Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR BRIAN
SMITH, MR
DICK HELLING,
MR BILL
WOOLLEY, MR
PAUL CROWTHER,
MR TONY
CROSS AND
MR JOHN
HODGKINS
21 JUNE 2006
Q20 Mr Donaldson: Do any of you have
views as to where the extra funding should come from if extra
funding is needed?
Mr Cross: The County Council is
now spending 125% more on subsidising bus services than it was
five years ago. We are having to spend more because we are seeing
costs going up substantially above inflation and commercial services
being deregistered. I think the county councils and local authorities
elsewhere are putting more money in but essentially we do need
more assistance from government. A lot of the initiatives where
we have had success have come from the major funding streams like
Challenge and Kickstart but the long-term sustainability of services
requires more revenue funding. Of course in the local authority
we are competing with other pressures—education and social
services—and often public transport is a fairly low priority
compared to those, I am afraid.
Q21 Mr Donaldson: In effect, you
are saying the money should come from central government rather
than local government?
Mr Cross: It has got to be both.
We need more help. I do not believe we will be able to sustain
current levels of service without finding some sort of revenue
stream to support it.
Q22 Mr Donaldson: And how do you
interact with the Commissioners? Do any of you have any particular
experiences you would like to relate? Is it a good relationship
that you have with the Commissioners?
Mr Crowther: Our relationship
is very good. It tends not to be at Commissioner level, it is
more at a staff level on issues of registration of bus services
and that kind of thing. Back to your earlier fit for purpose question,
the benefit of the Traffic Commissioner, in my view, is that he
is independent and it is not the local authority and it is not
linked with the operator. He is really there as the custodian
of interests of the travelling public. The information that we
get from our passengers is that reliability is the key factor.
People might have an issue over fares or frequency or route service
but reliability is what they want. It is the key role of the Commissioner
to police that. I think that is the weakness of some of the other
quality contract-type models where it would be the local authority
who would become the policeman and I think that would be detrimental
to the relationship; at the moment the policeman is independent.
Q23 Mr Donaldson: Do you all feel
that you have a positive relationship with the Commissioners or
are there areas where that can be improved?
Mr Helling: Again, I think it
is a resources issue. We find that they are not always very efficient
in processing registrations and not always very responsive to
our enquiries, and often simply seem to agree a registration at
short notice without going through any process. The impression
that we get is it is simply because they do not have the staff
in place to enable them to carry out any very effective checks
and any very effective monitoring of the registrations they are
receiving, or have any very effective dialogue with the operators
about whether these registrations should be agreed at short notice,
with seem very often to happen without any clear reason why.
Q24 Mr Donaldson: Is there any level
of support within local government for disbanding the Commissioners
altogether and transferring their powers to the transport authorities?
Mr Hodgkins: I do not think I
have been aware of any desire in that direction at all.
Q25 Chairman: And your members are
very widely placed?
Mr Hodgkins: Indeed, yes.
Q26 Mr Scott: I would like to talk
about security. Can you tell me how you believe passengers are
being made to feel safer, particularly vulnerable users and particularly
late at night?
Mr Crowther: Brighton and Hove
Bus and Coach Company, which is our partner, made a decision about
three years ago to equip 100% of their fleet with CCTV cameras.
Q27 Chairman: Which one is that,
Mr Crowther?
Mr Crowther: The Brighton and
Hove Bus Company, who are part of the Go-Ahead Group to whom I
think you are talking next week. That has been very beneficial.
Some of the more recent buses even have a screen so that passengers
can see what is being recorded on CCTV. That has been very beneficial.
We also have a very thriving 24-hour economy so we have a lot
of night buses. The interesting thing we find there is we have
comparatively little trouble on the night buses because the users
value it as probably the only way they are going to get home that
night and so you have peer group pressure. If people start to
misbehave the others stay, "Stop doing that because you are
spoiling it for the rest of us." I will not say that there
are not assaults on drivers and there are not assaults on staff
but it is not as big an issue as it could be, and I think that
is because the bus company were prepared to be proactive and invest
a significant amount of money in equipping their vehicles with
very good CCTV cameras. The quality of the image that comes out
of it is very, very good, enough to identify people.
