Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Report (2nd Day)

Clause 25: Safety and accessibility of stopping places

Amendment 35A

35A: Clause 25, page 24, line 37, at end insert “, or— (c) enabling persons with disabilities (within that meaning) to travel on local services independently, and in safety and reasonable comfort.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment enables guidance about safety and accessibility of stopping places to include guidance for the purpose of enabling persons with disabilities to travel on local services independently and in safety and reasonable comfort.

My Lords, in moving Amendment 35A I will speak also to consequential amendments on the Order Paper in my name. Before I do so, I pay tribute to all those who have been campaigning, as organisations and individuals, over a substantial time on this critical issue, long before I became engaged with it.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on his part and his commitment and dedication. One of the reasons I signed his original Amendments 36 and 38 was to ensure that pressure was brought to bear on the Government, and the Government have responded. I pay tribute to other Members who have signed his amendments, and those who have campaigned, present and past, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, the late Baroness Randerson, who did an enormous amount on this issue, and my noble friend Lady Hughes, who got the attention of the House back in the autumn by moving a Motion to which she spoke which focused attention on this critical issue, as did the Transport Select Committee in the House of Commons, just a few weeks ago.

I thank my noble friend on the Front Bench, who has been prepared to listen and to respond. It is a tribute to him that he has worked diligently to ensure that we could make some progress. I appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, with whom I have had considerable negotiations, to not allow us to make the perfect the enemy of the good. With the amendments I am laying today, with the support of the Government, we are making genuine and real progress. I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, tabled his original amendment. How could I not, as I signed it? Having signed it, I wanted to ensure that the Government were prepared to move. It is in that spirit that I am moving Amendment 35A and speaking to its consequential amendments this afternoon.

I ought to make it clear that, if the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, were to push his amendments to the vote and they were carried, my Amendments 39A and 61A would automatically fall. Those amendments are about the consultation arrangements and the immediate progression that is consequent on Royal Assent to the Bill. That would be deeply regrettable, because all of us are aligned in wanting to make genuine and rapid progress in getting to grips with something that is dangerous for people with a range of disabilities and particularly for those with little or no sight. That is why I ask my noble friend on the Front Bench to make it absolutely clear from the Dispatch Box that those organisations working with and for, and speaking on behalf of, people who are blind or partially sighted will be front and centre in that consultation.

My Lords, it may be convenient if I inform the House that we have a number of sight-impaired visitors with us in the Gallery. To increase the inclusivity of their experience, it may be convenient for noble Lords to identify themselves when they speak. To that end, I am Lord Holmes, a Conservative. As with all moves of an inclusive nature, everybody benefits. I am sure that a number of Members are now going, “Ah, so that’s Lord Holmes”.

It is a pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who has been and continues to be a role model for millions, not just in the UK but around the world. He was a first-class Secretary of State and a man who has transport in his bones, right back to the excellent bus subsidy scheme that he introduced when he was running Sheffield.

I want to speak to Amendments 36 and 38, which are in my name. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for co-signing them. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, regrets not being able to be with us for these discussions, but she was insistent that I made her support clear. She gave me a lot of evidence from her personal experience and what others had relayed to her about floating bus stops. I also thank all the organisations which have been campaigning on this matter since the inception of floating bus stops.

Perhaps it would also be to the convenience of your Lordships if I gave a brief description of what floating bus stops are. In essence, you take a bus stop and move it some way into the carriageway, at a distance from the pavement and with a cycle lane running behind it. Similarly, there are bus stop bypasses—another design. In many ways, it is the name “bus stop bypass” which gives us the greatest clue as to how these parts of our public realm came into being. For most of us, we are not bypassing the bus stop at all; we are simply barred from accessing the bus stop.

My amendments are predicated on principles that are the keys to finding inclusive and sustainable solutions to these issues. First, it should be possible for a bus to pull up for passengers to alight and egress to the kerbside. For “kerbside”, read “edge of the carriageway”. On country roads, where there are no kerbs and the bus pulls up to the verge, so be it. All that principle says is that the bus does not pull up mid-carriageway, leaving passengers stranded on an island with a carriageway on one side, a cycle lane on the other and the safety of the pavement some way beyond that. The first principle is for buses to pull up for passengers to alight and egress to the kerbside. Secondly, no one should have to cross a live cycle lane to access that bus service.

On what should happen to potential future floating bus stop sites, we already have thousands of these laid out across the country and clearly that issue needs to be addressed. With the Government already accepting that there is an issue with these designs, surely it would make sense to have a prohibition on all new proposed, potential and pending so-called floating bus stops. Call it a prohibition, a pause or a moratorium—whichever you prefer—but it would seem sensible to take that time to not have any more of these sites laid out before we have come to a conclusion about how to make them inclusive, accessible and sustainable.

