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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1317-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE TRANSPORT COMMITTEE
Wednesday 21 June 2006 MR BRIAN SMITH, MR DICK HELLING, MR BILL WOOLLEY, MR PAUL CROWTHER, MR TONY CROSS and MR JOHN HODGKINS
MR ROY WICKS, MR GEOFF INSKIP, MR DOUGLAS FERGUSON, MR ROBERT SMITH, MR MIKE PARKER and MR MARK DOWD
MS CLARE KAVANAGH, MR KEITH MOFFATT, MR ROGER SEALEY, MR GERRY DOCHERTY and MR JOE LYNCH Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 193
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Transport Committee on Wednesday 21 June 2006 Members present Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody, in the Chair Mr David Clelland Mr Jeffrey Donaldson Clive Efford Mr Robert Goodwill Mr Eric Martlew Mr Lee Scott Graham Stringer ________________ Memoranda submitted by Brighton and Hove City Council, Lincolnshire County Council and Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Brian Smith, Deputy Chief Executive, Cambridgeshire County Council; Mr Dick Helling, Public Transport Officer, Oxfordshire County Council; Mr Bill Woolley, Director of City Strategy, York City Council; Mr Paul Crowther, Public Transport Manager, Brighton and Hove City Council, Mr Tony Cross, Head of Transport Services, Lincolnshire County Council; and Mr John Hodgkins, Chairman, Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers (ATCO), gave evidence.
Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. It is all gentlemen? Yes. You are most warmly welcome. We do, as you can imagine, have a little bit of housekeeping to perform, if we may. Members having an interest to declare? Clive Efford: Member of the Transport and General Workers' Union. Mr Martlew: Member of the Transport and General Workers' Union and General and Municipal Workers' Union. Chairman: Gwyneth Dunwoody, ASLEF. Mr Goodwill: I have a large bus manufacturer, Plaxton's, in my constituency although it is not a pecuniary interest. Q1 Chairman: Thank you, it is very kind of you to make that claim. Gentlemen, house rules: the microphones that are in front of you record your voices but do not project your voices so if you would just remember that when you are answering questions. If you agree with one another, please be kind enough not to repeat what someone else has said. If you disagree, if you catch the Chairman's eye, God willing, you might actually be called. Can I ask you first to identify yourselves for the purposes of the record, starting on my left and your right. Mr Smith: Good afternoon, Chairman. I am Brian Smith, Deputy Chief Executive of the Cambridgeshire County Council. Mr Helling: Good afternoon. I am Dick Helling, Public Transport Officer of Oxfordshire County Council. Mr Woolley: I am Bill Woolley, I am the Director of City Strategy for the City of York Council. Mr Crowther: Good afternoon. I am Paul Crowther, Public Transport Manager for Brighton and Hove City Council. Mr Cross: Good afternoon. I am Tony Cross, Head of Transport Services at Lincolnshire County Council. Mr Hodgkins: I am John Hodgkins, Chairman of ATCO, the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers. I am also Transport and Accessibility Manager for Buckinghamshire. Q2 Chairman: Good, so you have got a number of hats. Does anybody want to make one or two brief remarks before we start, either collectively or singly, or may we go straight to the questions? I am getting some kind of combined no there. Why are bus patronage numbers still in decline? Come on, one of you! Mr Crowther: Chairman, they are not in decline in all areas. I represent Brighton and Hove City Council and we have seen for the last eight or nine years patronage growth. We have a very informal quality bus partnership with our local operator. Q3 Chairman: Is that the difference? Mr Crowther: I believe that has been very informative. The basis of partnership is that each partner sticks at what it is good at. The City Council is a highway authority and the bus company knows about running buses. Between us we work together to solve our problems. Mr Smith: I would very much echo those comments in the context of Cambridgeshire. In the last four years we have seen growth county wide of about 21 per cent and indeed in the Cambridge area itself something over 40 per cent. That very much reflects working together where we have had a bus operator investing in the area and we have invested as the local authority. Indeed, another angle from our point of view is the fact of working with local businesses. One of the best examples is working with the Addenbrooke's Trust where they have provided land in one of their car parks to help us build a new bus station, which is a very important facility. Q4 Chairman: So they have contributed by offering you a completely new facility of a bus station? Do they subsidise anything else? That is a big grant. Mr Smith: They also from their charges on the site put that into subsidising bus tickets for their staff, which is very important. Q5 Chairman: Has anyone got any other ideas as to how we can stop this decline? Mr Cross: Although we have had very dramatic increases on the routes where we have had investment in our Interconnect Network, there is an underlying decline still and last year we lost 1.5 per cent ridership, for instance. I would say as much effort as we are putting it is only counteracting the underlying decline. In a rural area like Lincolnshire that would be due to rising car ownership and fares increasing above inflation. Service levels have been maintained generally, so it is not loss of service. Mr Hodgkins: I think the message that is coming across is that arresting the decline has been a product of successful partnership working and that unless that successful partnership working is in place then there is still that underlying trend outside of London that is still pointing downwards. Q6 Mr Goodwill: I am interested to see Mr Woolley here from the City of York. I know you have introduced a bus that looks like a tram. I would be interested to know how successful that has been and whether you think that is the way forward, breaking away from the image of the bus being the method of transport of last resort? Mr Woolley: I would say that our bus services, like colleagues' on this table, have not been in decline but have been growing significantly. Over the last five years we have seen a growth of over 50 per cent. I would again echo the words that it is about partnership. Q7 Chairman: 50 per cent in ridership? Mr Woolley: That is correct. Q8 Mr Goodwill: How much of that is park and ride? Mr Woolley: The growth in park and ride over that period accounts for probably an increase of about 1.5 million bus passenger journeys compared to an overall increase of five million bus passenger journeys in that time, so it certainly is a factor but it is not the only factor. Our ability to invest clearly was increased six years ago when the local transport plans came into being. We moved into a new sphere of investment because previously the monies we had had available were very small. That investment has enabled us to enter into a partnership and both sides can see a real benefit coming out of that. The reason that we have been given the FTR, one of our routes which is this new, modern, tram-like bus, by First Group is because of the success we have shown in our partnership with them, and we are confident that the FTR will remove some of the stigma that buses have and that barrier that some people feel to be able to travel on buses. Those same people would, we are led to believe, travel on trams. The FTR is to all intents and purposes a bus but it is a very tram-like bus and we have a high level of confidence that that will move us into a different paradigm in terms of public transport travel. It is too early yet to say how successful that is going to be. It has only been operating for just over a month and it has had lots of teething problems, as you would expect from any new concept vehicle. We are working very closely with the operators First to overcome that, but we have got high expectations. Mr Helling: Can I add a slightly different note to that of my colleagues. In Oxfordshire over many years we have had an effective partnership with bus operators which has succeeded in growing patronage effectively since the late 1980s. During that time we have been progressively finding new ways to give the buses freedom from the effects of growing traffic congestion. We have rather run out of new ways to do that. Q9 Chairman: So what are we talking about? Are we talking about special ---? Mr Helling: We are talking about bus priority fundamentally. We are talking about bus lanes, sections of road where other traffic is not permitted so that the buses can get through and only local traffic can access. As I say, we have not been able in the last few years to actually provide much in the way of further improvements in that direction. We are starting to see a decline in usage because the bus operators are finding that in order to maintain the same level of service they are having to put more and more buses and drivers in because very gradually their journey times to get from one end of the route to the other are getting longer. In order to provide the same level of service, but it takes longer to get from one end of the route to the other, you need to provide more buses and drivers. So there has been something of a drop in the frequency in some services. In other services they have felt obliged to increase the fares by perhaps more than they otherwise would have chosen to do in order to cover the extra costs of the extra buses and drivers to carry the same number of passengers. Q10 Clive Efford: Why, in your view, have there been no quality contracts agreed? I am not sure who to direct that question at so whoever would like to pick it up first. Shall I start from the left and move across? Mr Smith: I will make a start. I think everybody in the country recognises that there is a whole series of quite challenging hurdles that have to be overcome to get to the stage of quality contracts, and within those hurdles there are some quite long timescales. In many respects, all the odds are stacked up against getting towards a quality contract and indeed demonstrating that the partnership has worked. From my own authority, and I suspect it probably reflects most of my colleagues here, where you have got the partnership working, informal or more formal, you do not feel the need to go down the quality contract route in any sense. Certainly it is not something we would wish to entertain. We do not need to do so. Those are some general observations to start us off. Mr Helling: I would echo that comment and perhaps add that there is a considerable fear that if you start the process of introducing a quality contract you will damage the partnership. Where you have an effective partnership with somebody and you say to them, "I am going to take control away from you and I am going to run it myself," obviously they are not going to like that and it is likely that they will cease to give you as good a level of service during the interim period, which potentially could be a very long time, while the quality contract is being introduced so unless you have a very good reason for it there is a huge deterrent to starting down that road. Chairman: Is money a very good reason? Q11 Clive Efford: What sort of reasons do you envisage then that would set that in train to set up a quality contract? Mr Helling: For us it would be if there was a bus operator who was simply sitting on his laurels, he was refusing to make any effort to improve his services under his own initiative and was also not going forward proactively in partnership with the local authority. Q12 Clive Efford: So basically when you could not break down relationships any further to make them any worse, that would be the situation where you would envisage starting the ball rolling? Mr Helling: That is probably a fair summary, yes. Mr Cross: I think there is also an issue about funding as well. There is a concern about whether the quality contract would be affordable. There is a risk there. Q13 Chairman: Affordable to the authority or to the bus contractor? Mr Cross: To the authority. Also I do not think my members would want to get involved in quality contracts. I think that they see running buses as the business of the operators and for us to get into detailed specification would not be appropriate. Q14 Chairman: Does that mean that you are all perfectly content with the level of service that you receive throughout the entire country? Mr Cross: Not at all. In a county like Lincolnshire we have something like 50 operators so it is hard to have a general rule about these things, but where we have worked in partnership it has worked very successfully. The thing which has held us back most of all is the funding to be able to take it through. There have been some problems in parts of it but I do not think we are ready to go down to quality contracts. Q15 Clive Efford: Mr Cross, you have proposed with your ATCO hat on a quality network. Can you explain what you mean by a quality network and what would be the benefits it would deliver against quality partnerships or quality control contracts? Mr Cross: It is really trying to harness the best of the commercial side with the local authority addressing its responsibilities in terms of social need. We would like to have a stronger partnership where there is more stability, where there is an agreement on what can operate commercially on a viable basis and what is required with public subsidy, where there is an agreed programme of investment in the quality of the service and the quality of the facilities, but also some protection so that you take the worst of the competitive elements away, so operators would not be able to just come in and cherry-pick. They could only come in on a planned basis, say an annual basis, and have the opportunity to enhance what was there. Q16 Mr Martlew: This is addressed to those of you that have two-tier local government in your area really. Talking to my local bus company they get deeply frustrated by the fact that the district council normally runs the concessionary fare and puts the money into the county council to do other things. There is great confusion there. What are your views? Is the two-tier system holding back quality contracts and improvement in the bus services in those areas? Mr Cross: I do not think it is holding us back. I do think it would be better if the county councils in two-tier areas were responsible for concessionary fares as the local transport authorities because the district councils are clearly trying to get the best deal they can for the amount of money they have got. If operators do not receive enough revenue through that means they will seek to address that through other ways, either raising fares or dropping services which will then come back to the county council. It would be better if it was in one place. Q17 Mr Martlew: Do you get the frustration from bus companies as well? Mr Cross: I do not think it is the biggest issue for us. Mr Hodgkins: I think there is a danger of treating concessionary fares and the management of concessionary fare schemes as another subsidy for the public transport industry. It is not intended that way clearly. Concessionary travel schemes are intended to reimburse operators for revenue that they would otherwise have taken through the fare box, no more and no less, but undoubtedly it is the one area of spend in support of public transport delivery that is not in the hands of the local transport authorities other than in the unitary authority areas. In that sense, one can see from examples around the country that when there was a financial pressure on the concessionary travel authority it is very easy to see that that can have a knock-on effect on the funding that is available for public transport in the round. Where there are two-tier authorities that immediate tension does not exist. It does not mean to say that the operators are necessarily comfortable with the level of reimbursement they receive but that same tension does not exist in two-tier areas as it can do in some unitary authorities. Mr Donaldson: Gentlemen, can I turn your minds to the issue of the Traffic Commissioners. Are the Commissioners fit for purpose? Do they have enough staff and are their powers relevant? Q18 Chairman: Mr Smith, you are taking a breath; are you going to risk it? Mr Smith: I will go first. I think there would be a general recognition that there is just not enough funding in the whole area of Traffic Commissioners. I think there is a debate about the scale of their powers. I think you could argue that some of their powers are adequate but they just do have the resources to discharge those powers, for instance some of the monitoring and the number of monitors you have nationally is quite ridiculous in terms of what we are asking them to do. That is a key issue. A related issue is whether we felt that they should have stronger powers. One of the things we might wish to explore - and I express it partly as a personal opinion - is whether some of their responsibilities might be linked more strongly through to some of the local authorities and some of us wishing to influence the regime that is in operation. The short answer is that I think that attention needs to be given to the Traffic Commissioner function. I think there is scope to improve it undoubtedly to help us move forward. Mr Woolley: In fact, resources is a major problem and our own Traffic Commissioner area in their annual report say just that. They do not have the resources. They complain about resources being switched from them to other priorities. I would echo what Brian has said. I do feel that Traffic Commissioners do have a role to play and they do have sufficient powers in many respects, but without resources to monitor what is going on they are never going to be as effective. Q19 Chairman: We are all agreed it is money? Were you going to tell me it is something else? Mr Hodgkins: I think it would be fair to say that in delivering quality of service maybe there are technical standards that all bus operators are required to meet in terms of the safety and maintenance of their vehicles, but the resources that the Traffic Commissioners are able to provide at the present time do not go to the point of really having a meaningful input, if you like, to customer satisfaction. There are a great many areas of the country where customers are repeatedly expressing dissatisfaction with the way in which bus services are being provided, whether it is by small operators or large. Clearly to the customer in the majority of cases the only response they receive to their concerns is from the operator themselves. I think in the minds of the customer there needs to be a wider capability on the part of the Traffic Commissioners to respond to concerns about quality standards. The industry, after all, is one which has a relatively low entry standard for a market the size that it is. Chairman: And reputation. Mr Donaldson? 