Mr Scott: Is that the same in
other areas?
Q28 Chairman: Little nods here but
some slightly blank looks. Mr Woolley?
Mr Woolley: I will not repeat
what my colleague has said but we also work very closely with
the community. We have had a number of incidents where through
our partnership, which is called Safer York, we work with communities
and they are, just like the gentleman said here about people wanting
to protect their bus services, very keen to hand over some of
the culprits or act as an informant on the people they know are
causing these isolated incidents. It is down to the community
to protect their bus services.
Mr Smith: Fortunately, we have
not had problems in our area, only very isolated incidents, and
we do not have the CCTV that has been talked about, so just to
make it clear what Brighton and a few others have done is not
general. I suspect it is one of those things that will become
almost inevitable as time goes on and as new buses come forward.
Mr Cross: We have also put CCTV
in some of our waiting facilities, our inter-changes on our Interconnect
project. It is important that it is not just on the vehicle; it
is also on the street when waiting for the bus.
Q29 Mr Scott: Are those monitored
or just recorded?
Mr Cross: They are recorded. We
are talking about very rural areas, Mr Scott.
Q30 Mr Scott: I understand. Can I
ask what percentage of the buses in your areas are accessible
for disabled people?
Mr Woolley: We are reporting about
70-odd% of the vehicles are disabled friendly. The main partnership
that we had, which we entered into with the First Group who operate
about 85% of our buses, saw them introducing a whole new fleet
in about 2001.
Q31 Chairman: A little bit louder,
Mr Woolley.
Mr Woolley: In 2001 the partnership
with First Group, which operates 85% of our bus network, introduced
a completely new fleet of buses which was in partnership with
us upgrading the majority of our bus stops to disabled access
friendly. Thus we currently enjoy quite a large percentage and
the plans in our current local transport plan are to see that
increased to about 85%.
Q32 Chairman: How about somebody
else with a percentage? Mr Smith?
Mr Smith: I do not know the percentage
offhand but we would be in exactly the same situation in terms
of a new fleet in Cambridge coming in in 2001 and many other new
vehicles coming in subsequently.
Q33 Chairman: Do you know the average
age of the fleet?
Mr Smith: I would look behind
me to help on that. No, they are useless to me!
Q34 Chairman: Let us ask you, Mr
Cross, what is the average age of the fleet?
Mr Cross: I do not know the age
of the fleet, I am afraid, but in terms of accessibility the whole
of our Interconnect network is fully accessible. That is one of
the requirements.
Q35 Chairman: All of it?
Mr Cross: Yes. Elsewhere it is
patchy. The whole of Lincoln is accessible, for instance, but
we have operators who are still using old coaches on local bus
services and that does not go down well with users. That is a
commercial decision that they have not got the capability to invest.
Q36 Chairman: You do not put any
pressure on them because you do not have a quality contract and
you do not think that is your function?
Mr Cross: On our Interconnect
network where we have the partnerships it is requirement for all
buses to be accessible.
Q37 Chairman: That is what I am saying;
where you have a proper partnership where it is spelt out, you
have got disablement access.
Mr Cross: And we give grants because
most of the services we started with had conventional buses and
we gave a grant towards one-third of the cost of replacing those
buses with local buses.
Q38 Chairman: That is helpful.
Mr Hodgkins: I think that is an
important factor and, as we hear around the country, there are
a number of centres where there has been a great deal of investment
on the part of the commercial operators in new, accessible fleet,
but in other parts of the country there is not. Indeed, in my
own county, I suspect that we are still below 20% accessibility
within the fleet.
Q39 Chairman: Across the county?
Mr Hodgkins: A very high proportion
of that 20% of accessible vehicles has been brought in with at
least some degree of funding injected by the local authority.
There has been a relatively small investment purely and simply
on the part of the commercial operators.
Chairman: Well, that is helpful.
Mr Stringer?
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