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23 Feb 2009 : Column 480W—continued
Tower Hamlets—Mile End, Globe Town, Spitalfields, Banglatown
Tower Hamlets—St. Katharines, Wapping, Shadwell, Bow and Bromley-by-Bow
Wakefield
Walsall (WS3.WS10) Blakenall
Waltham Forest
Wandsworth (Roehampton) Tooting, Battersea, Roehampton
Wear Valley
Wiltshire (Adcroft and Drynham)
Wirral—Woodchurch, Lesowe, Wallasey, North Birkenhead, Central Birkenhead, Rockferry
Wolverhampton (Low Hill/Bushbury)
Wrexham—Caia Park
Wycombe, Bucks
Transport
Ashchurch Station
Mr. Laurence Robertson: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport how many calls Cross Country Trains services are required to make at Ashchurch station (a) each day and (b) each week; what recent changes have been made to this requirement; whether any further changes are planned; and if he will make a statement. [257451]
Paul Clark: The service level commitment within its franchise agreement requires Cross Country to call at Ashchurch station on Mondays to Saturdays. Four services to Birmingham New Street and two services to Cardiff Central are required to be provided. The current service level commitment commenced on 14 December 2008. The previous service level commitment required Cross Country to operate two services calling at Ashchurch in the direction of Cardiff Central. There are no current plans to change this current level of service.
Aviation: Fares
Mr. Rob Wilson: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport with reference to the answer to the hon. Member for Eddisbury of 11 November 2008, Official Report, columns 955-56W, on aviation: fares, if he will provide details of the data referred to in note 3 to the table. [258061]
Jim Fitzpatrick: The domestic component of the average air fare referred to in note 3 of the table has been based on a sample of fares data compiled from air passenger interviews conducted by the CAA on 12 domestic routes, excluding passengers transferring to international flights.
| Average domestic air fare, 1997 prices | |
| £ | |
The sample of routes that this table is based on is as follows:
Gatwick—Glasgow
Gatwick—Newcastle
Heathrow—Aberdeen
Heathrow—Belfast International
Heathrow—Edinburgh
Heathrow—Manchester
Luton—Glasgow
Luton—Aberdeen
Manchester—Belfast International
Manchester—Edinburgh
Manchester—Southampton
Stansted—Prestwick
The domestic fare index is based only on routes from airports that are continuously surveyed by the CAA, as many domestic routes are between regional airports that are only intermittently surveyed. Fares at Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports were surveyed continuously over the whole period, but Luton and Stansted were surveyed continuously by the CAA only from 2000 onwards.
In addition, the index has been compiled only from domestic routes that have been operational throughout the time period under analysis.
Bus Services: Driving Instruction
Jeremy Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport which bus companies operating in the Greater London area have delegated driving examiners. [257391]
Jim Fitzpatrick: The Greater London bus companies that are approved to appoint delegated examiners are as follows:
Arriva London North
Arriva London South
Docklands Minibuses
East London Bus and Coach Co.
First London
London General Transport
London United Busways Ltd.
Metrobus Ltd.
Metroline Travel Ltd.
National Express London
The delegated examiners may conduct tests for sister companies both inside and outside the Greater London area.
Bus Services: Standards
John McDonnell: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport how many bus drivers were examined under the driver quality monitoring scheme in each year since 2005; and how many were found to be (a) unacceptable with serious faults and (b) unacceptable with dangerous faults in each such year. [256233]
Jim Fitzpatrick
[holding answer 11 February 2009]: The Driving Standards Agency provides Driver Quality Monitoring (DQM) assessments to bus companies on a
commercial basis. The Agency has no powers to revoke a bus driver’s licence based on the outcome of a DQM assessment.
The following table shows the number of DQM assessments conducted by the DSA.
| 2005-06 | 2006-07 | 2007-08 | |
A serious fault is defined as a significant deviation from the defined outcome with safety, control and/or legal requirements breached, such as moving off from a bus stop causing a car driver from the rear to brake.
A dangerous fault is defined as safety, control and/or legal requirement breached that would have caused actual danger, such as moving off from a bus stop into the path of a car from the rear causing the other driver to swerve to avoid a collision.
The data from the assessment are collated and reported back to the client on the next day, for potential remedial action. For those assessments recording dangerous faults the bus company is notified on the day of the assessment. In all cases the client is responsible for any further action. Some operators use these reports for disciplinary and reward purposes.
Bus companies use DQM assessments as part of their internal quality supervision arrangements. The Agency’s records indicate that the proportion of assessments giving rise to serious and dangerous markings decreases year on year during the life of a DQM contract.
Bus Services: York
Hugh Bayley: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport (1) how much his Department has spent on supporting bus services in York in each year since the creation of the York unitary authority; [257834]
(2) how much his Department has spent on road improvements in City of York constituency in each year since the creation of the York unitary authority. [257835]
Paul Clark: Funding provided by the Department for Transport to local authorities is not generally ring-fenced and local authorities have discretion to spend their allocations in line with their priorities. Figures are not therefore available at constituency level.
The Department allocates integrated transport block funding to local transport authorities for general capital investment in transport. Figures are available from 1997-98 and are shown in £ millions in Table 1:
| Table 1: Capital support for transport schemes in City of York council | ||
| £ million | ||
| Integrated transport block | Total pre-LTP funding | |
Revenue expenditure on transport is generally supported through the Department for Communities and Local Government's Formula Grant.
The City of York council also receives grant funding to help support marginal bus services through the rural bus subsidy grant (RBSG) and rural bus challenge (RBC), as shown in Table 2:
| Table 2: Bus subsidy for City of York since 1998-99 | ||
| £ | ||
| RBSG | RBC | |
| (1) Since April 2008, RBSG has been included in Area Based Grant allocations to local authorities. (2) Part of the 2005 Kickstart bus funding competition. | ||
Bus Service Operators Grant (BSOG)
Local bus service and community transport operators receive bus service operators grant (BSOG) from this Department, amounting to over £400 million in 2008-09. Records are not kept of BSOG expenditure by local authority area.
Before 1 April 2008, funding for the statutory minimum bus concession was provided exclusively through the Formula Grant system, which is administered by the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG). The Department for Transport therefore provided no funding to City of York council for concessionary bus travel prior to this date.
The Department did however provide City of York council with £130,972 in 2007-08 for the cost of producing and issuing the new England-wide bus passes to all their eligible people. In 2008-09 DFT will provide City of York council with special grant funding of £1.1 million for the improvement to statutory concessionary travel; this is in addition to the existing formula grant funding from CLG.
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