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent of the vehicles are disabled friendly. The main partnership that we had, which we entered into with the First Group who operate about 85 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent. 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 per cent accessibility within the fleet. Q39 Chairman: Across the county? Mr Hodgkins: A very high proportion of that 20 per cent 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? Q40 Graham Stringer: They are very impressive passenger figures for York, Brighton, Cambridge and Oxford. How much extra public money is going in to achieve those better patronage figures, both national government money and local authority money? Mr Woolley: Clearly any partnership, which is what we are talking about, relies on both parties paying into the partnership to achieve the end result. In York we are putting considerable sums of our local transport plan capital monies into improving the infrastructure to allow disabled access because, of course, disabled access is not just about the vehicles, it is about the bus stops as well, into improving information availability --- Q41 Graham Stringer: I understand what kind of investment would take place. What I am looking for is either the total amount of extra money that has gone in on a per annum basis or the increase on a per capita basis into transport, looking at all heads? Mr Woolley: We are probably spending something of the order of about 30 to 40 per cent of our local transport plan funding, which has been around £6 million a year, on improved public transport, so that gives you a figure, because that is what you are looking for, of something of the order of £2 million or £3 million, depending on any particular year. Of course, with a park and ride site which comes at about £3 million a time (and we have five dedicated park and ride sites in York) you can see that there has been substantial investment over a number of years running into many tens of millions in public transport infrastructure. Mr Crowther: In Brighton and Hove City Council we have got a fortunate situation that something like 97 per cent of the bus network is provided commercially so the revenue contribution to buy socially necessary services is comparatively small, but we have spent a lot of capital investment on things like bus priority measures. We have got the power for the decriminalisation of parking so we took over from the police the traffic function. Between us and the bus company we have spent about £4 million on a real-time information satellite tracking bus priority system. The bulk of our expenditure has been capital expenditure on highway improvements rather than revenue expenditure on services. Graham Stringer: The point I was trying to come to - and I cannot remember which witness said that their expenditure on supported services had gone up 125 per cent - is we have also seen passengers going up and it is a very odd equation, is it not, that the services are getting better and more passengers are using them and yet services are being withdrawn? Is that a failure of competition or is it the bus companies focusing on routes where they can make more profit? How can you square that circle for me? Q42 Chairman: Mr Smith is into squaring circles. Mr Smith: It is happening across the country. What we are saying is there is an increasing concentration by the operators on key corridors, their core routes. There is a logic to that in many respects insofar as you get the faster journeys down those core routes, but it tends to be off the core routes the buses are being withdrawn. Many of us do have non-urban areas here and one of the things we have struggled with over ten or 15 years is a withdrawal of services outside those core routes. That has been an area where do we put additional resources into that for our supported network? Indeed, just making a link back to the earlier discussion, when we do go out to tender in those rural areas often it is the old buses which are running on a marginal cost and therefore they are not easy access buses and the like and there would be a cost to us in doing that. That is the sort of scenario we have got. Perhaps, Chairman, if I may add one other point to Mr Stringer's question about resourcing. I would agree with what my colleagues say about capital but in an area like Cambridge where we have also got significant growth, another source of funding that we apply is actually from section 106 contributions, contributions from developers, and we have been very willing and wanted to use 106 monies both to contribute to infrastructure but in many cases also to pump-prime new services into areas. That is one of the things we have been doing which is fairly unusual and we have managed to establish bus services from the outset, particularly in new developments, which we think is critical to establish the habit of usage. Mr Helling: I was going to say very much the same thing. Q43 Chairman: Then please do not! Mr Helling: There is one thing I would like to add to the section 106 developer contributions. That is something that we, too, have been able to do because, like Cambridgeshire, we are in an area where people are keen to develop and they are willing to put money into things like bus services. The problem we have found is that it is fine at the start, we have got all this money and we introduce the bus services, but it is a finite pot of money that we get in that way and eventually three, four, five years down the line the money runs out and we do not always find that the service has become commercial at the end of that period. So it creates a need for the local authority to then put funding in and we would like to be able to secure a longer term commitment from developers wherever that is a reasonable requirement. Graham Stringer: So is it fair to say that the obverse of these impressive passenger growth figures is a contraction of the network? Is that a fair comment? I do not want to put words into your mouths. Q44 Chairman: We cannot record nods, gentlemen; someone has to say something. Mr Hodgkins: I am prepared to say that in terms of my county-wide growth over the last four years of the 20 odd per cent that I have talked about, most of that is driven in and around the key routes into Cambridgeshire, and there are some other parts of Cambridgeshire where it is stable or still declining which has been a characteristic of the beginning of a decline in bus use, so it is easier to focus on these core corridors and those key areas. Q45 Graham Stringer: Do you believe that your experience in medium-sized, historic towns where you have got these impressive growth figures is replicable in the great urban conurbations of this country, in the West Midlands, Tyne & Wear, Greater Manchester, et cetera? Mr Crowther: I believe so. If you have the density of people to make it work, and obviously the rural issue and the urban issue are almost two separate equations, but where you have a dense urban network of population, these models have got the potential for working very, very well. Mr Woolley: Certainly when I looked at some comparative figures between ourselves and two big urban conurbations, where the bus operator in question was claiming that they had put in exactly the same approach in all three and had a graph which showed our growth was certainly well ahead of the other two, their view was that it was the local authority's willingness to be partners in a way that gave them what they were book looking for, recognising that any partnership to be successful both parties have got to get something out of it. I think too many local authorities are not actually working with the bus companies. Certainly some of the leading ones are prepared to invest substantial sums, which is what is needed, and without that partnership being robust and them seeing the local authority being prepared to do their bit with the traffic and bus corridors and bus priorities, then they will not be prepared to invest. So I think it is a generic model; I do not think it is an historic towns model. Q46 Mr Martlew: Just following on from that - you may just have touched on it - do you think those of you sitting there are representative of the industry throughout the UK or are you sitting there because you run good authorities? If I look at the figures, bus usage is going down and yet you all have a good story to tell. I think Mr Hodgkins is probably the one for that. There seems to be a contradiction there, gentlemen. Mr Hodgkins: If I may try and venture a fairly independent perspective on that. I suspect in many ways the cities that we have heard about are not representative of the country as a whole. From my own experience what I would say is that even in those areas where there is not total generic growth in the market, it is possible to stimulate growth in individual routes or in individual parts of the network with the strength of commitment on the part of both the bus company and the local authority to deliver that growth. It is not impossible in any stretch of the word, even in a relatively small market town of 50,000/60,000 population, to deliver 25 or 30 per cent growth on an individual route by a concentrated effort to promote and improve the quality of that service. That growth, if you are on top of the game, will continue year on year at a lower rate. It will continue at perhaps five, six, seven per cent per year thereafter provided you contain and maintain the impetus of the quality standards and the marketing and promotion of that service. That can sit, as it does in my authority, with a handful, a dozen or so routes around a network of 100 routes which overall is still showing signs of decline at two or three per cent per annum, and only in the sense of the joint commitment to investment has that been turned round on a county-wide basis to an overall picture of very slight growth year on year. However, it is growth in parts and it is decline in many of the other traditional areas which have not received that same level of investment. Q47 Chairman: Mind you, if, as Mr Helling says, you are sending out the rural ones so the elderly cannot get in and the disabled find the facilities unusable, it is not going to be available for a lot of people, is it? Mr Hodgkins: Indeed. Q48 Mr Goodwill: Mr Stringer mentioned how the success we have had with some of the smaller authorities does not seem to have been replicated with some of the larger metropolitan conurbations. Do you think maybe that is due to the fact that they have been looking at light rail and tram systems and putting all their money on that horse which the Government has chosen not to back and that if they had maybe looked at buses in a more constructive way from the beginning rather than pin all their hopes on these marvellous schemes they could have replicated some of the success we have seen before us today? Mr Hodgkins: The equation goes far beyond solely the economics of providing the bus service. The equation is very much more heavily influenced by the levels of traffic congestion and overall levels of demand for travel within those areas, travel in its widest sense in terms of mobility. Clearly in some metropolitan areas bulk rapid transit, be it trams or high-quality bus services, is essential in order to keep the city moving. There are a whole range of different problems that beset the metropolitan areas which maybe are not replicated even in some of the locations that we have heard from this afternoon. Q49 Chairman: I just want to ask you some things about reliability. Are your services reliable? Mr Woolley: Well, not reliable enough, and that is a factor of congestion that we all suffer from and consequently we are having to work very hard to try and give bus priority through the congestion, but that is going to be a long-term goal to improve reliability over probably several years, five or ten years. Q50 Graham Stringer: How sure are you that the reliability is a factor of congestion? When I asked the Department for Transport what was the major factor in reliability they said that two-thirds of the unreliability of buses came from the buses not turning up and not congestion. Is that very different in your authority? Mr Woolley: I would be very surprised if it was as high as two-thirds but clearly we do have occasional problems with buses not turning up. It is clearly a matter that the Traffic Commissioners could help us with greatly, from the earlier conversation we were having. Reliability is certainly a factor in a constrained historic city like York where we have a road network which is basically the same as it was in the 1600s and we are having to deal with modern day traffic problems and no capacity to enlarge that. Q51 Graham Stringer: I understand that. What I am trying to get at is how objective is your evidence that congestion causes unreliability as opposed to bus companies not turning their buses out? Mr Helling: Can I say from the Oxfordshire perspective that we are confident that on our main routes, the routes that are the subject of partnerships, the bus operators are these days (it has not always been the case in the past, it has to be said) running the buses that they are supposed to run, there are the right number of buses on the route, but there are undoubtedly significant variations in journey time. Increasingly in the case of Oxford it is the suburbs that are the problem. I think we have the city centre quite well under control in terms of congestion but growing congestion in the suburbs means that now buses are taking very variable lengths of time to get from the suburbs to the city centre, and that is leading to a large amount of difference in the time that they arrive compared to the time that they should arrive, depending on the traffic that any particular bus encounters. Q52 Chairman: Are there reasons other than congestion, Mr Hodgkins? Mr Smith: The evidence nationally is that the level of bus reliability and punctuality at the start of a route is substantially higher than it is further along the route. The evidence within my own authority's area would suggest that whereas maybe around 90-95 per cent of services are starting their journey on time, the further you go down the route, the more that punctuality slides down to a level closer to 70 per cent. It is in that service gap, between the 70 and 90 per cent, that we as local authorities now, particularly with the assistance of the newly appointed traffic managers in each authority, are focusing our attention to try and understand what the reasons are for that differential. Some of it inevitably is traffic congestion, it is the impact of roadworks, it is the impact of