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I wish to conclude my short contribution to today’s debate by suggesting a way forward. The debate about
city regions offers in its analysis some very important points on economic development and public transport, although it is unwise to draw more general conclusions about political structures from it. What is needed is a combination of the ideas proposed by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport for taking forward the quality contract proposals, which have much merit, combined with an empowering of passenger transport authorities.
I took great heart from the Minister’s comments on the issue. I shall await the details of the proposals, but it sounds as if they are on the right lines. I strongly believe that passenger transport authorities should be able to make strategic alliances across their existing boundaries with neighbouring communities. They should be led, as they are now, by elected local representatives. However, I am not taken with the idea that they should comprise the leaders of the district authorities in the area. Council leaders are very busy people: a mixture of other councillors, in proportion to party representation in the area, would be able to specialise in transport matters, and make that their main contribution to local public service.
The PTAs need to have the power to assert specific bus routes. They do not have it at present, but instead must allow routes to be chosen by the bus companies. They should be able to impose bus-only lanes and make arrangements with the police for their enforcement. They should be able to assert the frequency of service on specific routes, and they need to be adequately funded so that they can support innovative public transport projects.
A strong case can be made for funding short or environmentally friendly journeys, such as school bus journeys in urban areas that might replace the car trips that parents make when taking their children to school. That idea has much to commend it on environmental and congestion-reduction grounds, but the obvious objection is that parents pay for their journeys by car to school, whereas the public purse would end up paying for the bus. Nevertheless, the time has come for such ideas, and the PTAs should be able to innovate in that way.
If bus travel is to make the contribution that many Ministers want it to make, we have to believe in it and create enthusiastic public authorities to champion it. The new proposals from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will have their greatest impact if local PTAs are empowered to act as strong advocates for them.
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Chris Mole (Ipswich) (Lab): I am honoured to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown), who remarked on the sequence of speakers in the debate and made many of the points that I want to make about the importance of buses in public transport.
To whom are bus services important? My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) mentioned the large number of female bus users, but many older people use them too. We are moving from the perception that to be pro-bus is to be anti-car, and a consensus is forming about the need to deal with climate change and reduce carbon
dioxide. To that end, we need coherence and consistency in the public transport initiatives adopted by all parties, at both national and local levels.
Buses play a crucial role in the provision of quality choices for modal shifting. I was a county council leader between 1993 and 2001, and introduced various public transport initiatives. A number of park-and-ride schemes were deployed around Ipswich, and it was interesting to hear what people said about buses when they had not been on one for years. They were pleased to see innovations such as double glazing, which showed that their resistance to public omnibuses was based on entirely outdated perceptions about what it was like to use them regularly.
If this debate had been held last month, I might have been tempted to say that Ipswich could provide some glimpses into the future of bus services. Buses provide an alternative to private car use on some journeys, and they are very useful for getting people to work or to the shops. Indeed, as the leader of the county council I used to look forward to receiving a letter from someone who wrote annually when the county council re-approved a rural bus route subsidy, saying, “Thank you very much for doing this again. It means that I can continue in my employment for another 12 months.”
If this debate had been last month I would have liked to invite hon. Members to come to Ipswich to see a glimpse of the future. I would never have thought to claim that we were in any way leading the pack on every possible initiative. Obviously, when we hear of the achievements in London, we recognise that some of the best practice is already in our capital. I would have said that over the years, particularly when Suffolk county council had a Labour leadership, we had a Labour borough council and a Labour Government, bus services were beginning to motor. We saw the introduction of a guided bus way, giving buses priority in avoiding congestion on one of our busiest radial routes out of town. We had bus priority and gating measures at traffic lights that, unfortunately, were opposed by local Conservatives at every turn. Since 2004 when they took over leadership of Ipswich borough council they have messed about with bus lane priorities and bus gating measures annually. That is hugely regrettable given the evident advantage that that gave to buses in reducing journey times and increasing reliability and adherence to timetables.
