is very important and it is part of citizenship and PSHE. I do not see a contradiction between saying that we have a set of capital grants which go to individual schools and which add up to quite a lot of money nationally - we are talking about £5,000 for a primary and £10,000 for a secondary - I think it makes sense for that to be at the school level, but the broader view about how the £650 million is best spent should be taken at a broader level by the LEA or even several LEAs working together.

Q480 Valerie Davey: I find that a complete anomaly.

Mr Twigg: Do you.

Valerie Davey: I just cannot believe that an individual school, in the context of a plan which has to be, I think you have already admitted, a shared look through several schools, then has to make this separate bid for a cycle shed. I can remember, sadly, two things from long ago. I can remember in the 60s when a Bristol Chief Education Officer told its school that its head teacher could buy a box of matches for the caretaker to light the boiler. Permission came from the Chief Education Officer. Looking back, Minister, the idea that your department is looking at an individual bike shed I think is crazy. I will just say that and we will move on.

Q481 Chairman: You should be abolishing bike sheds. We all know the English tradition of what happens behind bike sheds!

Mr Twigg: Absolutely.

Q482 Valerie Davey: I had not thought of that, Chairman.

Mr Jamieson: These days they are see-through ones generally. If I could make a point, I think innovation happens at all sorts of different levels. Clearly, with something like these pilots, it just could not happen at the individual school level because the implication is so big, and in fact the implication is so large in some areas it may be LEAs working together on these particular things. I think that is important. It is also very important that highways authorities work together; some of the highways authorities' funding will be used to enhance certain parts of what we intend to do here. But, equally, we should not be stifling innovation and good ideas that are coming from individual schools. I visited a school in Nailsea, not too far from your own constituency, the Golden Valley School, which has a wonderful cycling scheme. The children, the head teachers, the governors and parents came up with the idea. That is an exemplar for others to follow. It is not something you could lay as a blueprint for all authorities and all schools, but they have found a solution which works for them and that type of school, working with the highways authority particularly, in improving the routes into the school. I think that is a good idea. We should not be stifling that. We have to intervene, if you like, at levels where it is appropriate. If it is my Department or the DfES providing some money to an individual scheme that is of advantage to them, then so be it.

Q483 Valerie Davey: Thank you. I appreciate that. I would like to link that in one way with this incentive idea. We have to give youngsters incentives. This, again, is going back a bit: I do not quite go back to the penny farthing day, but my bus fare actually was a penny farthing to school. I was given that money every day and I knew that if I got off the bus early I could save some money, and I did. I only spent a penny on my bus fare and I still have at home those wonderful wren farthings. You need to give children that incentive, is what I am saying. Why do we not pay children to walk to school? Let's turn it on its head. Let's start saying to ourselves: What incentive do young people need? What do families need for their whole budgeting, to get them to be doing what is the healthy, obvious thing. I know circumstances have changed. My mum did not know I was getting off the bus, and if she had known where I was getting off the bus in certain circumstances -----

Mr Pollard: I am going to tell her!

Valerie Davey: You can. There are aspects to that, and I realise the world has moved on, but children's personal incentive and family incentives to do the right thing, given the money, is still there. I know you cannot take money from that which parents have paid for a bus fare and put it into education, but if we are looking at things in the round ... We visited a school in Boston, for example, that was given transport money but its children were local and so that transport money was used to get those children out of the city into the country, going on visits and other things. They went to the art galleries and to concerts on the basis of transport money they did not need to get to school. We need to blow this apart a bit. I would like to know what has been coming through.

Q484 Chairman: I think you are blowing the ministers' minds. I think this is all too much for them.

Mr Twigg: No.

Q485 Mr Pollard: Not these two!

Mr Twigg: I am thinking that is right, and we need to have grander thoughts about these things. The legislation is here, it is important, and that is what you are scrutinising, but actually the legislation is only one part of this. There is potential to do all sorts of other things, like the things you describe, some of which schools are doing. Schools are doing some of those things already. We need to remember that and praise the schools which are doing that and showcase those examples of work. In terms of the bill itself and the pilots - I am thinking slightly laterally about this - I think there is the possibility that monies could be used to look at the sort of transport that is available during the day to take children from the school to get cultural, sporting and other opportunities. There is some potential for that to be done and I think that would be a perfectly proper use of the money, because that is to do with providing better transport opportunities that, sadly, the current system does not provide.

Mr Jamieson: Part of the incentive to walk is not having to pay for the journey into school, either by car or by bus. At the moment, a lot of parents perceive the journey to school as dangerous, either on a personal security level or from a road safety point of view. That is why we have to look at these innovative ways of making the journey to school safer. Kerry seems to have his own walking-bus, with seven children, but where walking buses are working, where there is a skilled and trained adult who is in charge of the children, picks them up and walks with them, parents feel very confident about those arrangements because they know someone is in charge, and very often the authority will have looked at making sure the crossings, the puffin crossings and so on, are in place so that they can cross safely. This is a matter of balancing some of those issues and looking at innovative ways in each area as to how we can improve the journey by walking. My ambition would be that children, where possible, should walk - and that is where we should start. If we could make it possible for them to cycle, that is the next area. If then we can provide buses for those who obviously have longer or more difficult journeys, that is fine. I think the last option then is using the private car.