indiscriminate parking in many cases, but it is also in some cases the fact that there has not been a realistic expectation set by the operators in determining the timetable to which they are going to run. We are now working together with operators to try and understand and address those differentials. Clive Efford: We hear a lot about the powers that Transport for London has and that authorities outside of London would like to have similar powers. Is the London model viable for the rest of the country to follow? Again I am not sure which one of you wants to answer. Q53 Chairman: You are all looking thoughtful. You must have thought about this. Someone has thought about it. Mr Crowther: Chairman, it is viable, at a price. Q54 Clive Efford: What does that mean? Mr Crowther: I think it is a very expensive model. In the circumstances that I have got where 97 per cent of the bus services in our city are provided at no cost to the public purse if we were to take over the London model where everything is franchised to the city council, we would in effect be paying for something that we are getting at the moment commercially. In the circumstances where I am I do not think it is an appropriate model. It might very well be elsewhere but at a price. Q55 Clive Efford: Does anyone else have a view on that or do you all agree with that? Mr Smith: I would certainly agree with that point because there is undoubtedly a real cost to the London model. I think what it does, though, is to take us back a little bit to the point you asked earlier about thinking about a quality network, indeed linking back to an issue that is a general view held by local authorities of the need to shape the network. Where you are working in a good partnership - and I use my own area as an example of that - we do sit down with the operators and try to work out the best shape of the network. Q56 Chairman: We are talking about partnerships so do you have agreements about bus cleaning? Mr Smith: We do on things like our park and ride network where we have agreements there. It is part of the partnership. Q57 Chairman: That is only one part of what you do. Mr Smith: Indeed, taking that further, there are agreements with the bus operators there about driver training, customer training, and the like, so all of those components are in there, which is giving a much better product to the user. We have not touched on that but I think that is a really important aspect in terms of encouraging people to use buses. We touched on earlier this issue of stigma. One of the things we have discovered in the Cambridgeshire area where there is growth is that we are needing and wanting to attract people who have cars not to take their cars in or to take their cars in and to use park and ride. We have to make sure that the product that is offered by the operators is of a high quality otherwise they are not going to be attracted. That is the sort of thinking we are talking about in that way. Q58 Clive Efford: Is there anything about the London model that you think is good and that you would like to adopt? What about Mr Hodgkins? Mr Hodgkins: I think there are clearly areas of the country, and the major cities are perhaps the most obvious ones, where there is an appeal of the London model in terms of the ability that that would provide to the passenger transport authority to deliver the objectives and the outcomes that it is seeking to deliver in terms of public transport and mobility. I think the model is so far departed from the reality of a good many shire counties and rural authorities in particular, that it is not on the radar of a very high proportion of the local authorities to even contemplate what the delivery of a wholly regulated franchised system would mean in terms of financial commitment, particularly to the local authority. Q59 Clive Efford: Do you think the London model is more successful in tackling social exclusion in providing services? Is there a tension between services provided on a commercial basis as opposed to those that are funded and regulated by someone like TfL? Mr Hodgkins: I think it is very evident that it has been successful in tackling social exclusion but I would repeat the phrase that was used further along the table here earlier on; it has been at a price and I think it is a price that clearly has enabled the delivery of the objectives of Transport for London. Q60 Clive Efford: How do we resolve that? If there is a barrier to tackling social exclusion through commercially provided services, how do we overcome that problem? Mr Hodgkins: From the local authority perspective, one of the greatest burdens is the burden of having to try and build confidence in a system that is in many respects dependent on short-term funding streams. We have heard about Challenge funds and we have heard about Kickstart funding and a range of other rural transport grants in particular that have been to a very limited timescale, and it is quite challenging to the local authority to actually be able to go out and deliver a project when at the back of their mind they know there is only a three-year funding stream to back it up. Q61 Chairman: I am a bit worried about some of these things we have not talked about - frequency of cleaning buses, for instance, and late night buses. Do your vulnerable users feel safe in your buses late at night? Mr Crowther: The feedback that we get is that yes they do. Within the City Council we have a partnership called the Safer Streets initiative which involves the City Council, transport operators, the police and the community, and we address what are seen as being the major issues. I think I mentioned earlier that Brighton is fortunate in having almost a 24-hour economy and people are quite happy to be in the city centre quite late at night because of the city's own CCTV cameras, those on the buses, the behaviour of people; it is all a package. Q62 Chairman: What is the level of crime on your buses, Mr Smith? Mr Smith: To my knowledge ours is very low and I think that is true right through to our park and ride sites where literately we have a handful of incidents through the year. It is very low. The buses are fully covered by CCTV and to hear of an incident on a bus it is unusual. Q63 Chairman: Mr Woolley, are your buses covered by CCTV? Mr Woolley: They are, yes, and like Cambridge the incidence of crime and disorder on buses is very low. They are reported in a very high-profile way because they are so rare. Q64 Chairman: Are your buses generally safe and well-maintained? Mr Woolley: They are safe and well maintained. We introduced park and ride over ten years ago and we were very prescriptive about the way buses on park and ride were maintained in terms of cleanliness and the way that they were washed. Q65 Chairman: Does that tip over into the other buses because the park and ride, as you specifically told us, is aimed at your middle-class customers to get them out of their cars. It is only out in the rural areas they have the broken down ones that they cannot get in. Mr Woolley: I do not think we ever told you that, Chairman. Q66 Chairman: I did not think you said that, Mr Woolley. I paraphrase, as they say. Mr Woolley: I was going on to say that the example we set to the bus companies and because we were licensing that service, they realised that we were specifying something they should be doing as well because the growth in park and ride could be replicated on the staged carriage services. In the FTR, this new concept vehicle we talked about earlier, we have entered into a quality partnership specifically on that with the bus companies where they volunteered daily washing and cleaning, deep cleaning every fortnight, and a whole range of things to make sure that the quality of the vehicle was maintained, the operator recognising the importance to his business. Q67 Chairman: Mr Smith, a similar story? Mr Smith: Absolutely and I was just reflecting, having been involved in the business for some ten years or so, so back then the position was quite variable, shall we say. Today you rarely see a dirty bus which is out on the streets. When you use the buses - and I do use the buses as one of the people in the area - you generally find a good experience there. That is absolutely vital. We get a lot of feedback both on our own supported services but also on the commercial services. Q68 Chairman: Do you get passenger complaints about rude drivers and bad driving? Mr Smith: Of course we do. That goes to some extent with the territory. Q69 Chairman: What sort of level are we talking about? Mr Smith: I will quote a specific for you. On our park and ride services, which are carrying about 1.6 million passengers per year, we get about 50 complaints a month. Interestingly, one of the most regular complaints is that "the bus pulled away when I was approaching the bus". Of course, that is a reflection of when does a bus pull away when there is a continual stream of people wanting to get on? The serious side is that there are odd incidents, the fact the bus was being driven jerkily or the like. I think it is important that we are monitoring that and it is again part of having to care for the customer and, rather like Mr Woolley, we have tried to work with the bus companies to say it is really important that we get those messages across. Q70 Chairman: Is that normal Mr Hodgkins? Mr Hodgkins: I think it is quite representative, Chairman, yes. I think the level of complaint that certainly comes to the attention of the local authority about bus services is remarkably low given the total number of customers there are. Q71 Chairman: How many authorities insist on proper formal bus driving training? Mr Hodgkins: I cannot answer that question precisely. I think it would be fair to say that those authorities who have invested in public transport as a measure to encourage modal shift have done so with quality standards very much in mind and have invested very heavily with their partners in the operating sector in ensuring that the training standards, cleanliness and so on are part of the overall package that the customer is offered. Q72 Chairman: Are we agreeing that nevertheless the ones that we are talking to today may very well be the exceptions? Mr Hodgkins: I think they are excellent examples. Q73 Chairman: No, no, no, do not trade words with me, Mr Hodgkins, that is what I do! I ask you again: are these people that we are talking about here exceptions? Mr Smith: No, I believe that across the country the level of satisfaction with bus services is improving. There is no doubt, having been in the bus industry and local authorities for something like 35 years, that the image of the bus industry has never been wonderful. Certainly there has been a period in the last 20 years when the reputation of bus services and the image of bus services has taken a hit, but I think in general terms the overall level of customer satisfaction is now starting to rise. Q74 Chairman: So if we take evidence that wheels come off buses when they are in service and a number of vehicle were in use despite having expired Ministry of Transport certificates, that is not the norm? Mr Smith: I do not see that as being the normal standard of service that is delivered across the country as a whole. Q75 Chairman: I want to ask you about the Competition Act. I do not know who would like to give me their opinion. Should bus services be exempted from the Competition Act? Mr Smith: May I kick off, Chairman, with a comment in general terms and I am sure that there will be specific examples that others may draw on. As a local transport authority, we are required to produce a bus strategy which is, in effect, our statement of intent as to how we wish to see the public transport service delivered across the local authority's area and how we intend to prioritise our spend in support of that network. In many cases that bus strategy will take the form of an aspiration of what network we would like to see in place. In some cases those services will be provided commercially and in some cases they will not. In areas where the commercial service falls short of our aspiration, we may wish to enter into dialogue with more than one company in order to secure the enhancement that is necessary to meet our desired standard of service. In some respects the Competition Act has proved a barrier to that dialogue. There are examples of where bus routes run by two competing operators have generated additional ridership. I can quote several examples from my local area where that is the case. In many cases however that has been a short-lived experience, especially when profit margins are as tight as they are in many of the rural shire counties that I am familiar with. One of the greatest burdens that the customer sees, and they are being given the answer that it is an impact of the Competition Act, is that where there is more than one operator of commercial services they cannot use their tickets on the other operator's bus, and even where quality standards are of an even level and frequency of service is of an even level, that one factor alone can be a deterrent to passengers. Q76 Chairman: Are you saying to us, Mr Hodgkins, that the local authorities could in effect broker a better service if they were able to do so between bus operators? Mr Hodgkins: It would be fair to say that in setting out their objectives in delivering public transport networks, the local authorities by and large are trying to deliver a level of service that is in the public interest. It is very interesting to note that the view of the Office of Fair Trading is currently that the local authority is not entrusted with representing the public interest in that it has not got the power to go out and negotiate between operators in the way that you suggest. In that sense, yes, there is a disparity in view over the effectiveness of the Competition Act. Chairman: Gentlemen, you have all been very instructive and helpful. Thank you very much indeed, I am very grateful to you. Memoranda submitted by South Yorkshire PTE, Greater Manchester PTA, West Midlands PTE (Centro) and Tyne & Wear PTE (Nexus)
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Roy Wicks, Director General, South Yorkshire PTE, Mr Geoff Inskip, Acting Director General, Greater Manchester PTA, Mr Douglas Ferguson, Operations Director, Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, Mr Robert Smith, Services Director, PTE (Centro), Mr Mike Parker, Director General, Tyne & Wear PTE (Nexus), and Mr Mark Dowd, Chairman of Mersey Travel, gave evidence. Q77 Chairman: Good afternoon, to you. This is definitely our male dominated afternoon. Would you like to identify yourselves for the record? Mr Dowd: My name is Mark Dowd and I am the Chairman of Mersey Travel. Mr Parker: I am Mike Parker, I am Director General of Nexus. Mr Smith: Good afternoon. I am Robert Smith, Services Director of Centro. Mr Ferguson: Douglas Ferguson, Operations Director with Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, previously Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive. Mr Inskip: Geoff Inskip, Deputy Director General at Greater Manchester PTE. Mr Wicks: Roy Wicks, Director General of South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive. Q78 Chairman: Thank you very much. Am I to take it that I can go directly to questions? Why are bus patronage numbers still in decline? Mr Wicks: Could I start off by addressing that issue because you have obviously had quite a lot of evidence from the people before you. Certainly the situation in the metropolitan areas does paint a very different picture. All of us on this table are experiencing continuing decline of the order of two or three per cent a year. I think there are common factors amongst all of us and then there are some specific factors which some of my colleagues might want to bring in. Certainly in our own case in South Yorkshire we have done work to look at why passengers are no longer using the public transport service and they cite four or five reasons as to why the bus is no longer their chosen mode of travel: reliability, whether the bus turns up or not; the coverage and the stability of services. We are seeing a concentration, as your previous witnesses were saying, of bus services on the core routes but that is not necessarily where people want to go to and from, particularly in our own case where we have a very transformational economy where we have seen the coal mines and steel industry run down and we have got to take people to new destinations, and bus services often are not there to do that. Affordability is a big issue. We have seen fares rise in South Yorkshire by over 30 per cent in the last year and that presents significant ---- Q79 Chairman: In the last 12 months? Mr Wicks: In the last 12 months, yes. Sorry, in the 12 months up until December 2005. FirstGroup then introduced a no fares rise for 2006. Another reason is service stability, which I