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Mr. McNulty: It is very self-effacing of the hon. Gentleman to recognise that he is not a famous old boy of his school, which I am sure is not the case.
My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley has again done us a service in tabling the amendment, because it sets out the extremes of bus substitution. Were I to come to the Committee to secure the very limited proposal to simply replace a rail service with a bus service doing everything but going along the track bed, or close to it, such limitations would not be appropriate. But are the provisions a loophole to allow PTAs and PTEs to bring quality contracts in through the back door, which I know that my hon. Friend would like? They are not.
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The precise point where bus substitution and quality contracts lie in the clause is in the fuzzy bit in the middle of the two extremes outlined by my hon. Friend. The clause clearly states that the PTAs should be satisfied that
''making a quality contracts scheme is an appropriate way of securing that the transport needs of the potential users of a relevant railway service that has been or is to be reduced or discontinued are met''.
The aim is not direct, including geographic, substitution, but to meet the transport needs that were served by a particular railway service and, crucially, to broaden the point, to meet some needs beyond a simple one-for-one service substitution. The clause also requires that
''the making of the scheme will contribute, in an appropriate way, to meeting the transport needs of persons living, working or studying in the locality served by that service''.
Then there are the points about compatibility with the local transport plan, which we referred to in relation to previous set of amendments. That is important because, especially in an urban setting, if we were dealing with more or less one-for-one replacement, as my hon. Friend suggests, that would not be a quality contract. It would just be a secured bus service rather than a train service.
The points that my hon. Friend and others have made about the needs of a particular area served by a railway and about commuters who drive to a station to use that rail service are well made. We are talking about something that is sufficiently broad to encompass most solutions that a PTA would put up as alternatives in terms of quality contracts and bus substitution for discontinued or reduced rail services. I am sure that this is not the case in Manchester because of all the other elements of transport that it already has, but if we were talking about an urban area served by the sort of windy inter-urban rail service that my hon. Friend suggests that no one save what appeared to be a coded way of saying a DFT official would use on a Saturday, and if that was the principal rail service in the area and it was discontinued for some reason, the solution might be that a network of four or five substantive services would replace it and form the basis of a quality contract. The short answer is that I do not know.
My hon. Friend said that there might be only three stops on a rail service that was being discontinued, but he will know that, although we think of all the PTE areas as overwhelmingly urban, some of them serve a significant rural and semi-rural hinterland. If those three stops are on the way out to a particular community and are one of the core ways in which its transport needs are served, but for whatever reason the discontinuance of that rail service is granted, a more direct bus service to that community might prevail. My hon. Friend has highlighted the two extremes that probably, in all instances, cannot prevail.
We have drawn up the clause so that it goes further than simply one-for-one replacement to allow the integration of any bus substitution service within the wider transport on offer in an area and to secure
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improvements in public transport for others who live in the area. Let me turn around what hon. Members have said. If a bus service is being offered rather than a train service, how that addresses and satisfies the transport needs of a locality is entirely different from how the heavy rail service did it. We have left things deliberately broad, but I have to say, in all candour, that that the provision is a not back-door way of getting in an entire PTA area covered by a quality bus contract.
I would welcome applications for quality bus contracts from PTAs if they can be sustained in the broad, integrated way that is at the heart of the July transport White Paper. The provisions do not go so far as to enable PTAs to regulate buses over their area merely on the pretext of a modest rail reduction in one part of the area. That is more the domain of what we are trying to do in the wider context of section 124 and of quality bus contracts, the guidance for which, as I have said—in the light of the changes that we seek to make both in terms of the timetable and the substance offered in the transport White Paper—will shortly be issued.
So, the clause is not about the extremes that my hon. Friend suggests. Precisely because any number of alternative forms of bus services substituting for rail services could prevail, we have tried to leave things as broad as possible and allow the door to be open for quality bus contracts as a replacement. That is what the clause does.
4.15 pm
The Chair of the Select Committee said on Second Reading, as my hon. Friend has done today, that bus substitution leaves a bad taste precisely because of all the promises made not just by the Conservative Government during the Beeching era and the immediate post-Beeching era, but—I would say cheerfully—by the two 1960s Labour Governments. All sorts of promises were made for substantive bus substitution to replace the post-Beeching gaps, but they never came to fruition. I understand the hesitation, albeit some 40 years later, about losing rail services in any way, shape or form. That is why we included some substance to ensure that any replacement arising from the discontinuance of a rail service is durable and lasts into the future to sustain the communities concerned and their transport needs.