Q486 Chairman: This is a very innovative Committee and we have obviously shown that you can think outside the bus!

Mr Jamieson: Absolutely.

Q487 Chairman: You heard that first here. In term of the resources, it does come back all the time to this problem that if you want really innovative pilots, some of them would be quite expensive. We have heard evidence that you really want a very complex transport logistics system, with global positioning and very fancy IT - which in taxi fleets is normal. Companies like Tesco and the big mail order people have very, very sophisticated transport logistics systems now that could be applied to school transport, linked to social services transport, to health transport. If someone is going to come up with a really innovative partnership like that, that is going to cost money. You are not going to get a pilot like that unless that is allowable. Do you think that is true?

Mr Jamieson: A lot of authorities are using good logistical systems for their buses, and proper signing for buses at bus-stops using sometimes satellite or sometimes other technology at the side of the road. There is no reason why authorities cannot in their local transport plan funding be looking for funding for those sorts of things, which could complement some of the work they are doing in the pilots.

Q488 Chairman: So there would be other sources of funding coming from that possibly.

Mr Jamieson: It is up to the authority to decide how they want to spend their local transport plan money. As long as it fits the broad remit of what money is available for, there is nothing to stop them coming up with innovative ideas such as that.

Mr Twigg: The Yellow Bus Scheme in Yorkshire was funded in that way.

Mr Jamieson: Indeed. We provided £18.7 million for the Yellow Bus Scheme, which is a classic example of an innovation in the local authority area, where they applied for it through the Local Transport Plan funding system.

Q489 Mr Chaytor: The bill says that the main objective of the pilot schemes is to reduce car use. Are there other criteria by which you are going to evaluate the success of the pilots?

Mr Twigg: I think reducing car use is the key objective. I think it is important that we have a key objective. There are clearly a number of other benefits that could come from successful schemes. I think they have been explored in previous sessions. David, you asked earlier on about extended schools and I think the opportunity for better, affordable access to after-school activities is another potential benefit at which we would want to look. During the discussion today, we have talked about safety, congestion, pollution around schools - all of those issues as well - but I would say the key thing is about reducing car use.

Q490 Mr Chaytor: Do you now know the rate of car use in each local authority?

Mr Twigg: We do not, but we should be in a position to know this far more fully, for a number of reasons. David can talk about the transport surveys that the Transport Department does. We do have surveys that are currently done in schools. I think Peter Housden made a brief reference to this when he gave evidence. We are looking at the pupil-level annual school census as a possible source of what would be very, very detailed and accurate information school by school about the level of car use, so we would know, not only for each authority but for each school. We have a broad picture at the moment but I think we need that very detailed picture so we can assess whether the pilots are working.

Q491 Mr Chaytor: As things stand in the bill, there are no targets for reduced car use, so how are you going to evaluate the success? Even accepting that by the time the pilots come in there may be reasonably accurate data school by school, how can you evaluate the success if there are no targets?

Mr Twigg: We have not set a specific target, though we have set the target of reducing. We can evaluate by looking at whether it has gone down, up or stayed the same.

Q492 Mr Chaytor: If it was minus 0.1 per cent, would that be a success?

Mr Twigg: I do not think that would be a success, no. I think you asked Peter Housden if 2.5 per cent would be a success, which I think would clearly be more successful than 0.1 per cent. To be honest with you, this is an area at which we need to look in more detail. Part of the usefulness of having this process is that we can take things like that away from the Committee and have a look at them. We will have probably about 20 pilots in England and we want to work out in each of those a clear set of objectives, and I think we can consider as part of that whether to have a target for each of them.

Q493 Mr Chaytor: Are you saying you are confident now the local authorities have the mechanisms to produce reliable information about car use?

Mr Twigg: Yes.

Q494 Mr Chaytor: Are you confident the Department has the structures in place properly to evaluate the pilot schemes when they come in?

Mr Twigg: Yes, I think we have the structures in place. We need to do further work as to exactly what the nature of that evaluation will be. We need to sit down pilot authority by pilot authority to get some shared objectives. We would also very much want to encourage the authorities to be consulting widely, for example, with the local community, young people themselves. We want school pupils to be involved in this too.

Q495 Mr Chaytor: Will the evaluation criteria be established before the authorities submit their pilot schemes or only after they submit their pilot schemes?

Mr Twigg: The way that it is working is that informally expressions of interest are coming in already and we are having those sorts of discussions with the authorities on an informal basis. Once we get to the formal point of agreeing schemes, we would expect the evaluation to be in place for each of those individual schemes.

Q496 Mr Chaytor: Would you accept that from an authority's point of view it is difficult to know how to construct a pilot scheme unless they know what the evaluation criteria are?

Mr Twigg: I see what you are getting at. I think my view on that is we do not want to come in with a really strict set of criteria that is exactly the same nationally for every single scheme. We do want it to be much more of a conversation between us and the authorities.