meant to cover under coverage, the frequency with which services change. Even though in South Yorkshire we only change services four times a year there are still sufficient changes each time for people to think the network is constantly changing. Finally, the quality of the service which embraces a lot of the things your previous witnesses have talked about. There are considerable numbers of new vehicles in South Yorkshire, but there are considerable numbers of old vehicles. You tend to get concentrations of new vehicles on the core routes with some of the vehicles on the secondary routes being the older, less accessible, less clean and less attractive buses. Driver standards, standards of driving in terms of the approach and pulling away from the stops, as well as the approach the driver has to the passengers, is a big feature of people's concerns in South Yorkshire. Those are some of the reasons why passengers have deserted public transport in South Yorkshire. Some of it is demographic as well, it is fair to say. The aspirations still remain for the young to take cars. Obviously the ability to move around our city centres is another issue. In South Yorkshire, as yet, we do not have the levels of congestion you have in some other conurbations and, therefore, the car can provide an alternative. Chairman: Mr Stringer, you had something you wanted to declare? Graham Stringer: I am a member of Amicus, I used to be a member of the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority and I chair the PTEG parliamentary liaison group. Mr Clelland: I am a member of Amicus and also a member of the PTEG group. Q80 Chairman: Gentlemen, are there any extra bits that Mr Wicks has not told us about that you want to add to that? Mr Dowd: Chairman, I am speaking about Merseyside and we have ---- Q81 Chairman: We thought you might. We thought that was what you were here for! Mr Dowd: I am here as the Chair of the special interest group. On Merseyside we have a 75 per cent change of commercial buses every year. That is one of the reasons why people will not travel on buses. In St Helens next month there will be a massive change in the bus services there. Q82 Chairman: What is that largely, is that the company deciding the routes are not economic? That is an enormous change, 75 per cent a year. Mr Dowd: That is in a 12 month period. That is obviously what it is because they are in a position where they can change the routes every 56 days. Obviously if we look at what they will do in St Helens, which is next month, they will change the services wholesale and that is the law of the land as it stands, and that is why we are sitting here today. Mr Parker: I come from Tyne & Wear which has an experience slightly different from my colleagues in that in the early 1980s, against the national trend, we were actually increasing public transport use and every year from 1981-85 we had increases. The main reason for that was firstly the building of the Metro and the opening of the Tyne & Wear Metro but, very importantly, the then PTE was responsible for the overall network of bus services and they deliberately planned for those bus services to feed into purpose-built interchanges so that people would get off the buses and then get on the Metro to take them right into the centre of Newcastle. They did that so it was - that very overused word - a seamless journey. It was easy to do. There was a single ticket that you purchased so you did not have to get out and buy another ticket. What it did mean was you did not have the level of bus congestion, of over-bussing, that you have in the centre of towns like Newcastle now. For five years we were increasing and then we had a major decline. That major decline was because there were a lot of bus companies, it was dog eat dog, and there were a very difficult few years in the bus market, but also you had bus companies deliberately competing against the Metro and that caused confusion and reduced the return on the investment that government had made in the Metro in the first place. In the late 1980s that was the main cause of decline. In the 1990s we would have to say that the main cause of decline was growth in car ownership which has driven bus journeys down. There are lots of refinements on that but certainly the growth in car ownership and not being able to cope with that has been one of the main causes. Q83 Chairman: Is there anything new anyone wants to add to that? Mr Ferguson: Can I just clarify one point. In our area, the west of Scotland, over the last two years there has been a small increase in the number of people using buses but that is largely due to the introduction of free concessionary travel first locally and then nationally. If you strip that out of the figures then, for all the reasons that other people have been saying, people who have a choice are still moving away from bus services. Q84 Chairman: What should the bus industry do to improve its general public relations? Why are buses always seen as a last resort? A previous lady Prime Minister was said to have said they were only for the indigent and students, both of whom I think she thought were beyond the pale. Mr Smith: The issue is one of quality. It is a key issue that people will not get on buses that are not well presented, that are not clean, as you have mentioned before, where we have poor information. Until very recently only ten per cent of bus stops in the West Midlands, where I represent, had any form of bus information on them at all. Fare and timetable information needs ---- Q85 Chairman: What is the percentage now, Mr Smith? Mr Smith: It is going up. It is 40 per cent now. Q86 Chairman: Is that investment by the local authority? Mr Smith: It is, by the Passenger Transport Executive. As a PTE we are committed to put in 100 per cent across the West Midlands of 13,000 signs by the end of 2007. Q87 Chairman: Do you want to expand on that, Mr Parker, because I want to come to Mr Clelland? Mr Parker: I think the image of the bus is very crucial. One of the things we have done in the North East is got together with all the bus operators and the local authorities and run a marketing campaign to try and reposition the bus. The quality of buses themselves has gone up enormously. I am very happy to share the results of that campaign with Members of the Committee and I will arrange to send that to you, Chairman. Chairman: That would be helpful. We have found a simply wonderful picture, which I am sure we are going to share more widely, which is an advertisement for a car and has this wonderful picture across the front of the number 23 and it says "Creeps and weirdos" and then it says, "Luckily, there's an affordable alternative". Q88 Mr Clelland: Mr Parker has reminded us of the number of bus companies there were in the early days of the opening of the Metro system and the privatisation of buses, but could our witnesses tell us what percentage of services in their areas are not provided by the big five operators these days? Mr Parker: Two per cent from Tyne & Wear. Q89 Chairman: Anyone else? Any advance on two per cent? Mr Smith: In Centro 80 per cent of our services are operated by Travel West Midlands. Q90 Mr Clelland: Could the PTEs tell us what value for money they actually provide? Mr Parker: That we provide? Q91 Mr Clelland: Yes. Mr Wicks: I will tend to start the questions if you like, Chair, to ease the process. We are about one per cent by the big two bus operators in South Yorkshire now that the last remaining small big operator, Yorkshire Traction, was taken over by Stagecoach. What value for money do the PTEs provide? You have only got to look around the major conurbations and you will see that the PTEs are providing a lot of the things that the bus companies are not providing. They are providing information, the timetables, and the telephone call centres that provide information. In West and South Yorkshire you will see, as in other PTEs, information now being provided to mobile telephones and computers and things with real-time information. We provide interchanges where we provide staff at the interchanges. If you benchmark how we provide that, it is not just about providing the services, I think you will see those services are provided very cost-effectively. They are all things that we provide that reduce the barriers to people making their journeys. We then step in to top up the commercial market. I would be quite envious of the Brighton position if I had 97 per cent commercial operation. In South Yorkshire ten per cent of the market is now tendered services and what we are finding - my colleagues would all be saying the same thing - is we are increasingly having to buy a bigger share of the market and it is costing us more each time we go out to the market to buy services because there is less competition for those services and the costs of those tenders are going up. We think we are very efficient organisations at procuring those services. We strongly believe that if we were not there as organisations, to go back to the Chairman's first question, the rate of decline in our areas would be greater if it was not for the initiatives that we are taking to intervene. Chairman: Gentlemen, I should warn you that we might have to adjourn any minute for a vote. It is not a personal comment on our witnesses and I hope you will not go away. Please carry on. Q92 Mr Clelland: In light of the reply, could I ask in terms of PTEs whether you feel that services in your areas are reliable? Have you managed to limit route changes and the removal of services and stop over-bussing and, if so, how? Mr Wicks: Reliability is quite a complex issue. It is very easy and quite common for reliability just to be seen to be a matter of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion is an important factor, in our own surveys it is around a third of the reasons why buses are unreliable. The other two main reasons tend to be either presentation of the vehicle in the first instance and/or staff, so people do not turn up to run the buses or the bus itself does not turn up. The next chunk is boarding and alighting. I know it is an old joke that it is the passengers that get in the way of running a reliable bus service, but the way in which tickets are sold is critical to the speed at which buses move through the system. When you are looking at investments, speeding up ticketing, for example the introduction of Oyster-type travel arrangements outside London, can have equally as great an impact on the reliability of journeys as can investment in traffic systems. Certainly in South Yorkshire, and I am sure my colleagues can add, have concentrated on all of those. We have sat down with our own bus operators who had problems with staff shortages and vehicle presentation and worked with them to get them to reduce that, and that is now a declining proportion of the reasons for delay. We worked with the city council and the other highway authorities to regulate the traffic and improve the flow and hopefully we will be getting government funding to introduce a smart card ticketing system which can speed up the boarding of passengers. Q93 Chairman: Mr Ferguson? Mr Ferguson: In terms of our area, for the original question, around 50 per cent of the services are provided by the big three operators: First, Stagecoach and Arriva. The other 50 per cent are provided by around 100 other bus operators. If you look at reliability, for the big three I would say that, by and large, they try to provide a reliable service within the factors that they can control. Within that 100 other operators it is very, very variable, some try hard, some do not try hard at all to provide a reliable service. Q94 Chairman: Mr Dowd? Mr Dowd: Could I mention finance because we are in a position, again on Merseyside, where we spend now in the region, on subsidised services, of around about £24 million. Chairman: I am sorry about this Mr Dowd, we will have to hear about the 24 million when we come back. The Committee is adjourned and I will be grateful if Members could return within ten minutes. You are entitled to 15 minutes. The Committee suspended from 4.01pm to 4.10pm for a division in the House. Q95 Chairman: Mr Dowd, you were about to make a comment. Mr Dowd: Yes, finance. We were in the position when Mr Scales joined the organisation about seven or eight years ago where we spent in the region of £8 million or £9 million on subsidised services; we spend about £23 million now on subsidised services. Added to that, we pay the bus operators £20 million for concessionary travel for the elderly, £71/2 million for disabled people and £41/2 million for half fare for children which costs £32 million. We spend a huge amount of money. The thing about the £32 million is we have no say on when the buses begin, when they end, the routes, the frequencies or the fares and that is a great problem. Of course the bus operators laugh all the way to the bank and no wonder that they do. They really do not need to change the system because the system suits them as it stands at present. Q96 Mr Clelland: That brings me nicely to the next question because you have all really in your written evidence said that you should have more power. Perhaps you could explain to the Committee what extra powers you think you need and how you could justify the extra powers? Mr Dowd: Can I answer that. Over the past six or eight weeks I have actually been to Ireland, they have a regulated service with an increase of 12 per cent on patronage every year. London, last year, was £30 million. We know for a fact that London actually spend - this is Transport for London - £1,400 million on bus contracts, the actual subsidies are £550 million. Now they are in the premier league, we are in the Beazer league, that is the problem that we have got. People in London, I am talking about per head, it is around about £660 per head, people in the sticks around about £230. Q97 Mr Clelland: You want the power to spend more money? Mr Dowd: Yes. We need some sort of add-on for us so we can look after the people, our people --- Q98 Chairman: That is not an answer, Mr Dowd, to the question you were asked. The question you were asked was about powers. Do you want just the money and then keep the powers or are you saying you want the powers and you would not then need the money, what is the answer? Mr Dowd: The answer at the end of the day is obviously to give us the finance. What we can then do is have a bus service which the people that we represent can be proud of, similar to London, that is all we ask. Q99 Chairman: Mr Ferguson, do you have these powers? Mr Ferguson: We effectively have the same powers in Scotland as exist in England and Wales. Some of the details around the Transport Act 2000 are slightly different but by and large the ability to introduce quality contracts and statutory partnerships are the same. Like in England and Wales we have not used those powers, and the reasons that we have not used them are that quality contracts, although the rules by which you can introduce them, the wording is slightly different in Scotland, the guidance that sits behind them still makes it very clear that quality contracts are seen as the last resort after other opportunities have been taken to improve services. We do work with operators in terms of trying to improve services through partnership but because there are so many operators involved it has proved impossible to raise the general standard of services. Q100 Chairman: Did you want to comment on that? Mr Inskip: I would, yes, please. We do need more powers. We need more powers for network stability, to co-ordinate services. We need to organise the buses through the city centres, the town centres and the region, and we need simplified fare systems throughout the conurbations as well. The only way to do that is by having greater powers over the bus services. I do not think we would apologise for wanting to spend more money on raising the standard and giving people better quality bus services. Q101 Chairman: Mr Wicks? Mr Wicks: Mr Inskip has covered most of the points. The other one I would add is that I think what the highway authorities want is the confidence to invest in the reliability improvements and that comes from knowing the bus service will still be there after they have made the investment. I think having the powers over the provision of the service reinforces the investment and reliability. Q102 Chairman: Mr Parker? Mr Parker: I think we look very enviously at the powers of Transport for London, particularly over the strategic highway network where Transport for London is able to drive bus priorities more flexibly than we are able to do in partnership with local authorities. We also need powers on bus operator performance. Colleagues have mentioned poor performance before but we have no powers, the Traffic Commissioner has powers but in terms of Tyne & Wear our local Traffic Commissioner is based in Leeds