Select Committee on Transport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360-379)

MR PHILIP BROWN

28 JUNE 2006

  Q360  Mrs Ellman: Let me put it the other way on. Suppose the Traffic Commissioners were abolished and the powers all transferred to local authorities, would anything be lost by that?

  Mr Brown: Yes, it would because it would then certainly leave a bus company which had an issue with a local authority—the local authority may not be co-operating—open to the lack of any independent body to deal with those issues. The strength of Traffic Commissioners is that they are independent of both central and local government and they are there to deal with these issues as independent regulators as such, and that is what would be lost, I think.

  Q361  Mrs Ellman: Which of your powers would you say you have used most effectively?

  Mr Brown: In terms of bus priority measures?

  Q362  Mrs Ellman: In terms of buses in general.

  Mr Brown: In terms of buses in general, it has been mainly on dealing with poorly maintained buses rather than bus reliability. We get very few bus reliability cases, it has to be said, so I do not want this to go out of all proportion. What I am saying is that may be to do with data—the point I was making earlier on. Most effectively has been when a bus operator has been found to be lacking in terms of maintenance and as a first measure taking away their ability to run further services because you have removed some of their buses off their licence and then try to make a difference with that by saying, "If this happens again then you are actually going to lose buses that matter (in other words beyond the peak vehicle requirement) and you are going to dig into that," which will stop them running services. The Traffic Commissioners are loath to do that unless absolutely necessary. It has happened a couple of times and it has made a difference in terms of the operator making sure that their maintenance systems are effective.

  Q363  Mrs Ellman: Are there any areas where the Department for Transport could be more active?

  Mr Brown: The Department for Transport could be more active in firstly giving us more staff to monitor bus services and to analyse the data to enable us to do that effectively. That would be a quick-fix, if you like, from changing legislation to impose obligations on the bus operators to provide those figures, but again it would only be a quick-fix.

  Q364  Mrs Ellman: Is it not an important fix?

  Mr Brown: I think it would be a very important fix. It may actually reveal that in terms of bus reliability, it is more reliable than it appears to be from the 2005 statistics which have just been published, because again that monitoring exercise was only carried out over a two or three-week period at selected bus stops in non-peak hours.

  Q365  Mrs Ellman: What sort of increase would you be looking for in terms of staff and skills?

  Mr Brown: Within England and Wales at least a doubling, probably a tripling to make it effective. In England and Wales there are currently six or seven bus compliance officers who are paid for by the Department for Transport. Wales have a couple more paid for by the Welsh Assembly, and Scotland for that matter also.

  Q366  Chairman: What are the total numbers for all of them by country, do you know?

  Mr Brown: In England, Wales and Scotland?

  Q367  Chairman: England is what?

  Mr Brown: England is about six.

  Q368  Chairman: Scotland is?

  Mr Brown: Scotland is probably three or four now because some of them are paid for by the Scottish Executive.

  Q369  Chairman: And the Assembly in Wales pays for two?

  Mr Brown: They pay for two.

  Q370  Chairman: Bringing the total number to?

  Mr Brown: Round about nine or ten.

  Q371  Mr Scott: What level of complaints do you get about security and anti-social behaviour?

  Mr Brown: Very few. When they come in, the first thing I would do is send it to the bus operator to investigate and, secondly, if it is a serious issue, I would send it to the VOSA compliance officers to investigate, although they do not really get involved in that at all.

  Q372  Mr Scott: Can I go back to what you were saying about local authorities. In a number of areas, if I take my own constituency, there is nothing you can do for a bus priority lane because 95% of the roads are single lane. It is totally impossible. In that sort of area what would you suggest as a priority for buses?

  Mr Brown: It depends upon whether there is a problem in terms of congestion or in terms of bus reliability. As far as Traffic Commissioners are concerned, they do not set the timetables. It is the bus operators' timetables. They may be, if they are subsidised services, according to whatever a local authority wants, whatever they have contracted with the local authority but it is the bus operators. They can run to whatever timetables they want to run. As long as they are registered—and I have no say whether something is registered or not provided they give the statutory 56 days' notice—so in those terms it is up to the operators to assess what they can do to run their services on time. I only get involved when they do not run their services in accordance with their registered timetables.

  Q373  Graham Stringer: What I want to get at is how safe services are with 30% of the buses nationally not being right. When bus operators were giving us evidence they implied and gave examples that this was torn seats and relatively trivial issues. Of those 30% that are stopped, what percentage would you describe as a serious risk to the travelling public?

  Mr Brown: I do not have those statistics in front of me. This is only from my feeling and experience as a Traffic Commissioner dealing with bus operators over the last 15 or 16 years, but in those terms I would say that the majority of the 30%, about 50 to 60%, are probably not road-safety critical issues. They may be technical issues which, of course, may impact on road safety at a later stage, if I can put it that way. I do not know what the split between delayed prohibition, which are the not so serious ones, and immediate prohibition is, but, having said that, when you get an immediate prohibition, which is a road-safety critical item and is S-marked, that is when it becomes significant. Sadly, although we see many fewer bus operators than we do for example haulage operators, in that role, what we tend to find is that with bus operators the defects tend to be more serious.

  Q374  Graham Stringer: Right, so can you give us any percentage of immediate prohibitions?

  Mr Brown: I just said I could not do that.

  Q375  Graham Stringer: I know but then you started to give some statistics that made me think we might be getting somewhere.

  Mr Brown: I am afraid I cannot help you there.

  Q376  Graham Stringer: Is it possible for you to provide them?

  Mr Brown: I am sure I can get those figures from the VOSA Annual Report. There is an annual report presented each year by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency and all those statistics will be logged.

  Q377  Graham Stringer: Thank you. You said previously I think in answer to Mrs Ellman that you changed operators' behaviour by having inquiries and rulings. We have heard evidence from the Transport & General Workers' Union and others that when First Manchester had faulty services de-registered they immediately re-registered them as First Pioneer. This was after quite serious safety issues. Did you not as a Commissioner feel you were being undermined by this? I know it is not your area.

  Mr Brown: I am sure my colleague in Manchester would have felt that because that is just trying to get round the legislation, it is being disingenuous, is it not?

  Q378  Chairman: "Cheating" is the word you are looking for, Mr Brown.

  Mr Brown: I think it is. I was trying to be more delicate than that.

  Q379  Graham Stringer: Do you think the rules should be changed to stop that?

  Mr Brown: You have to go into the realms of company law and all kinds of intricate rules in order to do that, but if there was a simple way of doing it, yes, of course. The trouble with that of course is that at the moment vehicles are not specified on a PSV operator's licence whereas they are on a goods vehicle operator's licences, so you might be able to stop that if vehicles could be specified as individual registrations, yes.


 
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