Q497 Mr Gibb: How will you go about this in practice? Will you be sending questionnaires to parents, asking them how do they send their children to school now, and then, after the pilot, how do they send their children to school then? Will that be the basis of evaluation? Or will you just look at the roads system and see what is happening there?

Mr Twigg: I think it will be a mixture of things and we will use a number of different tools. Surveys of parents, pupils, schools are certainly a good idea; looking at the figures transport will have about the roads and congestion is also useful. But, to reiterate what I just said about the school census, this will enable us to ask pupils as part of that census: How do you usually come to school? and to have what will be a very accurate figure one year that we can compare with the figure the next year and the year after. If we can get that up and running in all of the pilot authorities, or at least some of them, we will have a very, very clear basis for making an evaluation. Somerset have said to us that they would like to try this out from next year for their own purposes, and I think there is potentially something there that could become universal, through the pupil-level annual school census.

Mr Jamieson: My Department will be able to provide free of charge to authorities an assessment of the movement of vehicles in their areas. I will not go into all that now, but there is technology that exists that shows the movement of vehicles and we will be able to provide some of that information to authorities. Of course, it will not necessarily be an indicator that the pilot has created whatever has happened, but it will add to the sort of information that authorities have about the movement of vehicles.

Q498 Mr Gibb: This causal link is important. There are so many other variables that can impact on transport any day or week or month.

Mr Jamieson: Indeed. It is quite a slippery area to grasp; nonetheless, it would add to the quality of information.

Q499 Chairman: Is it as slippery as the costing of the West Coast Line?

Mr Jamieson: If you would like me to answer the detailed question, I certainly will, but I am not sure it is within the remit of the hearing we are having today.

Q500 Chairman: What is that now, 500 per cent over budget?

Mr Twigg: Are you bidding to do a job swap with our esteemed colleague?

Mr Pollard: I will second that.

Q501 Chairman: I was suggesting the two of you could get together. They are seconding that.

Mr Twigg: I am sure, Chairman, you are not suggesting that we should cease the improvements on the West Coast Mainline.

Chairman: I just know that, in the private sector, if a construction project goes 5 per cent over budget, the manager in charge has a question mark against his name, and if it goes 20 per cent it is automatically the end of the relationship of the company. God knows what 500 per cent would mean. Anyway, that is a total diversion. Could I just ask Nick to finish off on this section and we are going to move on?

Q502 Mr Gibb: This is really a question for David. Current transport policy orthodoxy - and it is an orthodoxy that I do not happen to agree with - is that if you increase the amount of road space available it will simply be filled by other car users. If these pilots are successful and car journeys to school are reduced, people will simply then see that the roads are free and think," I might drive to work now instead of taking the bus." Completely unconnected with schools, that road space will simply be filled by others. Is that not current orthodoxy?

Mr Jamieson: I think that is true, that if you create extra space on the roads it tends to get filled up again. But I think there is something different here in that we are trying to change the thinking people have about the way children travel to school. It may be far more convenient, of course, for parents if children walk or cycle or get the bus than for them to take them by car, and that just changes people's total habits in what they do. In that case, if children cease doing what they were doing previously, travelling by car, and they travel in an alternative way to school, that will not be supplanted by other vehicles coming in. That is true in many areas where improved public transport has been put in, in some places where bus lanes have been put in. It does not necessarily mean they fill up with cars; it means you have a better flow of traffic.

Q503 Mr Gibb: The orthodoxy is wrong, then. Therefore, when you build a new road, it does not automatically get filled up. You cannot have it both ways. Either the orthodoxy is wrong or this scheme is not going to work.

Mr Jamieson: It does not apply to all circumstances. This will change people's habits and the way they work, just as in other areas of transport. If, for example, with logistics companies you can get better use of lorries, then you do not just get more lorries coming in. The companies actually reduce them because it is in their financial interests not to run all those vehicles. So if you improve the logistics, if you improve the service you have, the company may reduce its lorries by 20 per cent. That does not mean to say another load of lorries are going to replace it.

Q504 Mr Gibb: I agree with that.

Mr Twigg: I think members of the Committee are enjoying have a transport minister here for a change.

Chairman: We are.

Q505 Mr Pollard: We are talking about evaluation and monitoring. Some of the benefits that will be considerable are not really measurable; for example, that children will be fitter and all of that. It is said by teachers that children are aerobically excited if they walk to school, they are into learning much quicker and more able, straight off from the bell at nine o'clock. How do we incorporate that into the evaluation, so that we get a full picture rather than just a cost benefit of fewer cars and all of that?

Mr Jamieson: I do not think we have ever put a marker or a measure next to that sort of thing. It is true that if children are walking and sometimes if their parents are walking as well that is better for them. Something else we have missed out too is that I think the walking to school is actually a social occasion for children. It is a useful occasion when children interact with each other, talk to each other, and they see and they meet some of the hazards there are in life and get to cope with them and deal with them, and with proper attention from adults, either teachers or parents, this is a very important part of a child's growing up experience. In education, it is a bit like saying, "We are going for trip to the zoo, what is the value of it?" and trying to have a 20-point value. You do not always do that, do you? Anecdotally, teachers and parents will tell you things are better. That is a subjective view very often but I think those views are quite useful sometimes.