To those infrastructure measures introduced by the local authority, I would add real time passenger information. On the few routes into which we have managed to tiptoe with RTPI, the public have shown an appetite for it. One route used a satellite space technology, so bus users could monitor buses over the internet. That was developed in co-operation with local business. I should have liked to see that develop into a local texting-based bus alerting system.
Investment in frequency is critical in passenger psychology. Services should be frequent and reliable. Some of the methods around RTPI are an attempt to bolster passenger confidence that when they go to the bus stop, the bus will turn up. The more frequent the service, the more confident are passengers that if they turn up, the service will be along shortly and if they have just missed the bus, they will not have to wait too long for the next. That is critical to ensuring that
services are financially viable and have a high level of ridership. Tinkering with service frequencies is a dangerous game.
Park-and-ride schemes have been an enormously successful element of the central Ipswich transport system. The first two schemes were introduced without Government subsidy and the third was supported through local transport plan arrangements. Their success is measured by a monthly increase in passenger usage of between 2 and 3 per cent., and they are the mainstay of the increase in bus ridership to and from Ipswich. The schemes are operated under parking regulations rather than the bus service regime, but they have taken 1.5 million car journeys off the roads in Ipswich over the past few years.
Another feature of a sustainable future will be a co-operative—partnership—approach between local authorities and bus companies to meet the needs of new developments. Ravenswood in Ipswich is a major development on a former airfield, where we secured support from the developers for the introduction of an up-front bus route. The service is one of the fastest growing in the town in terms of usage. People moving into the development have had the option of quality public transport from day one, so they have not got into the habit of using cars.
That example shows that we have a forward-looking bus company. There have been many claims of uniqueness in this debate, but Ipswich is the only non-metropolitan district that still has a corporately owned bus company. Ipswich borough council is the sole shareholder in Ipswich Buses and has provided proactive partnership in the initiatives that I have described.
Last month, I was pleased to be invited by Ipswich Buses to the launch of its new fleet of six Scania buses for service 13, which shows the company’s forward thinking on how best to meet the needs of passengers. For me, the most pleasant surprise was that the new buses had leather seating. It had been fitted in the confidence that if the quality of the environment was high, people would respect the buses and they would be less subject to damage. However, there are also eight CCTV cameras on every bus, which are linked to the borough’s safety system.
Some Members asked about security on buses. Bus companies are frequently subject to ill-founded claims for damages that people say were sustained on buses, in the hope of reaching an out-of-court settlement because the company will not want the cost of an expensive court hearing. There is some early evidence from Ipswich Buses that, when people discover that what has happened on every bus journey has been recorded, quite often some of those unfounded claims for compensation are withdrawn and the bus company saves the expense that it might otherwise have been put to.
I was pleased that a bus company that is as forward looking as Ipswich Buses was introducing six excellent new buses on one of its services and that those buses were going to be fully accessible and compatible with the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee—DPTAC—standard, as is true of 100 per cent. of the existing fleet. Had we had this debate last
month, I might have told Members that they should come to Ipswich for a glimpse of the future.
The public have a simple perspective. It is all well and fine to talk about the regulatory regimes, but the public’s perspective is clear. If a service is withdrawn by a private operator or the frequency of buses is reduced, they think that the local authority is responsible. They think that services should be frequent, that buses should be clean and smart, and that fares should be reasonable. The public do not think that there should be the absurd complexities associated with through-ticketing. I urge my hon. Friends on the Front Bench to look closely at what they can do to work with their colleagues in the Department of Trade and Industry to look at the application of competition law to through-ticketing. It does appear to create some nonsenses that I know we would have overcome in Ipswich.
Although we would certainly have overcome those difficulties last month, this month is a different story. Not a week after I was pleased to be involved in the launch of the six new buses, I discovered that the shareholder—the now Conservative and Liberal Democrat-run Ipswich borough council—had told the bus company directors that it wanted to withdraw £975,000 of share dividends and that it required a dividend of £162,000 every year until 2009, when it was going to introduce a £500,000 annual rental on the depot.