and I understand he has two individuals responsible for looking at bus services between the Trent and the Scottish borders. We would like powers like Traffic Commissioners to ensure that bus operators perform and provide the buses that they register. In Tyne & Wear we have about four per cent of bus services, which I think is quite a good statistic, I am told, but four per cent of bus services just do not operate because either there is not a bus or there is not a driver. If I do that on my Metro I would be shot. Q103 Chairman: Mr Smith, same ideas? Mr Smith: Yes, indeed. I think what is required is a system where the public sector specifies what is to be provided and the private sector does what it is good at which is providing for that specification. It allows bus operators to concentrate on what they are good at and it allows local authorities clarity of their particular role. Q104 Mr Clelland: Finally, are there any powers which local authorities currently have which would be better exercised at the PTE level? Mr Wicks: There is one power in that Passenger Transport Executives are not actually able to own buses whereas some Shire counties and district councils have that power. It ought to be put in place fairly easily. Q105 Chairman: Unlike somewhere like Cheshire, you cannot offer a complementary or alternative system? Mr Wicks: We cannot own vehicles. It is as simple as that. Q106 Mr Clelland: What about things like common rules for bus lanes, for instance, which is a big problem in some areas? Mr Parker: Chairman, it is a real problem when you have got five local authorities in Tyne & Wear who all have different rules for bus lanes. Trying to get them all to agree to have the same rules, the result is the police are more reluctant to enforce bus lanes because they claim that drivers can always use the excuse that they are confused and they are not quite sure whether they are in Gateshead or Newcastle. Q107 Chairman: In what sense can they not combine them, Mr Parker? You are not saying you have a bus lane which finishes up in a dead end and then the next one starts. Mr Parker: No, no, it is not combining. For instance, one local authority may have a no car lane which allows taxis and vans as well as buses and cyclists, another might not. One might operate between seven in the morning and seven in the evening, another might operate in the rush hour. Q108 Chairman: Is there any attempt to standardise? Mr Parker: We have tried very hard, Chairman, but have yet to succeed. Q109 Clive Efford: Given that many of you are seeking more powers, am I right in believing that quality contracts could offer you the opportunity to get more power and, if so, why have there not been any? Mr Wicks: In our evidence we have set out what we think are some of the barriers to quick achievement of quality contracts. Together with Nexus we started a market consultation exercise at the beginning of this year when we invited operators to work with us and understand how a quality contract could be introduced. Without giving a long treatise on it, there are two or three very critical problems. First of all there is the hurdle, the test that we have to pass is to prove that it is the only practical way. That requires us to put a lot of work in to demonstrate that that is the right way forward. The second is really around the process. There are clearly issues involved in how you introduce quality contracts, the risk of instability in the short-term to your bus provision. The question mark over what it might cost. We have done quite a lot of work through the market consultation to give ourselves comfort on what a quality contract might cost and we are not unduly concerned about that in what it might actually cost but clearly there is the risk about how incumbent operators might price that, whether the public sector gets value for money. A third issue is contract length. The legislation only allows a five year contract for a quality contract. All the people we spoke to on the market consultation exercise said an eight year contract, or something like that, would offer much better value for the public sector and particularly on vehicle costs and things like that there will be significant savings. There is quite a lot of work going on to look at how one might be introduced and I think all of us along this table are at various stages in the process of doing that. Of course, as was mentioned in the earlier evidence, there is the political dimension to this which is the elected authorities that we represent have to look at the consequences of pursuing the quality contract process which we think in South Yorkshire will probably take three to four years to implement, even with the accelerated timescales of the legislation. That may still be better than that which they will get through continuing voluntary partnership arrangements but it does represent a substantial risk politically and to the passengers in South Yorkshire. I think we are seriously working through the legislation but the hurdle, the risks to the process and the local political consequences are serious. Q110 Chairman: I take it most of you would agree with most of that? Mr Inskip: Can I just add one other dimension and that is operator resistance to quality contracts should not be overstated as well. They will resist quality contracts all the way through, if necessary taking this to court to prove that there is a different way and the only practical way will have to be tested in court I believe. Q111 Chairman: Is this because they cannot be shamed into agreeing that they do not want to comply with certain standards? Mr Inskip: We do not believe that they want them full stop and they would rather have the existing situation continue through. Q112 Chairman: They just want the money but they do not want the restriction? Mr Inskip: Making 25 per cent, 30 per cent returns on their commercial services currently. If you go down the quality contract route, let us face it, we are talking about seven or eight per cent returns and that is what they do not want. Q113 Clive Efford: Greater Manchester has put in evidence that says they would like to see an enhanced quality partnership which gives the transport authority more control over timetabling and fares. What sort of improvements would this deliver over quality partnerships and what would it deliver that they currently do not? Mr Inskip: I think Mr Wicks has described the difficulties with quality contracts in terms of process, I have also explained about operator resistance. I think he has also explained that we think it could take three to four years before we could get the quality contracts in place. If we could have binding partnerships with the bus operators which give us exactly the same thing you could achieve that more quickly and that is what we are suggesting, there could be a path through to do that. It still requires legislative change, we still need change in the legislation to do it. We would be offering some level of exclusivity to the operators but rather than have a monopolistic position where they are now, where they have got no control, we would have control over the operators for service levels, the standards and the specification that they would operate to. Q114 Clive Efford: Can I just move on to Traffic Commissioners. Are the Traffic Commissioners fit for purpose and do they have enough staff and resources? Mr Smith: I can help on that particular one. I think we have a very good relationship gently with Traffic Commissioners, certainly in the West Midlands we have a good personal relationship with the Traffic Commissioner. I think he would also say that the amount of inspection staff that he has at his disposal is only one for the whole of the West Midlands region which is clearly inadequate for the purpose of doing anything other than ensuring the buses are safe to run, which generally they are in the West Midlands. In terms of his other responsibilities for checking on whether buses turn up on time and taking care of that, he has only one member of enforcement staff for the whole region, not just the conurbation, and therefore he uses our own monitoring staff. We send out monitoring staff to ensure that buses are running to time and if they are not we try and identify why that should be. Q115 Clive Efford: Any other comments on that? Mr Parker: The Traffic Commissioner has certainly said to us that they will only act if there is a big upsurge in local stress about the local service but the question is how do local people know about the Traffic Commissioner, and frankly they do not. They do not know of the Traffic Commissioner's existence, the Traffic Commissioner has no responsibility to publicise him or herself. The point I made earlier is that the resources are completely inadequate. The whole emphasis is on making sure bus companies run safely, that is absolutely fine, but actually making sure they perform is what bus passengers are most interested about, punctuality and reliability. Frankly, the Traffic Commissioner is non-existent in Tyne & Wear. Q116 Clive Efford: Where should extra resources for Traffic Commissioners come from? Mr Parker: I believe that the PTEs could be Traffic Commissioners in their own particular areas. We are there, we are not bus operators, we are not allowed statutorily to be bus operators. I do not see why we cannot do that policing job perhaps as an agent for the Traffic Commissioner. Q117 Clive Efford: Just referring back to Mr Wicks, Mr Wicks was suggesting that PTEs wanted to become bus owners and therefore presumably bus operators, you are saying they should go down another route? Mr Parker: I am saying that if your real effort is to enforce punctuality and performance and you ask the question about the powers of the Traffic Commissioners, the Traffic Commissioners are not fit for purpose. I am suggesting we could do that. Obviously if we were a bus operator ourselves then that would not be the right solution because we would be biased. Mr Wicks: Could I clarify that: I certainly was not seeking for the PTEs to become bus operators. Q118 Chairman: No, I think that is clear, Mr Wicks. Mr Wicks: It was just the ability to own vehicles for community transport and those sorts of purposes. Q119 Graham Stringer: If I can take us back for a second to quality contracts, did you, Mr Wicks, listen to or read the evidence given by the Permanent Secretary to the Public Accounts Committee in January about buses? Mr Wicks: I did not see the evidence but I did see the Committee's report. Q120 Graham Stringer: Mr Rowlands in that report brought up the Human Rights Act as a hurdle. Do you believe that was an act of sabotage on your attempts to get quality contracts or is there a consensus in the industry that human rights are different in London from the rest of the country? Mr Wicks: I think the latter point is probably true. On the specifics, in our own quality contract discussions we have also started to take legal advice and there is a real issue there in terms of whether or not the operators would have a case for compensation if their operating rights were withdrawn. Q121 Graham Stringer: Had the Department helped you and advised you on this matter before? Mr Wicks: The Department's position is that they cannot help us on this matter as they have to remain separate from the process. One of the complexities in making a quality contract application is as the Department for Transport will be taking a view on that application they are struggling to work through a way they can advise potential applicants as to how to make that application without compromising their own position particularly, and it goes back to my colleague's point, as were there to be an appeal or a judicial review against the decision it would obviously be the Secretary of State's decision that would be taken to appeal. That is not unusual, the Transport & Works Act is a good example of that and the Department for Transport have promised to set up appropriate Chinese walls within the Department in order to advise us. That process has been quite elongated because we have been working on quality contracts for over a year and, as yet, we have not had detailed advice on the case we will have to make. We will be putting that in as a "surprise" to the Department and I am not aware of any legal advice on the human rights which was presumably taken when the legislation was first made and subsequently being made available to any of us. Q122 Graham Stringer: This is a general question: you are putting more and more money in as passenger transport executives and you are getting a worse service out. Are you completely incompetent or are you victims of cartels? Mr Wicks: I would hope we were not incompetent. We are certainly victims of limited competition. That is why we are paying for it, it is quite a simple equation in South Yorkshire's case and I think Councillor Dowd made exactly the same point. Q123 Graham Stringer: Do you believe that it is limited competition by accident or do you believe that bus companies are organising themselves in an anti-competitive way? Mr Dowd: Can I say this: we are in the position now where, say, for instance a bus contract, a subsidised one, is for two or three years, when they come back for 30 or 40 per cent over and in many instances we only get one or two applications for sometimes huge contracts, as far as I am concerned I find that strange. Q124 Graham Stringer: So do I. The argument you are putting is I guess that you do not have the evidence but you believe there is anti-competitive behaviour out there. I did a debate with Mr Souter not long ago, and some of you were present, and his view, and I would like a response to this, is that you are all dinosaurs based in the late 1960s and that the real model that you should be operating to is the Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford model, that is the way forward. It is Cambridge, Oxford and York as the model, not London. Can you respond to Mr Souter's point? Mr Dowd: Brighton, York, I should imagine that what we speak of are two bus companies, in Manchester there are 48, in Liverpool there are 37, so it is an entirely different ballgame when you have only got one or two bus companies to basically deal with, other than, say, for instance, me, I deal with 37, that is a major difference. Q125 Graham Stringer: Anybody else? Mr Smith: Madam Chairman, if the Committee is looking for a model there are many models not far from here in Western Europe which operate very successfully. There are many different models but they all have one thing in common and that is some form of bus franchising, so whether it is a quality contract or enhanced quality partnership or whatever, the bus franchising model is the one which does deliver results whether it is government objectives, local objectives or, indeed, objectives commercially for bus companies. Mr Inskip: Certainly the Brighton, York model, is great for them, I am sure, but trying to bring something like that into Greater Manchester, at one level I have had the same conversation with Brian Souter, "So, okay, Brian, what is stopping you doing it in Manchester as well? Why are you not increasing growth? Why are you not increasing patronage? I am not stopping you, I will help you in every way I can, putting in bus corridors, putting in bus priorities to help you". Inevitably the overall shape of the market in Manchester is still in decline and, therefore, we have to make some changes and the changes are systemic, it is a systemic decline in this industry in the metropolitan areas unless something is done about it and the Brighton and York models simply will not work. Brian Souter, Moira Lockhead, and the rest of them, if they thought it could work, we could invite them to Manchester and throw the challenge down. Quite honestly, unless we take positive control over the networks and over the quality standards that people want, I do not think people are going to come back to the buses. Mr Parker: Chairman, I think there is also another point about the nature of places like York, Oxford and Cambridge. They are very historical cities with very limited access. They have managed to get political support for very, very significant car restraint and, therefore, the local authorities are delivering very good park and ride systems. If you like, the culture is there for people to cycle and to use buses, that culture is less in the big conurbations where the propensity to drive a car is much greater. Mr Ferguson: Chairman, one other point: in the west of Scotland we have a very extensive rail network and I can see nothing in the current legislation that would encourage Mr Souter to integrate with that rail network and provide services that feed that rail network, quite the opposite, it seems that the current rules encourage them to compete with the rail network. Q126 Graham Stringer: Mr Ferguson, I have trying to get out of the Government the