Q506 Chairman: Does Kerry not put his finger absolutely on the point, that here we have what a lot of people would view as a miserable bill about getting traffic congestion down and you have missed the opportunity so far to sell this bill in terms of improving the environment, improving children's health, as well as reducing congestion. You have really missed an opportunity of selling this bill in the best way possible and that is something you really ought to get right.

Mr Twigg: I hope we can get it right. I think it is fair criticism. I think it is important that we have clarity about having a priority that we are seeking to achieve and that it can be measurable. That is what certainly I have sought to do today, but it is absolutely fair to say there are a number of other potential benefits, of which children's enjoyment, potential health benefits in terms of fitness with walking and cycling to schools, are positives as well and we do need to use them in selling this. I agree.

Q507 Chairman: We take this role of pre-legislative inquiry very seriously. We do not see it as a ritual; we see it as trying to improve the bill and give you some ideas to improve the bill. I do hope you take some of the things up, even the very good view that Val introduced in terms of re-thinking this bill. Some people would say it is, in a sense, a very bureaucratic and slow way to get some fundamental change. Why not take Val's sort of thinking and say, "Let's just pass a bill that gives local authorities the opportunity to charge." That is the key bit of the bill and then you take Val's thinking and say, "We are going to incentivise, we are going to give serious extra cash to any local authority that really tackles the problem," so you turn it round. You give money to local authorities for new resources to do things in education if they achieve certain targets in terms of reduction. I think Val has made a very important point about changing the nature of things. Surely we are radical enough as a government to do that, are we not?

Mr Twigg: I hope so, and I will take that away. I agree with you very much that this pre-legislative scrutiny is not just a formality and it is a very, very important part of getting this right. We will certainly be interested in the report from this Committee as well as the other responses.

Q508 Chairman: It would be nice to have incentives - and speedier, for goodness sake, not 2011.

Mr Twigg: Yes. And a lot of these are things that can happen. Valerie was talking about incentives for the pupils and I think that is important, in engaging. Some of the best schemes are ones the pupils have come up with themselves. They may require an incentive within the school but often the ownership is there with the children and therefore they are the biggest advocates of the schemes.

Chairman: The way we are going, by the time we get to 2011 it will be one and a quarter euros - or I do not know how many euros it will be, but it will not be a farthing. Let's move on. We are going to look at fairness and choice and who better to ask a question about fairness and choice than my friend from Barnsley.

Q509 Jeff Ennis: Thank you, Chairman. Going back to the aims of the bill, which we have covered to some extent: when the Secretary of State gave evidence to the Transport Committee, he said the aim "is the encouragement of people to go to their local neighbourhood school and, therefore, to travel less in the whole approach, which is a question of our other policies on quality of schools." This particular broad aim is backed up by the LGA reps who said they would be unwilling to provide transport to schools other than the nearest suitable school. Is this not running contrary to the Government's wider agenda of choice, building up choice in terms of, for example, the 14-19 agenda, getting more pupils to go to main school and then perhaps a couple of days to a further education establishment or a junior apprenticeship work placement. Is the statement that Charles Clarke made not contradictory to the parental choice issue?

Mr Twigg: I do not think it is. In a sense it follows up the questions Nick was asking earlier on. Clearly there is a tension there. I think there is a tension rather than a contradiction between the policies, because we have made very clear that we want to ensure that all of the schools are good enough that someone who wants their child to go to the local neighbourhood school will be happy for their child to go to the local neighbourhood school. The reality is that for most parents that is what they want, but there will be those who want to make other choices, for example, faith schools, and then I think we need to have a system that has sufficient flexibility in it to enable those choices to be exercised by parents. Does more choice mean that it is more likely that children will travel a bit further? Overall, yes, I think it does mean that, but I am not sure it means it on quite the scale of the increase we have seen over the last 20 years in the car use to school.

Q510 Jeff Ennis: Going back to Val's point about the need for an incentive for the children and the parents themselves to use other forms of transport rather than the car, it appears to me that a possible ideal example in one of the pilots may be whereby children can purchase a fairly low priced bus pass which not only allows them to go to the school which they attend but also allows them then to use that particular pass for other journeys; for example, for the FE college or perhaps into town on a Saturday to buy a CD or whatever kids buy these days. It is actually giving that incentive to the parent and, in particular, the child to use public transport more, not just for going to school but for other ancillary reasons. Would that be your sort of ideal example of possible pilot?

Mr Twigg: I have been helpfully reminded and, as I am sure you will know, some places, including in South Yorkshire, already do this. I think it is exactly the kind of thing we want to encourage through pilots. I was looking yesterday at some of the authorities that have come forward and there are not any authorities in London. I think part of the reason for that now is that in London we have free travel on the buses for primary age children.

Q511 Jeff Ennis: You also have a regulated bus service, of course - which we would like for the rest of the country, by the way!

Mr Twigg: I will allow David to answer that.