That will have a huge impact on services. The proposals are enormously regrettable and there has been much hostile reaction from my constituents. They will mean that—whereas we were able to launch six new vehicles last month—there will be no investment in new vehicles for the period of the plan. They will mean the withdrawal of the present day-rover ticket, which has been a boon to many, and a reduction in evening and Sunday services on many routes. Buses on routes 5, 7, 11 and 15 would be reduced by the Tory and Liberal council from four per hour to three per hour. Buses on the No. 2 route would go from half hourly to hourly, on the No. 12 route from three per hour to two per day, and on the No. 16 route from three per hour to two per hour. The No. 14 service would be cut entirely.
I said earlier that the public have a very simple view of these things. They expect a good standard of frequency. There is a huge danger that the proposal made by the Conservative and Liberal-controlled council will lead to some of the four routes with reduced frequencies that I identified becoming less patronised because people will be less confident that if they turn up at a bus stop, they will be able to get a bus and go. There is a risk that profitability will thus decrease and that the routes will become subject to more financial scrutiny.
I would have liked to have been able to say that if hon. Members came to Ipswich, they might have a glimpse of an aspect of the future of bus services. However, despite the fine words about the environment of the Conservatives and Liberals who run our council, they plan to do something else. It is time to put an end to that, so I hope that the good people of Ipswich will put every pressure on Ipswich borough council to reverse the proposal because it would be enormously damaging to all people who use buses for leisure, to get to work and in every aspect of their daily lives.
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Ian Stewart (Eccles) (Lab): I have spoken in and secured several debates on buses in recent years because buses are one of my constituents’ highest priorities. We need to look at transport in a new light: we need to see it in relation to health, education, employment and the environment, and look at it in an integrated way across all those public interests.
I welcome the publication of “Putting Passengers First”. As one of my constituents, Mrs. Connor, wrote:
“it is now some time since the meeting at Swinton Town Hall was held to discuss the problems caused by the cancellation of local bus services. I am hoping that there will soon be some good news.”
My constituents, like others, hold local politicians and the transport authorities responsible when their bus disappears, but we know that that is not the case. We have a problem that all Governments face: how do we reconcile competition with co-operation, or, as I put it, how do we achieve “co-opetition”? That might not be achievable, but we must try to work towards it. As we do so, we need to try to achieve a negotiated partnership-approach settlement. However, achieving that will depend on the balance of power. I think that that lies too much with the bus operators, rather than with local government and local transport authorities. I hope that the forthcoming Bill will go some way towards redressing that balance so that effective action can be taken in the interests of the public.
As we all know, good, reliable, affordable and safe bus services are vital for social inclusion, economic renewal, the reduction of congestion and the improvement of our environment. Bus services are now predominantly provided by five large companies. We have heard that buses account for 31 per cent. of the turnover of the big five, but for 47 per cent. of their profits. Taxpayer subsidy to the industry continues to rise; in 2004-05, it was estimated at £1.86 billion. We all want value for money, and passengers expect their elected representatives, be they MPs or councillors, to deliver the services that they want and need. Like other Greater Manchester Members, I am proud of the Greater Manchester passenger transport authority. I know that PTAs are working hard to deliver high-quality services for local people.
With 20 years’ experience of deregulation, we can say with some certainty that voluntary co-operation does not work and that further initiatives are needed. The quality contracts for which the Transport Act 2000 provided have not materialised, as some of us predicted. The Passenger Transport Executive Group has proposed that only minor changes to the 2000 Act are needed to solve our present difficulties. Local authority franchises or quality contracts can be introduced only if it can be demonstrated to be the only practicable way to achieve a local bus strategy. That is too high a hurdle. The PTEG says that the practicable test should be removed, leaving the existing tests of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. It also believes that the current five-year time limit on such franchises should be extended to act as an incentive for operators to invest. I agree with those two things.
The key changes that the Government are considering include improving arrangements for public performance controls across the network and giving
local authorities a say over frequencies, timetables and fares. I would welcome such initiatives. The Greater Manchester passenger transport authority is committed to the principle of local transport authorities being given greater control over the bus network.