figures for public subsidy per capita in all the regions of England. I have managed to get it for England, including London, and Northern Ireland but because transport is a devolved matter I cannot get those figures for Scotland. Would you be able to provide those figures? Mr Ferguson: I could certainly try and provide those, Madam Chairman, I do not have anything just now. Chairman: That would help us, Mr Ferguson, thank you. Q127 Graham Stringer: Two more questions, if I may. First, to Mr Inskip, I know Manchester very well, I have stood on platforms arguing for the re-regulation of these services. Do I take it from the submission from yourself and the chair of the PTE that the policy has not changed, that the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority is still in favour of re-regulation? Mr Inskip: I think the issue for us is quite clear. We have been knocking on Government's door, we have been asking for a form of re-regulation and have been told that we have got to work within the existing confines of the marketplace. Q128 Graham Stringer: You feel you are being bullied into this position? Mr Inskip: I think that as far as we are concerned, we need to find a way through this with Government to find a way which will bring us the control over the market that we want. I am not sure that there is a huge amount of difference between whether you want to call it a quality contract, whether you want to call it franchising or whether you want to call it an enhanced quality partnership. Certainly from our point of view an enhanced quality partnership gives us control over frequencies and fares and, therefore, there is not too much difference. I think where we come at it is saying that rather than wait three or four years to be able to put something in, if we can put something in much quicker on our terms through a binding partnership, albeit that that does require some change in legislation, we want services to change quickly and in order to do that we are proposing that this may be a way forward. Q129 Graham Stringer: Finally, I would be interested in all your views on the operation of a concessionary fare system. Do you think it is value for money? Do you think the money is properly accounted for and do you think the basis of the scheme, whereby there is an assumed subsidy to a full fare passenger who is eligible, is a scheme fit-for-purpose? Mr Parker: No, I do not, Chairman. In Tyne & Wear we are being hit most by the recent changes in the concessionary travel scheme because we have ended up with a £5.4 million deficit on funding. I think there are a number of issues. You asked earlier about powers and one of the things local authorities have is wellbeing powers which would allow them to give concessions to other groups that in some way are deprived financially. At the moment Passenger Transport Authorities only have the powers to give concessionary travel to pensioners and to children, yet if one of the key objectives, which certainly is in our PTA, is to use transport to reduce social exclusion then you need powers to be able to provide concessions to students, single parents on income support, et cetera, jobseekers and so on. At the moment we do not have those powers. I think if your objective is to reduce social exclusion then you need to say, "Well, how much money am I going to put that way?" Should you put all the money, if you like, in the pensioners' basket? I think I could refer the Committee to the Commission for Integrated Transport, which I used to be a member of, which produced a report about three years ago on the value of bus subsidy and they very clearly stated that once you went beyond half fare for pensioners then the return - it does not mean to say you are not reducing social exclusion - the actual return on your investment actually gets less. The half fare is sort of maximising the return. Of course, the basis on which we compensate the bus operators is on the assumption that the bus operator would charge that pensioner the full fare. There is a formula that relates to generation but basically that is the principle. I believe in a competitive market. If you have bus operator competing with bus operator and there are no concessionary fare systems, those bus operators would charge a lower fare for pensioners in order to attract pensioners on their services rather than someone else's services. Q130 Mr Martlew: On concessionary fares, you have mentioned pensioners and many of us represent rural areas where there are a great deal of problems with young people who wish to come into the city, they are living in the villages and get a bus but cannot afford that bus. Are you saying we should be expanding the concessionary system to those groups? Mr Parker: I am, Chairman. I think we should be able to provide cheaper fares for students, anyone in full-time education and jobseekers. If one of your objectives on transport is social exclusion then a crucial thing is the price of that transport journey. One of the frustrations that Passenger Transport Executives and local councils have had over the years is they have no control over that price. They used to, they have that control in London, but we have no control over the price and that is crucial. One answer might be to give those sorts of powers to allow us to be able to give concessions to those disadvantaged groups. Q131 Chairman: Mr Inskip on this. Mr Inskip: Madam Chairman, there is just one point I want to make as well. It is great giving people free travel but they have to have the buses and the services there to use them. If there are no services it is no good having free travel. Q132 Mr Clelland: I accept that last point, but on this question of giving concessions to young people, it is possible to give concessions to students in full-time education under 18. Mr Parker: Under 18 it is but not over 18. Over 18 it has to be a commercial decision of the bus operator, not allowed to put public subsidy in. Q133 Mr Clelland: Even then, young people under 18 in full-time education, some might be going to further education colleges, not necessarily all going to sixth form, may have to travel across the boundaries of the Passenger Transport Authorities. Is there a case for having a wider than PTE regional scheme? Mr Parker: Absolutely, Chairman, yes. Q134 Mr Clelland: In order to finance that, presumably you would need the co-operation of other partners in the region. Is this something which Regional Development Agencies might help out with? Mr Wicks: If I could add to the comments which have been made and respond to the question. There are two or three things here which come together on what I would call the city region agenda. I think there is a strong argument and it is part of emerging government thinking to look at the role in the city regions and to recognise that transport does not necessarily neatly fit into the current administrative boundaries but it should fit within the city region boundaries. I think all the PTEs feel quite strongly about an alignment of powers which gives them more local accountability and local flexibility about how they organise those transport services, and it goes back to the debate about quality contracts and the debate about concessionary fares. It would seem to me they are local decisions at the city region level, not necessarily national decisions, and I think if you align those powers then you can address the cross-boundary issue. Q135 Chairman: Do you think the Department gives you a strong enough lead? Mr Wicks: In terms of what? Q136 Chairman: Sir David seemed to believe in the evidence that he was giving certainly to the Public Accounts Committee, "... The complexity of the delivery structure outside London is tied up with local authority structure". That is a rather passive response to the needs of the bus industry, is it not? Mr Wicks: It is, very much so. I think there is no difficulty with local leadership, local leadership is very clear about where it wants to take its public transport agenda. I think it is the ability of the local leadership to do that. Q137 Chairman: Should the Department promote buses on a greater scale? Mr Wicks: Yes. Q138 Chairman: Why does it not collect more data about buses and is that a problem? Mr Wicks: I think all of us suffer from a lack of data, most of that is not provided by the operators because it is commercially restricted. Q139 Chairman: Our Public Accounts Committee looked at that and said that it was not convinced that the Department monitored the operation of the market to the extent to which monopolies may exist; is that your view? Mr Wicks: Yes. Q140 Chairman: Supposing that data was provided from Traffic Commissioners, would that be a good idea? Mr Wicks: That would help, yes. Q141 Chairman: Can I ask you, Mr Dowd, why is the network in St Helens changing? Is that a good thing if it is not fit for the purpose that it is designed for? Mr Dowd: I think one of the problems that we have got is that the bus operators on a commercial basis can basically do what they wish. I think it has been mentioned today that what they will not do is run buses where they are going to lose money so they will look at St Helens as a whole and basically make a decision that they will do A, B and C. They will then decide that is the way it is going to be. They will send that to the Traffic Commissioner, they give the 56 days' notice and obviously that puts Mersey Travel in a position where we have to print timetables, we do not have the time to do it and obviously there are people who stand at the bus stop for the bus which will not turn up because it has been taken off; that is the problem. Q142 Chairman: What percentage of the various services are not provided by the big five operators, do you know? Mr Dowd: In Merseyside we provide 20 per cent of the services and that is subsidised. Mr Parker: We fund ten per cent of the bus services in Tyne & Wear. Mr Smith: In Centro in the West Midlands it is around about nine per cent. Mr Ferguson: In the west of Scotland around 15 per cent are subsidised services. Mr Inskip: 15 per cent. Mr Wicks: We are ten per cent but, of course, most of those contracts are won by the big five companies again, so they end up operating 90 per cent of the services. Q143 Chairman: Gentlemen, you have been very helpful but I would like to ask you one other thing. What percentage of buses in the areas that you control are accessible by disabled people? Mr Wicks: In South Yorkshire it is about 44 per cent. Mr Inskip: 42 per cent. Mr Ferguson: I do not have that figure but I could provide it. Q144 Chairman: Let me know when you do my note, thank you. Mr Smith: The same. Mr Parker: 60 per cent. Mr Dowd: We have got 37 bus companies, I will provide you with the figures. Q145 Chairman: Are all your buses generally safe? Mr Dowd: Yes. Mr Wicks: Yes. Q146 Chairman: And properly maintained? Mr Dowd: Yes. Q147 Graham Stringer: You say that buses are safe but is there not evidence in Greater Manchester, West Midlands and South Yorkshire that when the Traffic Commissioner has intervened many of the buses have had to be withdrawn immediately, so clearly they are not all safe, are they? Mr Smith: If I could answer that. In the West Midlands I would say the majority of buses are safe. There have been one or two quite significant incidents, however, of smaller operators who have been called before the Traffic Commissioner and action has been taken against them for the poor maintenance of vehicles. Q148 Chairman: Buses where the wheels fall off cannot be entirely safe. Mr Smith: Absolutely, that is why we have used the word "generally". There have been instances and these are treated very seriously indeed by the Traffic Commissioner who is responsible and he has taken the appropriate enforcement action. Q149 Chairman: You have not persuaded the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport that age has anything to do with quality, have you? Mr Smith: That is correct. In our view, age is a very key issue in quality and there are vehicles running around on Britain's second cities' roads which are over 20 years old which in our view is just not acceptable. Q150 Chairman: Sir David said that the Routemasters in London were 30 to 40 years old in London but they were fairly reliable at that age. Is that a view that you hold? Mr Smith: I think Routemasters are particularly wonderful buses, Chairman, but they are not appropriate for modern use. They are used now by TfL for heritage purposes. Chairman: I think we can guess how often Sir David uses the bus! Q151 Mr Clelland: Given everything that has been said, how profitable are the bus companies compared with other businesses in your area? Mr Dowd: Rich. Mr Parker: Extremely. The return in Tyne & Wear in 2004 was over ten per cent in the three big bus companies. Mr Smith: We have been told in Birmingham by a Director of Travel West Midlands that their return is around about 19 per cent. Q152 Chairman: So they are not doing badly. Anybody else? Mr Inskip: Similarly, in Greater Manchester I would say that typically bus operators where they run railways are making four to five per cent, on coach operations now eight per cent and certainly on bus operations I think in excess of 25 per cent on some routes. Q153 Chairman: Mr Stagecoach still earns the bulk of his profit, does he not, from buses? Mr Inskip: Yes. Q154 Chairman: Do you have formal training standards for bus drivers in your areas that you insist on from the companies? Mr Wicks: We have done two things. One is on the voluntary quality partnerships and on the statutory quality partnerships we have asked for driver training up to NVQ standards. Q155 Chairman: Is it accepted? Mr Wicks: Yes. We have also opened a transport academy where we provide free training for drivers because it was such an issue in the consultation we did a year ago that we now provide customer care training and other training. Stagecoach have been very good at supporting that and First are supporting it. It does not cost them anything, we get funding from the LSC and all they have to do is provide the time. Q156 Mr Martlew: Surely they should be paying towards this because it is to their benefit. Mr Wicks: There are lots of things that PTEs provide that are to the benefit of the bus companies that only seem to happen if we provide them. Q157 Chairman: Do you make that case to the Department for Transport? They seem to be slightly remiss, they are not promoting the bus in the way we think they should and apparently they are saying that some of these problems arise that are not your responsibility but you make the case that you do have a responsibility. Mr Wicks: I think we do. One point I would like to make, which brings a lot of these points together, is one of these issues is about the attractiveness of buses, which goes back to one of the first questions. Very few of the bus companies, even the major bus companies, see bus service provision as a customer service and actually treat their passengers as customers, they still see them as operational products. It is about getting buses out in those sorts of ways and their recognition that the driver is the sole point of contact between that company and the passenger has been very under-invested. I think that is why we have stepped in and said, "Look, you should be doing this but we cannot wait for you to do this because it is turning passengers away". Chairman: Gentlemen, you have all been extraordinarily helpful, thank you very much. You have also been very patient, I apologise for making you wait. Thank you. Memoranda submitted by Transport for London, Translink, Transport & General Workers' Union, Transport Salaried Staffs' Association and Bus Users UK