Mr Jamieson: I am not going to answer that, but I will say there is quite a number of authorities that run these sorts of schemes already and if they were coming into the pilot it would be interesting to see how they could be integrated into it. I know that the youth members of parliament are much exercised about this - and I think quite rightly. We have been looking at ways, again, of spreading good practice. To give a blanket right across the country to all school children for reduced travel or free travel would be seriously expensive, and I am not sure necessarily the best use of resources, but it is something we are very closely looking at and it would be interesting to see some of those ideas used in the pilot areas.

Q512 Jeff Ennis: That leads me nicely onto my next question. I know David knows this, but in the former coalfield areas we have a public transport deficit. The Minister came along last year and launched the Coalfield Rural Transport Project between my constituency and the constituency of my honourable friend from Hemsworth, Jon Trickett, which is very much needed. But, given that sort of public transport deficit anyway, should we not also be looking at the possibility of allowing people wanting to get to work, shall we say, out of the small pit village where there are not any jobs, as it were, to be able to ride on perhaps a school bus. Is that the sort of initiative that could also be incorporated into a pilot scheme? What would be the pitfalls of actually doing that from a health and safety point of view?

Mr Twigg: It is slightly treading into area where I am going to be looking over my shoulder asking for a bit of paper with some writing on it, but I think there may be some technical issues about definitions of school buses.

Q513 Jeff Ennis: You are on your own, Minister!

Mr Twigg: Absolutely. We are all looking over our shoulders. I think the principle of looking at ways in which there could be more sharing between different providers is a good one. We would have to consider the legal position with regard to buses that are designated school buses, and maybe the best thing, unless the note comes very quickly, is that I write to the Committee on that.

Q514 Chairman: You are not ruling anything out, are you?

Mr Twigg: No.

Q515 Chairman: These pilots can include all this stuff.

Mr Twigg: Absolutely.

Mr Jamieson: Yes. A lot of children already do not travel on dedicated school buses; they are actually travelling on the big service buses. If we could encourage other users of the buses to use them at those times, as long as they do not disadvantage the children in terms of space, then I do not see any reason why they should not be integrated.

Mr Twigg: He has said it now!

Chairman: We await it with bated breath.

Q516 Jeff Ennis: Could I go back to something you said earlier, Stephen, in terms of the demand from the local authorities - and it is nice to see the Government responding to a request from the LGA, and I wish more government departments would listen to local councils and local government representatives and then we might be more successful and lucky at local elections, shall we say. But that is another issue. You intimated that there are already "over two dozen local authorities," to use your exact expression, wanting to participate in the pilots. Presumably that will include a number of Conservative-controlled LEAs.

Mr Twigg: It certainly does. In fact, the three LEAs that have made the clearest, firmest and most public political commitment are all Conservative LEAs.

Jeff Ennis: I cannot understand the attitude of the ministers, then, if they are against this, when it is actually local government -----

Chairman: Shadow ministers.

Q517 Jeff Ennis: Shadow ministers, sorry.

Mr Twigg: Charles Clarke made this point when we met Tim Yeo, and certainly the meetings I have had with Conservative councillors through the LGA, including Councillor Wilkinson who was here last week, indicate very strong commitment amongst those authorities to come forward with this. Clearly there are some internal discussions to be had within the Conservative Party and I hope that those in local government in the Conservative Party are successful in persuading the Shadow Secretary of State to change his mind.

Q518 Chairman: Is it something that might change after June 10?

Mr Twigg: Who knows.

Q519 Jeff Ennis: It appears to me that you are quite confident - and I hope I share your confidence - that in terms of trying to break down barriers of parental choice hopefully this bill can be used actually to extend parental choice, particularly for children from the poorer backgrounds.

Mr Twigg: Absolutely. I think that is critical. I think perhaps I did not make the point as well or as fully as I should have done earlier on. When we look at the present system, you can be a child from a poor background living 2.9 miles from the school who gets nothing, when a child up the road from a wealthier background, who is 100 yards away, is getting guaranteed free transport. I think there is a real case there about more opportunity and more choice for all children, but perhaps particularly benefiting some of those from the poorest background.

Q520 Jeff Ennis: We also had the issue of the Lancaster rule recently on the human rights issue. Do you think we ought to be giving more guidance within this bill on that particular issue?

Mr Twigg: Whether it is in the bill, I am not sure, but, yes, we do need to be giving more guidance and we are taking a look at some of the issues that arise, both from that particular case but also a rise from what I imagine was quite an interesting session with the Christians and the atheists last week.

Helen Jones: It was.

Chairman: It was a very stimulating session. We enjoyed that session.

Q521 Helen Jones: Could I follow that up, Minister, because it is a very difficult question. It seems to me there are two problems. First of all, as many local authorities do exercise their discretion to allow free transport to denominational schools - and certainly the Catholic education service would argue that they have previously placed their schools to take in a wide catchment area and therefore some obligation is owed to them - why would any local authority politically, particularly in areas where there are large numbers of denominational schools, suddenly announce they are going to start charging for transport? Have you given any thought to how that problem might be overcome?