I am grateful for the chance to put those points on the record. I cannot accept the amendment, however well intentioned it may be. None the less, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for posing his questions. I am deeply disappointed that I cannot give him the answer that, deep down in his bones and in his heart, he wants.
Mr. Stringer: I thank my hon. Friend for his reply, which—this may surprise him—was slightly better than I expected. This is not the first or even the second time that we have debated this matter. It should be a priority for the Government to look at ways of re-regulating the bus system that capture the best aspects of commercial entrepreneurship of private operators, ease congestion and put reliability and punctuality back into the system.
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Dr. Pugh: Is it not worth putting on the record that the bus service that is doing best in this country and makes bus statistics look good is the least-regulated service: the London service?
Mr. Stringer: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman meant that. I agree that the most successful bus service in the country for punctuality, reliability and, probably most importantly, increasing its patronage is in London. However, it is regulated.
Dr. Pugh: I meant most regulated even though I did not say that.
Mr. Stringer: In that case, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. I have made the point a number of times that, in the capital, we have a scheme that works. We should be trying to replicate that good practice in at least the other great urban conurbations.
Mr. Chope: Surely, the London bus scheme necessitates a subsidy approaching £1 billion of taxpayers' money each year. How can the hon. Gentleman describe the London bus scene, which needs such a subsidy to sustain it, as successful?
Mr. Stringer: The hon. Gentleman is right about the current situation, although I think that the figure is slightly lower at the moment. If we compare metropolitan bus services outside the capital with the service in the capital until the advent of the Mayor and large subsidies to the London bus system, we find that patronage in metropolitan areas dropped by 40 per cent. or more and patronage in London grew marginally over the same period. A good period to consider is that from deregulation in 1985 until 1999 when the London system worked much better than elsewhere without subsidies. One can argue about how much cash should be put in, but not that the regulated system, with virtually no subsidy, outperformed the subsidised systems, albeit with small subsidies, in the metropolitan areas. I did not intend to talk about those two areas, but I was encouraged to do so by the interventions.
To conclude, my hon. Friend can contradict my interpretation of his statement later if he disagrees, because I am sure that we will come back to this on Report, but I understand him to mean that the ''bustitution'' process requires quality contracts. Quite simply, one could not guarantee the bus substitution if it was done only over a small area. Therefore, for quality contracts, one should look to a much larger area than the route along the line just to make ''bustitution'' viable. If that interpretation is wrong, I am sure that we will return to the issue at some point. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 39 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
<<256>>Clause 40
Substitute road services
Mr. Knight: I beg to move amendment No. 69, in page 43, line 27, at end insert '; or
the new route and the stopping places thereon are more convenient for, and accessible to, the communities served thereby.'.
I want to make similar but not identical points to those that have just been made. The amendment is moderate in effect and is meant to be helpful. It is in no way at odds with what the Government seek to achieve through the clause. I therefore hope that the Minister will embrace the amendment.
The clause deals with substitute road services when a railway passenger service has been either temporarily interrupted or discontinued. The amendment deals with the latter event. The clause must say that when a railway passenger service has been terminated, the route and stopping places of the substitute service need not correspond precisely to those of the discontinued service if, under subsection (3)(a)
''it is not practicable for them to do so; or . . . the substitute service broadly corresponds to the discontinued service in terms of the localities served.''
My amendment seeks to widen the scope of paragraph (b) and it is appropriate partly for some of the reasons that we heard in the previous debate. A station is very often on the outskirts of a village or town, and its siting was probably determined by the overall route of the railway track or even by the siting of a particular community not in the 1990s or even the 1950s but in the 1800s. So in many cases, the positioning of a railway station is not convenient to the local community, but it must live with it because it is all that the community has. When that service is terminated permanently and a substitute service is introduced and when there is a clear case for altering the route and moving the stopping points to make the service more popular, that is what we should do.
I accept that the clause contains several safeguards and it is right that it does. We do not oppose the general thrust of the clause, which is a welcome part of the Bill. Our amendment, however, seeks to allow greater flexibility than that given by subsection 3(b) where it is appropriate and right to do so. I commend it to the Committee.
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