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ms Clare Kavanagh, Director of Performance, Transport for London, Mr Keith Moffatt, Translink (Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company), Mr Roger Sealey, Transport Sector Researcher, Transport & General Workers' Union, Mr Gerry Docherty, General Secretary, Transport Salaried Staffs' Association, and Mr Joe Lynch, Senior Officer, Bus Users UK, gave evidence. Q158 Chairman: Good afternoon, madam and gentlemen. Could I ask you first to identify yourselves for the record. Mr Lynch: I am Joe Lynch, I work for Bus Users UK. Mr Docherty: Gerry Docherty, General Secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association. Mr Sealey: Roger Sealey, I am the Transport Researcher for the Transport & General Workers' Union. Mr Moffatt: I am Keith Moffatt from Translink in Northern Ireland. Ms Kavanagh: I am Clare Kavanagh from Transport for London. Q159 Chairman: You have a scarcity value today, Ms Kavanagh, that you would hardly believe. Does anyone want to make some personal comments before we start or may we go straight to questions? Thank you very much for coming. Can I ask you, do you really think the Department for Transport is sufficiently engaged in promoting the bus as an attractive means of transport outside London? Mr Lynch: No in one word. I think it is very disappointing. What is clearly demonstrated is that political leadership is needed to increase bus use. That has certainly been demonstrated in London but I see a sore lack of this in many of the regions. Q160 Chairman: Mr Docherty, is there anything you want to add on that? Mr Docherty: Our view is that ten years after the first Ten Year Transport Plan, the reality for public transport users in Britain is that connections and interchanges are either very scarce or non-existent. As far as buses are concerned, it is our perspective that buses are used by those with no other means of travel, there are either no train services locally or they cannot afford to have a car, and where this happens even measures that are designed to try to improve the efficiency of the bus service are opposed by other road users. As far as your question is concerned, no, we do not think the Government is doing enough. Q161 Chairman: Ms Kavanagh, are you taking a deep breath or thinking about it? Sorry, Mr Sealey? Mr Sealey: Our views are very similar to those of Mr Docherty. It is the Cinderella of the transport sector. Q162 Mr Donaldson: If I could direct this question to Transport for London and Translink. What is the secret of the success in growing the use of buses in both your areas? Ms Kavanagh: I am not sure there is any secret to it, as I think has already been discussed this afternoon. Generally, country-wide bus passengers want the same thing. They want a reliable service, they want short journey times, safe journeys and a high quality of service. As I say, it is a relatively simple process, you invest to give the passengers those things and concentrate on those aspects of the service and you will generate new passengers, people who will use the service. Mr Moffatt: I think the key is the design of an attractive integrated network by some form of executive body. Mike Parker of Tyne & Wear referred to their experience in the 1980s. I was there and it was very successful because the executive body was able to design and organise the delivery partly through train operators and partly through other operators on a very attractive network. I think that is the absolute key. In Northern Ireland we are in a position to do that because we still have a regulated system. It has its faults and we are working on improvements to it, but essentially I think it is all about a professional body run on commercial lines being able to design and organise the delivery of an attractive network. How it is then delivered, whether it is a public operator or a franchise system, is a slightly separate issue. I have worked in private and public, regulated and deregulated, and it is not a question of ideology but I do think ultimately experience shows that you do need to provide a well-planned system. Q163 Chairman: You are really saying that degree of integration only comes with an overall authority, is that what you are saying? Mr Moffatt: Yes, I think you do need a design. It is three things: the networks, the ticketing system and the marketing of information. Those things have to be brought together. That needs to be done with the full co-operation of the participating operators. In my experience that is the case. Q164 Mr Martlew: Can we go on a little to the recruitment and retention of bus drivers. Is that a problem? Mr Sealey: It is a problem. It is more of a problem now outside London than in London. Transport for London have bitten the bullet there and through its contracts have allowed wages to increase in London. Although they make the comment that there is no shortage of bus drivers in London, I do not necessarily agree with that, there are still shortages but nowhere near the shortages there were in 2000 when we were getting a turnover of maybe 60 per cent in some of the garages in London. Outside of London we have still got high levels of labour turnover and retention. There is also a cost to the industry. It costs about £6,000 to recruit and train a bus driver and if they are going out as fast at the other end that is a massive cost to the industry that it is losing. We ought to be looking at how we can stabilise that and maybe transfer those costs into wages to stabilise the workforce. Q165 Mr Martlew: Following on from that, the days of driving a bus when it was very heavy have gone, I presume they have all got power steering, but I see very few women drivers and, in fact, very few women have given evidence today, although I am glad to see this session is the exception. Why is that? Mr Moffatt: We are putting a lot of effort into that. We have over 2,000 drivers and we have got 160 women now, that is 25 per cent more than a year ago. We have introduced new flexible rotas, part-time and term-time working, to enable more women to come in, which I think is very important. Retention is absolutely critical in the industry. I do not think there is any secret, it is about good planning and providing good opportunities and getting the wage structure right. In the past the bus industry suffered from a low wage, heavy overtime dependency type of culture and we are trying to get away from that now by improving basic conditions and improving the image of the job and that is having a positive effect. Q166 Mr Martlew: Can I ask if the unions are proactive in this? In their evidence the T&G made reference to the average wage of a bus driver being 57 per cent of a male's wage in this country. Are the unions being proactive? Mr Sealey: We have been and we have been successful in regard to that, but that has not been at no cost to the public. We have had to take on very hard-nosed business people who are driven by cost centres. Recently we had a dispute in Eastbourne, which is the first time I can remember bus drivers there have stopped working, and we are seeing increasing militancy across the industry and it is the only way our members see they will be able to get the level of remuneration that the job requires. Mr Docherty: I think we would concur with what Mr Sealey has said. The whole of the transport industry is not attractive - I talking at the coal face end - and by and large does not attract female participation, it has not done for a long time. It is getting better and, to be fair, the companies are trying to do that. We have to deal with some of the social consequences of people working on their own, which a bus driver does, which someone working in a rural train station does, they are on their own and there are difficulties, assaults on staff are increasing, and we have been dealing with the British Transport Police and the rail industry to try and deal with that, but what are really needed to make the gender balance a lot better than it is are family friendly policies because, whether we like it or not, in this country the domestic burden falls on females by and large. Until companies adopt family friendly policies to take account of that then we will fail in the transport industry to rebalance that gender balance, in my view. Q167 Mr Martlew: There has been reference made to the fact that it costs £6,000 to train a bus driver. One presumes that is to get him or her through the test. What about customer care? We have heard the bus driver is the point of contact for the company. Should there be formal training in this area and, if not, why not? Mr Sealey: To be fair, there is in certain companies, and quite specifically Transport for London, where it is a requirement that drivers go through customer care training. We have had discussions with the Department for Transport and personally I sat on a committee for a number of months looking at this whole area of customer care but it seemed to run into the sand because one of the problems at that time was because there was such a shortage of bus drivers, as soon as the company got the driver trained they wanted them out on the road and the whole thing about customer care, route familiarisation and things like that, were, in a sense, the last thing on the agenda. There are possibilities with the certificate of professional competence coming in for building that in where drivers will have to have required training every five years, but with a £6,000 initial cost unless the company is convinced they are going to keep that person they are not going to invest more money in customer care in the short-term. Ms Kavanagh: Training is hugely important in this issue. It is not just about driving skills, it is about customer care. As Roger Sealey has said, in London it is now compulsory that all drivers go through what is essentially an additional 40 hours of customer care, disability awareness training and so on. We had a situation prior to the introduction of the training, for example, where we had powered wheelchair ramps on all our buses but the drivers were not necessarily trained to use them. It is a vital component of customer care and also a vital component of retention because you have to make the drivers feel worthwhile, that they have a career progression, have an interest in developing their skills. We see additional training as vital. Q168 Clive Efford: How serious is the problem of congestion in terms of delivering a reliable and efficient bus service? Mr Moffatt: I believe congestion is a key issue and it has grown in all parts of the country. In Northern Ireland we have not had so much because traffic growth has been a little behind but it is now the fastest UK region for car ownership growth and it has to be tackled. It has to be tackled in a planned way so there are quality bus corridors, not just bits of bus lane at the easy places but tackling the difficult points. In terms of making public transport more attractive the answer is on two fronts: one, making the network of service more attractive in terms of frequency and reliability, but equally providing tracks for buses. If you build a tram system generally it has a track which is very well designed and kept clear, and we do need the same approach with buses. In Belfast, on our core corridors our road service colleagues have identified that 32 per cent of the people in vehicles on each major corridor are being carried in two per cent of the vehicles. If a third of the people are already on the bus, why should they not have a third of the road space? If we are really serious about trying to have half of travellers on the bus we need to be looking at it in that way, in a very simple way. I believe that is the example which we can follow from London now where they are having great success in this way. Mr Sealey: There is another issue which is about the flexibility of buses. When you stick to a strict timetable, and we know that congestion occurs, the classic thing is why do three buses turn up at one time, and all the academic research comes up with the same answer, it is congestion. There is another way this could be looked at, which is unrealistic scheduling. These days companies generate schedules by computers whereas in the old days there used to be a lot of local knowledge. In the garage there used to be what was called a garage rep who would deal with schedules and they had local knowledge so they would know the bottlenecks and that sort of thing and could realistically schedule the buses. That has gone now. It is interesting that on an educational course we have recently started to redo scheduling and we have had a massive response from our stewards from all over the country so that they can understand this. Mr Docherty: In answer to the question, clearly congestion plays a major part in bus usage in my view. There is no point getting on a bus if you are going to sit in a traffic jam. It takes political will and imagination and innovative thinking to determine (a) how the bus is going to achieve priority, make the journey quicker, make it more attractive, and (b) how it is going to be politically sold to other road users because when you make available a bus lane there is less space for other people to use. The quality bus corridors, for example, have been extremely successful in Dublin which started ten years ago and Dublin has been transformed in terms of congestion. It is still bad but it would have been a hell of a lot worse if some measures had not been taken. There are other things that have not been done that could be done, for example traffic lights giving priority to buses when they approach, when you have got two lanes coming into a city centre that are clogged in the morning and the other two lanes going out empty, why do we not use one of the lanes going in to make it three lanes in the morning and three lanes coming back out in the evening? There are issues that could be dealt with but it seems to me that nobody is grabbing these and saying let us at least try them. I am not aware that there is anywhere in Britain where there are those kinds of things and that kind of innovative thinking has been put in place to try to alleviate congestion, which on all statistics is only going to get worse. Mr Lynch: One of the things we do is run bus user surgeries and the top issue every time is reliability. The most important aspect of that is doubtless to do with congestion, as has been mentioned already. It is clearly a hot political issue. As has been mentioned already, it is possible to put in bus lanes which do not achieve anything, and I can think of examples of that, where you can take up road space, reallocate it to buses but achieve nothing for buses and you do not disadvantage cars either but you can then tick the LTP box to say you have put in bus lanes. There are some hard political decisions to be made to reallocate road space as appropriate to ensure that buses do get priority and this will improve reliability, there is no two ways about it. In the submission I put in I suggested there is a figure of perhaps ten per cent of the bus fleet in urban areas required simply to deal with the effects of congestion, and that is a tax on bus users because the bus companies have to put in extra buses to ensure there are sufficient buses to run the correct timetable, and the people who pay for that are the users. As was also mentioned earlier, there is the question of who provides the track and given it is the highway authority, the local county council, the unitary authority, that has a responsibility for doing that, perhaps there needs to be some quid pro quo whereby if they do not provide the priority for buses there will be a financial penalty for the authority. Q169 Clive Efford: Can I ask TfL to explain how you work with local authorities and whether you have any problems in dealing with them over improving facilities for bus services? Ms Kavanagh: Something like ten per cent of the strategic route network in London is directly under TfL's control, however 90 per cent of our buses run on local authority roads, so the issue is about working with the local authorities. The key issue is that Transport for London are responsible for allocating the funding for bus priority schemes, but we still need the political will of the local authorities in order to introduce them. We are still, like everywhere else, reliant on the local authorities to work with us to put bus priorities in. We do control the traffic signals, for example, so the kind of scheme that was talked about, giving buses priority at signals, we can control and are expanding. Q170 Clive Efford: How do you define what a community bus service is? What level or number of community services do you run? Ms Kavanagh: We do not run anything that we would call a community bus service. We run a level of service across London which is consistent with the level of demand that people require. There is not any distinction in the London bus network. Q171 Chairman: Does the Mayor have a central control point which controls all of the traffic lights throughout London? Ms Kavanagh: Effectively, yes. Q172 Chairman: So he could in fact, if he were to consider the scheme Mr Docherty was talking about, take initiatives that he himself could bring forward? Ms Kavanagh: Theoretically we could, yes, but you still need to work with the local authorities because they could oppose it. Q173 Clive Efford: How do you ensure that you are running services that people actually want and need? What we have been hearing from previous witnesses is they would like the flexibility and the powers that TfL have in order to meet local need and, in fact, you are better at tackling issues like social exclusion than they are able to under their regimes. How do you ensure that you are running the services that people want and need? Ms Kavanagh: We collect the data, simply. We have a very extensive programme of passenger demand monitoring. Essentially we survey all the passengers who get on the bus, find out where they get on and where they get off. We put that together with information, for example, from Census data so we know what