Mr Twigg: It is interesting that that is happening in some authorities. I think it is probably more for financial reasons than any kind of hostility to the existence of those schools within those authorities. But we have a position where around 120 authorities, so three-quarters, do provide, according to our information, either free or assisted transport: with about 80 it is free and 40 it is assisted, and it is generally to the nearest relevant denominational school. But, I think, partly because of the spiralling costs of home to school transport, a lot of LEAs are looking again at how they exercise their discretion and are bringing in charges, sometimes quite steep charges, for travel to denominational schools. So I think that is happening already. I know there are concerns, which were clearly reflected in the evidence session last week, particularly from the Catholic education service, but I said to them when I met them yesterday that potentially there is an opportunity for them in this bill, because there may well be children who currently are not benefiting, because the local discretionary practice is different, who perhaps could benefit from at least a subsidised place because of a wider availability of bus transport because of the extra money that comes into the system.

Q522 Helen Jones: All right. Could I ask you a little bit more about the human rights implications. We accept that what happened up in Lancashire does not set the precedent for anything because it never went to court, not even a court of first instance, but I think there are major difficulties in dealing with this problem, not least, as I keep pointing out, that we do not have secular schools in this country. How has your Department gone along so far with wrestling with the kind of guidance you ought to give to local authorities, and how could you prevent it being abused? We had a very clear case before us where the gentleman concerned only had a denominational school in his village and did not want his child to go to a denominational school. You could see that argument being used elsewhere, could you not? "I do not like the ethos of this particular school. Even though it is a community school, I do not like the fact that they teach too much RE, so I want my child to go somewhere else." How are we going to wrestle with all those problems and give the right guidance to local authorities, so that they cope with their responsibilities under the Human Rights Act but do not fall into the trap where that can be exploited and then cost them a lot of money unnecessarily?

Mr Twigg: I think the honest answer to that is we are still wrestling with it.

Q523 Helen Jones: It is work for lawyers!

Mr Twigg: It is plenty of work for lawyers, yes. As you rightly say, we do not have secular schools. The churches tend to have ways of identifying that people are Anglican or Catholic, like going to church, whereas if you are an atheist it might be more difficult. To demonstrate that you do not go to church might be more difficult than to demonstrate that you do.

Q524 Helen Jones: You are a Catholic if you are baptised, by the way. You can lapse, you cannot leave.

Mr Twigg: There you go. By its nature, agnosticism is not going to be something that is going to lend itself to that.

Q525 Chairman: Our faith witnesses point out that there are two different criteria. Do you remember, they said there was a disparity or a difference between the two methods. In terms of entry to that school it is on your family actually practising; to get the school transport, all you have to prove is an affiliation, it does not have to be attendance or anything else. Two interesting criteria that never seem to be joined up.

Mr Twigg: As David said when the evidence was given, the references in the European Convention on European Rights are on religious or philosophical grounds. I think there is a real set of issues there, but I am afraid if I carry on answering I am simply going to carry on wrestling and probably the more sensible thing is for us to explore this further within the Department.

Q526 Chairman: On Monday morning, I was in Thurrock, at a wonderful school, the Gateway School, listening to parents talking about what they want out of school. The message that came from them was that they wanted excellent community schools. In any joined-up thinking that this Government has, surely anything it does about transport is to help good local schools to flourish and to be more attractive.

Mr Twigg: Absolutely.

Q527 Chairman: Is there a "joined-upness" about your thinking, or do you just think this is a good idea and it does not matter what the implications are for supporting local schools?

Mr Twigg: In terms of what we are doing with regard to school transport, absolutely. Jeff quoted what Charles Clarke said at the select committee and that is absolutely the position that we have outlined. But we also believe that choice is available and we respect the different choices that parents will make. That will mean, along with other factors such as sparsity in rural areas, that there will always be children who are travelling and who will require support with transport.

Q528 Chairman: This Committee looks at a range of policy: we look at admissions policy, we look at diversity policy, we look at schools transport policy. They do not seem to be very joined up from where we are sitting. There seems to be one real push to make children travel further for different kinds of types of schools, at the same time as you are saying, "We do not want children to travel so far."

Mr Twigg: There is a tension - which is the word I used earlier. I do accept that. I need to be clear that our overriding objective in terms of our policy is about high school standards and children having access to high quality education. That must override other policy areas. That must be the key determining factor.

Q529 Chairman: Even if that meant getting rid of selection and grammar schools, that is what you believe, is it?

Mr Twigg: We would certainly look at the evidence, as David Miliband and I said when we appeared before the Committee on that issue before.

Q530 Chairman: We are delighted to get you to quote that. We may quote it back at you.

Mr Twigg: That we would look at the evidence. Absolutely.

Q531 Helen Jones: Could we move on to look at the status of protected children under the bill. The draft bill, as I understand it, defines protected children as those who are eligible for free school meals or free school milk in England. Did you look at any of the definitions? Did you do any costings or potential costings on different definitions of eligibility for free transport?