I also suggest a prohibition on any DfT funding going towards floating bus stops in their current design. How can it be that taxpayers’ money is used to lay out infrastructure and overlay that is accessible and usable for only part of our communities? It is incredibly difficult to make uninclusive buildings inclusive—things that were put up decades and centuries before anybody even considered issues around inclusion. That is difficult but doable. What is perhaps even more frustrating is where you have sites in the public realm, such as bus stops, that were for decades accessible, inclusive, safe and able to be used independently, then for want of a planning change made inaccessible and excluding for such large swathes of our population. I suggest a prohibition on new sites and a prohibition on any government funding going to such sites.

On retrofitting, it is clear that we have an issue with all the thousands of floating bus stop sites currently in existence. They have to be fitted back to the situation they were in before they were turned into floating bus stops. Alternatively, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, there are potential solutions that are worth exploring. It is desperately disappointing that we have got to this stage with no such exploration and no such interest in those solutions coming from this Government and previous Governments.

So I suggest prohibition, retrofitting and then rewriting the LTN 1/20—the note that sets out this cycling infra- structure. Perhaps again we get a key as to why we find ourselves in this situation when we look at LTN 1/20. At the beginning of the note, it sets out its key principles —the aims. There are around eight or nine principles in that document governing these pieces of infrastructure —that is the front page. Not one of those principles talks about inclusion. It is instructive as to how we find ourselves in this situation.

The Government talk about growth—quite—but how can they enable economic growth, social inclusion and psychological well-being when huge swathes of the population are not even able to get to the shops, the restaurants, the café or the cinema because they cannot get aboard the bus? The Government talk about getting more disabled people into work—quite—but how will that work when we are not even able to board the bus to get to the interview?

I appreciate all the discussions I have had with my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and his efforts in this pursuit. I will be very interested in and listen carefully to what the Minister has to say. Certainly, one of the most important amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, Amendment 35A, will stand irrespective of what happens with my amendments, as will a number of the others—and that is all to the good. But if we want to ensure that public transport is inclusive by design, accessible by all and worthy of its name, Amendments 36 and 38 would enable that. That is what those amendments are all about, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s response.

My Lords, I support those two amendments. For the benefit of those with sight impairments, my name is Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and I am from the Green Party —yay.

I have been working for three decades or more on the issue of safety on our roads and road danger. I do not know whether that pre-dates the interest of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, but it seems like a very long time, and it has been a very long slog. I have worked with amazing campaigners of all kinds. I have to admit that when I started, I was concerned primarily with cyclists. At the time we had a lot of cycling injuries and deaths and relatively few cyclists; I wanted to get more people cycling, get them off buses and out of their cars and make London cleaner—get the air cleaner with fewer cars. That was my driver at the time. Obviously, as I continued working, preventing deaths and injuries of all kinds—of walkers, cyclists and drivers themselves—became paramount.

When floating bus stops were first mentioned, I thought, “What a fantastic idea to get the cyclists away from the heavy vehicles and buses”. It seemed like a really good idea and I was a huge fan, but I have now seen the light. I have examined particularly the two bus stops over on the far side of Westminster Bridge. They are quite interesting, because one of them is awful—absolutely dreadful. I have almost got mown down by a cyclist there, and I am fully sighted and fully mobile. The other one just about works most of the time, so I can see that there is an option for making all the floating bus stops we have viable. The one on this side is next to St Thomas’ Hospital, and it has a much better layout, better visibility and so on. Also, cyclists zooming up the bike lane perhaps realise that there are people crossing into St Thomas’ who may not be as mobile or as able, and so perhaps they take greater care. So I can see the possibilities, but—and this is a really big but—we have to accept that many of these bus stops are flawed, and we need a huge look at them all to make sure that they are viable.

My Lords, I support Amendments 36 and 38 in the name of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond and his co-sponsors. I thank them for their powerful speeches. For the benefit of our visitors, I should explain that I am Lord Shinkwin and I have a disability.

I apologise to your Lordships’ House as this is the first time I have spoken on the Bill. I am doing so for a particular, personal reason as a disabled person. I have run the very close risk of almost being run over on nearby pedestrian zebra crossings three times in the past five days—last Friday evening, this Monday and as recently as yesterday, all in perfect visibility and all by people cycling at speed. In each case, the cyclist had seen me in my wheelchair as I started to cross and chose not to apply their brakes. One interrupted a phone conversation to shout an apology outside Clarence House as she cycled past, which was really good of her. In another case, when I appealed very politely to a cyclist on an e-bike to stop, he looked at me with utter contempt.

The only thing that saved me, and enables me to be here today, is my sight. It is my only form of protection, because I can confidently say that I would not survive a collision. How much worse must it be for those people who do not have that protection, which we take for granted if we do not have a visual impairment? That is why Amendments 36 and 38 are so important.

Although I am speaking for the first time today, I read very carefully the Minister’s response to my noble friend’s amendments in Committee. I want to make clear that I do not question the Minister’s sincerity or commitment, both of which I welcome. My concern is that, notwithstanding the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, the Minister’s department does not recognise the clear and present danger that disabled people, including those with both mobility and visual impairments, are facing today.