the population is like, we know the age profiles and so on. We have a huge background of information and do a lot of market research asking people what they want. We liaise directly with all local authorities to understand what they want. We work with developers, with schools and hospitals, anyone who can impose a demand on the bus network. We have a huge network of both hard and soft data, if you like, about what people do. We then have a team of skilled transport planners whose job it is to analyse that data and come up with the integrated network that Keith Moffatt referred to. Q174 Clive Efford: Is the hard data the thing that drives the decisions or is it the appeals from local communities? Ms Kavanagh: No, it is the hard data. We start with our data and with the local knowledge, if you like, the appeals, and put everybody's ideas through our track demand model to find out whether they meet our investment criteria, the pretty standard cost benefit analysis that is done that says how many passengers this will generate, how much passenger benefit it will generate, what is the cost of doing it, and we have criteria for agreeing what is a worthwhile part of the network. Q175 Clive Efford: When we strip it all away you are as bad as the operators out of London? Ms Kavanagh: No, because the criterion is passenger benefit and not profit. That is what makes the difference. It is about whether people have a facility, can save time, can access the bus network, not whether we make money. Mr Moffatt: We have a similar approach, although on a much smaller scale obviously. Unlike outside London, in Great Britain our job is to provide as comprehensive a network as possible, so we do not distinguish between commercial, community or social. We have a broad remit. Basically we are a state-owned operator so our remit is very broad, which is to provide as comprehensive a network as possible to meet the needs. Within that we have to provide more commercial services in order to attract more people on to the buses. We have targets to achieve in terms of modal share and patronage growth. We have to meet those targets by putting in network schemes which are very "commercial", but equally we have obligations not to leave people high and dry as well. The value of this approach is that it is truly integrated. We have a research unit which is expert in social needs analysis, GLS systems, and we have all sorts of community issues in Northern Ireland to handle as well. Ultimately, it is an art as well as a science. It is very hard to pin down precise targets. I suppose the real value is in an integrated approach to meeting all the different network needs. I get quite concerned when I hear these distinctions made between commercial and social. We know precisely the cost and the revenue on all of our routes but we look at them on a much wider basis than whether any one particular route makes a profit or a loss. In fact, our network has a lot of cross-subsidy. Cross-subsidy used to be a bit of a dirty word. I think the important thing about cross-subsidy is to know where it is, to have transparency. I do not think there is anything wrong in having a network that is concentrating on commercial routes to make them grow, which is what we have done with our Belfast Metro system, if you can create more profit which you can use to cross-subsidise perhaps the community-type services. Q176 Graham Stringer: If I can ask Ms Kavanagh, it is very difficult to disaggregate the factors that have led to the impressive patronage growth in London. I have tried to look at some of the figures. Can you tell us what the growth rates are in Outer London on those routes that are not affected by the Congestion Charge, because quite a lot of credit is given to the Congestion Charge but it seems to me that there is just as good a growth going on elsewhere? Ms Kavanagh: The Congestion Charge has had a huge high profile and has been extraordinarily effective but it does cover a very small area of the City, particularly in relation to where our bus passengers are. As I have said, 90 per cent of them are outside the central area. To get the growth figures we are talking about it is growth in the outer areas and it comes down to what we were talking about, the bus service is more reliable, it is more frequent, the vehicles are of a much higher standard and are more accessible. The network is planned in detail to meet passenger needs and that is the reason why, despite growing congestion in Outer London, bus service usage has continued to grow. Q177 Graham Stringer: There has been a dramatic rise in cycling since the bombs last July. Do you believe that has contributed to part of the growth in bus patronage? Ms Kavanagh: Can you say that again, I am sorry? Q178 Graham Stringer: I was not very clear. The impact of the bombs is clearly people make judgments about how they are going to travel and one of those judgments appears to be more people are cycling. Have people switched from the Tube to buses since 7 July? Ms Kavanagh: There was a very small effect in the immediate aftermath during July and August but by the end of August we were almost back to the same levels on the Tube and on the bus. Q179 Graham Stringer: Can I ask Mr Lynch, can you tell us a little bit about your organisation, how it is funded, how it is controlled, who is on the management committee, that kind of thing? Mr Lynch: Sure. It is an organisation that used to be called the National Federation of Bus Users. Caroline Cahm has been leading it for the last 20 years. She has done it on a voluntary basis. The funding primarily, certainly in my case, comes from the large group bus operators because there is no other funding. I would be quite happy if government wished to put some funding in, in the same way as for Passenger Focus for the railways. That is something we have mentioned before and the response has been that there has been some project funding but it has been very limited. Q180 Graham Stringer: How would the people I represent in north Manchester influence your policy? Mr Lynch: I did a bus users' surgery in Oldham four years ago. As I said earlier, that is an opportunity for everyone to come along and talk to the people who run the services. We had PTE representatives, First Bus, we had the local metropolitan authority as well. The issues raised were primarily to do with reliability. It is a grass roots sort of thing, we get people to come along and tell us what their problems are. Q181 Graham Stringer: How many of those surgeries will you hold, say, in the whole of the North of England over a year? Mr Lynch: It is very hard to say. We are a very slim organisation. We would like to do more. The aim was for each of us to do about one a month but in terms of full-time employees we have about three and a half, so you can appreciate that there is a problem there. Q182 Graham Stringer: I am trying to find out what your organisation is. If I could just move on to a final point, Mr Lynch. You fairly said that some bus lanes work and some do not work. Do you accept the evidence that was given to us before? You were here for the previous evidence, were you? Mr Lynch: I am afraid not, no, I only just arrived. Q183 Graham Stringer: Let me paraphrase it. What both the local authorities from small districts and PTEs were saying was that there is a concentration on radial routes in cities and that is leading to shrinkage of the network. Do you accept that in a deregulated system that often putting bus priority measures in actually shrinks the network even if it increases the headline figure for passengers? Mr Lynch: I think there can be an element of that and you have got to look very carefully behind those figures. Clearly people do not like losing their service and often there is a way of ameliorating that by putting back a regular service in consultation with the bus company who say, "Yes, that is a fine idea", but there are some people who might travel once a week who would say, "I must have a bus service down my road come what may" and perhaps there are other solutions that could be found, such as Dial-a-Ride, maybe a shared taxi in some cases. From a user perspective, in our submission we endorse what Alistair Darling said about the railways, about carting around fresh air. We do not say just run buses for the sake of it because that is not going to deliver a benefit to users, but we would want to see buses, or an alternative service, where there is clearly a need. Clare Kavanagh talked about measuring social need, as did Mr Moffatt earlier. Q184 Graham Stringer: You said the local authorities should be fined for not providing bus priority measures along the route. The Department for Transport say that lack of reliability of buses is two-thirds the bus operators' fault. Do you believe that bus operators should be fined for not turning out their buses? Mr Lynch: I think blame should be apportioned appropriately and if the operator has fallen down on the job then, yes, but if it is the local authority then equally, as I said earlier, they should be blamed, but at the moment that is not something that is possible. Operators are fined for poor performance regardless of whether it is their fault or not. Q185 Mr Clelland: On concessionary fares, is the current concessionary fare system fit for purpose? Mr Lynch: If we are talking about England then our belief is it is not. It is a very disjointed system, as recognised by the Budget this year in which it was said that there will be changes again in two years' time in 2008, which we welcome as an organisation. There are all sorts of inconsistencies. I live in Cornwall. Cornish residents have a very good deal at the moment, they have a 24/7 availability of concessionary fares. There may not be quite the same availability of buses, of course, but they can at least use their passes at any time of day. Come the national scheme in 2008 it is quite possible that the same restriction of 9.30 will apply and I believe that Cornish residents, for example, could end up with a worse scheme because you will have great difficulty in having a local variation in time just for Cornwall where everyone else, if you live in Blackpool say, can only use it after 9.30 in Cornwall but if you are a Cornish resident that would be okay. I do not think you can do that. There is a whole raft of questions to be answered. Is it going to be a scheme that lifts up to match the best that is available now or is it going to be one that goes down to be a basic minimum for all users? Mr Moffatt: The concessionary scheme in Northern Ireland is very similar to the GB model in terms of reimbursement but the difference is de facto it is a national scheme, it applies across the whole of the Province. It has been extremely successful in starting to rebuild confidence in public transport after the years of troubles. We are now extending that into the Republic of Ireland. Senior citizens can use concessionary passes on the trains right down into the south of Ireland. I think that is very, very important. We all have the issue of reimbursement rates and so forth, but our system works pretty well and the key is to have a uniform system because people do not necessarily travel according to local authority boundaries. Q186 Mr Clelland: Can I ask Ms Kavanagh if she thinks the Freedom Pass system should be used throughout England? What are the pluses and minuses of that? Ms Kavanagh: The Freedom Pass system works very well in London. For one thing, it is much longer established than anything else. One of the key reasons why it does work is that it is a joint agreement with all the local authorities, so residents of one borough have access across London to free travel. That element of it provides a lesson for the rest of the country. We still have boundary issues, as with any of these schemes, but the key issue is to try and solve those boundary issues. Q187 Mr Clelland: The Mayor recently announced a new concessionary system for students in London. Who does that apply to and how is it financed? Ms Kavanagh: Currently under-16s travel free and it is being extended in September to under-18s in full-time education. It is funded from the general grant. Q188 Mr Clelland: Just two quick questions from something Ms Kavanagh said earlier. You talked about bus growth in the outer areas and the question was whether the Congestion Charge had been responsible for bus growth and you were saying it had grown anyway in the outer areas. How many of the extra people using buses in the outer areas are using them to travel in and out of the Congestion Charge zone? Ms Kavanagh: Again, a relatively small number. Your average bus trip is about three kilometres, so a huge part of our bus trips are to outer suburbs, for example to a town centre like Croydon and all the feeder services to that area. It is a very small number of people who transfer from Outer London to Central London. Q189 Mr Clelland: Finally, on bus priority lanes, who sets the rules and regulations for those? Are there common rules right across the TfL area? Ms Kavanagh: No, unfortunately there are not. That comes back to the political negotiation about what is acceptable. From Transport for London's point of view we would like all bus lanes to operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day, but that is a matter of negotiation with the local authority who control those as to what levels we can get. Q190 Mr Clelland: So there are different rules in different areas. In some areas perhaps taxis can use lanes and in others they cannot? Ms Kavanagh: No, taxis can use them. It is things like the hours of operation that vary. That is not by borough, it is individual bus lanes that have their own set of requirements. Q191 Mr Goodwill: I have got a question for Mr Lynch. In my constituency I have one bus service which leaves Scarborough to go to York and Leeds. It used to leave at nine o'clock but it has now been changed to ten to nine to exclude pensioners. Is there any evidence of that happening elsewhere in the country? Mr Lynch: I am surprised to hear you say it has specifically been done to avoid pensioners. I could not give you any evidence of that elsewhere. It certainly has been an issue that because of the 9.30 cut-off as the statutory minimum there are examples in some rural areas where there may only be one return journey a day and it happens to leave before 9.30 on the outward journey and, therefore, people have to pay a full fare on the outward journey although they may get a free fare on the return. I think people have been disadvantaged from that perspective because of this time barrier, but I have not heard of the sort of example you have given. Q192 Mr Goodwill: Is there any evidence that the buses are getting filled up by pensioners and that is maybe putting some regular travellers off? Mr Lynch: My colleague in Wales, who obviously had the scheme two or three years before England, said this happened in the Principality at an early stage and there is evidence that is happening but there are social benefits from that as well. It is not just filling up buses, it is getting older people out and about, possibly putting fewer demands on the health service, on social services. One of the things I mentioned in our submission was perhaps the funding for this concessionary scheme at the moment is coming from the transport allocation and it may be there is an argument to say social services or health should be contributing to this rather than putting the full onus on the transport sector. Q193 Chairman: Mr Docherty, do you think you can only get a really efficient bus system organised if there is control over movement, there are management controls put in on the movement of cars and congestion, as well as the planning of bus services? Mr Docherty: Our position has been made quite clear. To get an integrated transport policy put into effect that is going to deliver requires some sort of overview. It is not about one mode of transport having priority over another, it is determining what the local needs are and what best delivers the ultimate objective. Unless you have got someone sitting in judgment as to what the local needs are, to get the best efficiency from the resources that are available, as opposed to what seems to prevail at the moment, the commercial needs - I heard what Ms Kavanagh said about it not being about commercial needs, and I accept that happens in London - unless you have got someone who sits there and says, "What is the purpose of public transport? Is it to make money for those who run the system or is it to deliver the services for those who need to use them?" and having an overview as to what is the best use of the scarce resources that are available it does seem to me that you are not going to get efficiency, certainly not maximum efficiency. Chairman: I think that is extremely helpful. On that very useful note, can I say thank you to you all, I am very grateful. |