Mr Twigg: We have not done that but we have said, first of all, that the definition in the bill is the bare minimum standard: it is a minimum standard and no scheme will be accepted that would expect a child eligible for free school meals to pay when they do not currently have to pay. We have given a green light to authorities to come forward with schemes that are wider and more generous. There is a real issue here about access to information; for example, about working tax credit. We are in discussion between our officials and officials in the Treasury, the Inland Revenue and DWP about information sharing, which, if we can take that forward, would potentially give us the information to provide a more generous definition for this purpose and potentially for other purposes. We have had correspondence about free school meals itself, and potentially there is that benefit. We are still in those discussions with the other government departments about how that could be done.

Q532 Helen Jones: I think that would be interesting. As you know, we have had correspondence not just about free school meals but about charging for school activities, where this is quite a difficult issue. There are two things which follow in that case, Minister: the draft bill has something different in it where it relates to Wales. It says it must include those on free school meals but may be extended. Why is it different for Wales?

Mr Twigg: I think the answer to that is devolution and that is what the Welsh have come forward with.

Q533 Helen Jones: It is a very difficult thing to sell to anyone in England, is it not? Why is it not on the face of the bill for England?

Mr Twigg: I think our purpose is to have flexibility. We wanted to provide a minimum protection everywhere, but we are very much encouraging the 20 (or however many it turns out to be) pilot authorities to come forward with schemes that potentially are more generous and go more widely than that.

Q534 Helen Jones: I understand that. It is what is on the face of the bill I am querying with you. Perhaps we could come back to that. The other problem that also follows is we all know that eligibility for free school meals does not necessarily mean that the family claims free school meals - in fact, there are quite a lot of families who do not, for various reasons, one, in my view, being the quality, but the other being the bureaucracy that is involved. Have you given any thought to guidance to local authorities on how those families who may be eligible for free school meals but are not claiming them are going to exercise their right to free transport for their children?

Mr Twigg: Yes. That is a very important point and one that has been raised with me in some of the consultation meetings I have had with head teachers who are obviously concerned about access for pupils within their own schools. We are looking at a number of discussions with experts in this field about how that can be taken forward. I am not in a position to say now, but we are very much aware that that is an issue, the gap between eligibility and take-up. It is particularly an issue in many rural areas. It is something that is raised a lot by rural schools, and clearly because of this bill's particular relevance to rural schools it is important we get it right. We are working with a number of head teachers, head teacher associations and local government on how we can have a guidance that maximises the number of children eligible to have free travel still getting it.

Q535 Helen Jones: Will an assessment of how that works be part of an evaluation of any pilot programme?

Mr Twigg: Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely right. It must be, because, of course, in setting a minimum we do not want to have kids who should be benefiting from that minimum not benefiting from it. We want in fact to be looking at widening it wherever possible. No answer about Wales has yet appeared.

Q536 Helen Jones: An answer is just being provided.

Mr Twigg: They want to make their own regulations - so it is devolution. They are having their own discussion in Wales about free school meal eligibility. It is because they are having a debate about the very issue of who is eligible for free school meals, which of course we have corresponded about.

Q537 Helen Jones: I think I might say that is an answer but not an explanation. Could we carry on to look at SEN children. There is very little in the draft bill about this. Currently, of course, if your statement says you are eligible for free transport for an SEN statement, then you are. This Committee often hears a lot about the law of unintended consequences. I wonder if you have given thought to the fact that, first, there obviously needs to be some special protection for children with special needs who need to travel to a particular establishment or who cannot travel on ordinary public transport, and perhaps you could explain the thinking on that. Secondly, do you not perversely encourage some parents to go for a full statement for special needs because it carries the free transport with it if it says so in the statement?

Mr Twigg: I read that had been suggested by one of the witnesses that came before the Committee. I am not entirely convinced that would be the case. We have said we want the implications for children with special educational needs to be explicitly addressed in the schemes that come forward, and clearly the situation is going to vary according to the nature of the special need. There will be children who are receiving transport at the moment for whom this bill will be totally irrelevant: they should absolutely continue to receive that transport on the basis of their need, whether it is set out in the statement or not. There could potentially be some benefits, going back to our earlier discussion, in terms of being able to have more flexibility in linking up with other transport fleets, for example in health and social services, so we may be able to get some better quality transport facilities available for those children with disabilities or special needs who need those forms of transport. But there will be other children with a statement who are perfectly able to be travelling with other children. There is no issue at all for them, and they will be treated in the same way as other children, and the circumstances for them will simply depend on family income with respect to charging, as would happen for other children. There is obviously a much bigger issue here, that goes beyond the bill, about SEN transport and getting the quality right and looking at the enormous variation between different parts of the country in the quality and the cost, and you are probably aware that we are having a piece of work done at the moment specifically around SEN transport. If that does have implications for the bill, then I think it is going to be important that we reflect that. Whether it would need to be reflected on the face of the bill, I am not sure, but it probably would need to be tested in the pilot.

Q538 Helen Jones: Do you not think this links up with the whole issue of who supervises school transport and whether there is someone on the buses not simply to ensure good behaviour but perhaps to provide a helping hand for some children who have disabilities but are able to travel on the school bus with a bit of assistance? Would investment in that area not only perhaps cut down the bill for some SEN transport but also benefit the children concerned because they could travel to school with their peers?