I want the final legislation to include powers to enable local transport authorities to act as the procurer of local bus services through a franchising process. There should be powers that enable PTAs to stipulate networks and frequencies so as appropriately to marry capacity and demand; powers to direct capacity where and when it is required, including to integrate rather than compete with other modes; and powers to enable the specification of minimum quality standards across the network. There should be mechanisms to guarantee network stability, potentially by all operators being required to register services with the GMPTA and executive. There should also be powers to require compliance with the specific integrated multi-modal ticketing arrangements and powers to enable PTAs to set the level and structure of bus fares.
I also want provisions to override existing competition law to enable PTAs and executives to invite individual operators either individually or jointly to bid for services against set frequencies—fully integrated with existing modes across the network. There should be powers to enable competition between bus operators off road; powers to devise, enforce and operate an incentive regime; powers to allocate slots for services passing through congested centres; and powers to ensure that customer and commercial data are shared in the interest of the public.
“Putting Passengers First” strengthens the arrangements for voluntary and statutory partnerships by allowing the inclusion of fares and service levels. It also seeks to make it easier to achieve options for improving bus services through quality contracts. It says that franchising and quality contracts should be made a more realistic option via a new approval process. However, the process set out in PPF has the potential to be lengthy and convoluted. The traffic commissioners and transport tribunals—currently the regulators of vehicle safety and performance—are earmarked to determine a quality contract proposal. I hope that the Minister will reassure us today that, whatever changes are made, the introduction of quality contracts will be a speedy process.
There are also concerns about the continuing influence of the competition authorities over local bus services. It is not clear from the Government document to what extent the Office of Fair Trading has agreed to step back from its stance that on-street competition is in the passengers’ interests. The Government need to ensure that the OFT does not undermine the Government’s bus policy and, by extension, their wider transport policy by continuing to obstruct sensible co-ordination and co-operation between operators. That is where co-opetition is really needed.
I have some questions for the Under-Secretary, which I hope she will take away for serious consideration. I apologise to her as I will not be here for the summing-up. I would have liked to be, but some pressing matters at home mean that I will have to leave. Have the Government made any assessment of how
long it would take for a quality contract to go from proposal to implementation under the process set out in “Putting Passengers First”?
Will the new process for quality contracts set out in “Putting Passengers First” make quality contracts a more realistic option than the process set out in the Transport Act 2000, when the new process appears to have more stages to go through and a longer time scale? The new process could entail agreeing a plan with the Government on funding for associated bus priority measures, an inquiry by the traffic commissioners, an inquiry by a transport tribunal and the possibility of a judicial review.
In addition, do the Government consider it appropriate for the traffic commissioners and transport tribunals to sit in judgment on the merits of a quality contract, when that proposal is central to wider transport strategies, including traffic management strategies and even road-user charging pilots?
How will the Government ensure that traffic commissioners and transport tribunals have the necessary resources, skills and capacity, which would be relevant in determining the wider planning, social exclusion and regeneration implications of a quality contract proposal?
Why do not the Government seek block exemption from competition legislation for local bus services, when that legislation is clearly hampering sensible co-operation on fares and timetables between operators against the interests of the public? What evidence do the Government have that schedule 10 to the Transport Act 2000 has encouraged operators to co-operate with one another on fares and timetables without fear of prosecution by the competition authorities?
We have problems in the city of Salford. Buses have been withdrawn on the three main radial routes—from Little Hulton through Swinton to Manchester; from Worsley and Boothstown, through Eccles to Manchester; and from Cadishead and Irlam through Eccles to Manchester—and on other routes. Why cannot we allow PTEs and PTAs to buy and run buses where no private operator wishes to do so? I have no problem with the concept of competition, where appropriate; but where competition means that our constituents on the social routes are not serviced, that cannot be in their interests. I seriously ask the Government again to consider allowing the PTEs and PTAs the power and the resources to fill that public interest need.
In conclusion, I ask the Government to ensure that the White Paper gives local government the power to get the balance right and to deliver the service in the interest of local people. That is what my constituents in Eccles want, and it would benefit not only my constituents or those in Greater Manchester, but those throughout England, too. The Government have taken a good step forward with the White Paper, and I hope that we can convince them that there are ways to improve their proposals even further.
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