Mr Twigg: Absolutely.

Q539 Helen Jones: Have you given any thought to that?

Mr Twigg: Certainly. The suggestion of escorts or, however they are described, adults being on the buses is, I think, a very, very positive one. Obviously there is a lot of concern about behaviour of, for example, pupils who are travelling by public buses and the impact that has on other passengers. I know that witnesses before the Committee talked about the prevalence of bullying, particularly of children with special education needs, and clearly having an adult present will make a difference. We are positively encouraging pilots to come forward that use some of the money that they could raise through charging to have escorts on the buses, but I actually think it is a broader issue than the pilots. I think it is one that we would want to encourage to be taken up more generally, even in authorities that are not pilot authorities.

Mr Jamieson: If I could add a point. We are very aware that driving a bus full of adults is a different matter from driving a bus full of children. It does place a very considerable responsibility upon a driver, particularly of a double-decker bus, of having children who, particularly on the journey home, may be letting off a bit of steam. We have in place some guidance on training of drivers, particularly those involved in the school run, which I think is very important, and I know the Transport and General Workers Union have had a considerable amount of concern about this, not least because some of their drivers were actually fearful of doing the school run. Clearly, that is unacceptable for the drivers and it is not good for the children. It is also the case that some drivers have less difficulty than others. Anybody who has had experience of handling children will know that a certain amount of experience and training will help them make a better job of what they are doing. We do see the training of drivers as very important as well.

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 hey 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 of 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 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 of 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 specialists 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 2003/2004.

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.

Q560 Valerie Davey: This is to the Education Department: From the reply we have had from the department, I understand that some of the city technology colleges received money specifically for transport.

Mr Twigg: Yes.

Q561 Valerie Davey: Could you ensure, please, that the evaluation of that reaches this Committee.

Mr Twigg: Yes. You asked Peter Housden about this. When I read the transcript, I sought to get an answer. No research has been conducted into this but I will see what sort of evaluation either has been or could be conducted and come back to the Committee with it.

Valerie Davey: Thank you very much.

Q562 Mr Chaytor: If by the deadline for submissions of pilot schemes you do not receive 20, what will you do?

Mr Twigg: I think, to be honest, it would depend on whether we had received three or 19. If we were close to it, then we would want to go ahead; if we had very few, then I think we would have to reconsider. As I say, we have 27, I think, authorities which have expressed an interest so far, which I find encouraging, so I think we are unlikely to be in a position where the total is in single figures.

Q563 Mr Chaytor: If 20 of those 27 came in, and 10 you thought were inadequate ...?

Mr Twigg: If 10 were adequate and 10 were inadequate, I think we would want to go ahead with the 10.

Q564 Mr Chaytor: You are not going to delay.

Mr Twigg: I think the only circumstance in which I could envisage delaying would be if it were a very small number of adequate pilots coming forward. And we do have the facility to have additional pilots launched in the following year.

Q565 Chairman: Let us wind up by asking you this question: This is a pre-legislative inquiry. It is new for us, new for you. Have we all been wasting our time here? Are you actually going to take any notice at all of the Select Committee's transport recommendations and evaluation of this piece of legislation? Are you going to take any notice of what we produce? Is it going to make any difference at all?

Mr Twigg: I believe it certainly will. Simply from being here today, responding to questions and listening to comments from members of the Committee, I think there are a number of contributions from today's Committee that will inform what we do on evaluation, for example. I think a number of the things that people have said are areas that certainly I personally had not fully thought through. I am sure officials will have done, but I will take those issues back from the Committee today. We will obviously await this Committee's report, and, taken together with the Transport Committee's report, we will respond fully to it. I think it is important that we are having this process. I think the work you are doing is of great help. I also think some of the witnesses you have had at the Committee inform the work we will do, both on the bill and more generally, on the whole area of addressing school transport. I certainly do not think it is a waste of anyone's time.

Mr Jamieson: I would totally concur with that. I greatly value the work of all select committees. As I say, I have been a member of one for five years and I know the value of the work the select committees do. I have never had the opportunity of this type of pre-legislative scrutiny, I am sad to say, and I think this is actually a very good way of getting better legislation. We have taken very careful note of what the Transport Select Committee have said in the evidence I gave to them and Charles Clarke gave to them and we will be responding to that shortly. I think they have come up with some ideas that certainly we need to take note of and make sure they are woven into the pilot schemes that we are about to embark upon.

Q566 Chairman: Would you take back to your departments a message from this Committee, that, having put a lot of time and energy into this pre-legislative inquiry which we care about from our side, we would be very disappointed if this bill was scrapped merely because one party said it was not going to vote for it on second reading. Because it seems to us that the whole point of this pre-legislative inquiry is for you to improve the bill before second reading, so that the bill that comes through second reading can be very different in quality and texture from the bill you originally produced at the time of the Queen's Speech. Would you give that message to your friend from Norwich?

Mr Twigg: I am very grateful for that and I will take that message back.

Mr Jamieson: I also undertake to make sure my department understand what you have said, Chairman.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your attendance. We have got a lot of value out of it.