I apologise to the House for my brief absence. In speaking to this Motion, I will speak also to the other amendments in this group and to Motions 1A, 8A, 8B and 29A. It is a pleasure to bring the Bill back to the House for its final stages and to engage on the remaining areas. This is an important Bill that empowers and provides local authorities with the tools to make the right decisions on bus services for their local areas. Debate on the Bill has considered the importance of local bus services and how we need improvement, so I hope that noble Lords will continue to support this ambition.
There have been changes since the Bill was last in this House. These include the removal of some amendments, such as the purpose clause, the assessment of the impact of national insurance contributions on accessing socially necessary local services, and the review of the provision of services to villages. There have been changes that extend the existing zero-emission vehicle measure to Scotland, which replicates the application in England. There is also a carve-out for Wales on some measures, and there are smaller changes on removing unnecessary data overrides and on the variation of franchises.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for tabling Motion 1A on the purpose clause. The Government have made it clear throughout the stages of the Bill that improving buses is a priority, and that includes services, performance and accessibility. But the Bill also goes wider, including cleaner and safer travel and providing the ability for local transport authorities to make their own funding decisions. The purpose clause would run contrary to this and could also have unanticipated effects on the interpretation of the Act and the exercise of powers under it. This is something that the Government cannot support.
Motion 8A from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, seeks to review the impact of the £2 fare cap on socially necessary local services. My department has already published an evaluation of the first 10 months of the £2 bus fare cap. This showed that the cap delivered low value for money. Work is already under way to undertake a review on the £3 cap. Therefore, a legislative requirement for further evaluative work would be duplicative and unnecessary.
My Lords, in moving Motion 1A, I will speak to the other Motion that I have tabled in this group. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for being distressingly frank. The background to the Bill is the Government’s payment of the Danegeld, if you like, to their friends in the trade unions and in a network of left-wing local authorities, who have seethed with resentment for many years at the success of the private sector and want to see it effectively eliminated from the provision of public transport services in this country—the same motivation that lay behind the passenger railway services Bill, which we passed before Christmas.
That is why the Conservative group and the House as a whole supported amending the Bill on Report to include a purpose to which the Government could be held to account as to its effect, putting passengers and their needs at the heart of the Bill from the outset. The Government, using their majority in the other place, have deleted that purpose. There is no standard, no accountability, no measure to which we can turn from the Bill itself and say to the Government, “You promised you would achieve this by these measures. You promised that this was the purpose you were setting out to effect and we can hold you to it”. None of that is there. The Bill simply stands on its own, a great experiment with the provision of public transport but with no accountability for the Government behind it. That is the simple fact behind Motion 1A but, as it happens, I do not propose to test the opinion of the House on it.
I turn, then, to Motion 8A, which covers two subsections that have been removed from the Bill, Clause 14(5) and (6), which your Lordships added on Report for a very good reason. The first, subsection (5), related to the £2 bus fare cap. The fact is that the Conservatives pledged to keep this going for another year. The Government removed it. Of course putting the fare cap up by 50% had an effect on the most vulnerable people, because it is the most vulnerable people—those who are low-paid workers—who depend most on buses for getting to work, for example. Yet the Government say, “We don’t need to consider that. We’re going to look at the effect of the £3 fare cap, so we don’t need to consider the effect of the £2 fare cap”. What is the point of looking at the effect of the £3 fare cap unless you can compare it with the effect of the £2 fare cap? Comparison is the very purpose of that study. The Government having made no concession on that—they could easily have said, “We will do something on the £2 fare cap as part of our review of the £3 fare cap”—and I will, when the time comes, test the opinion of the House.
I was pleased to hear what the Minister had to say about my amendment. I thank all those who voted for it on Report, including my new Tory best friends, who were very kind to vote for it, and the Lib Dems. It was a novelty and wonderful, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for arranging that.
I think this Bill is doing quite a good job of bringing back quality bus services to urban areas, but we also need to bring good services back to rural areas and villages. That is obvious because rural areas and villages should have just as much love and attention as urban areas. I would see this review as the first step in reducing isolation for those who experience poverty and deprivation, age or ill health and are stuck and cannot go out. For a Green, it is also about reducing car dependency, the number of cars on the road, pollution, road deaths and injuries, so it pays off in every way.
I am glad the Government have accepted the idea of a review. I had hoped they would accept my amendment and put it into their Bill so that I could say that I had changed government legislation. The Minister has told me that what he has done comes under Pepper v Hart. I have no idea what that means, but presumably some of the older Members of this House know. The Opposition Chief Whip says she knows what it is. That is wonderful. However, even when the Minister was telling me that the Government are going to do the review, I was a bit worried about the length of time because five years puts the end of this review into the next Parliament, and who knows what the next Parliament is going to look like? If we have a lot of other types of MPs and perhaps Peers, am I going to be able to hold them to account for the bus review? I am not sure I am. I am glad that the Government are going this way, but I regret that it is not a more powerful signal.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his work on this Bill and for meeting me to discuss any concerns that may remain. We on these Benches are pleased to hear from the Government a commitment to a comprehensive review that will cover many of the issues that we discussed at earlier stages of this Bill and were the subject of many amendments to the Bill earlier in the year. These, we hope, will include the impact on SEN bus services, the £3 bus fare cap and the impact on villages and rural areas. The Government have already mentioned their published review of the £2 bus fare cap.
Within this group, for our Benches, the one key area remains the affordability of bus fares. We think the overall package of legislation in this Bill will help to transform bus services across the country and equip local transport authorities with a wide range of powers to deliver the right services to their local communities in the right way, but this needs to go hand in hand with affordable bus fares. The increase in the bus fare cap from £2 to £3 has created real barriers for passengers, particularly those on low incomes who rely on buses to go about their everyday lives. Budgets are tight for many families, forcing difficult choices between transport and other essentials. Bus fares outside cities such as London are very expensive. Without addressing fares, we think the Bill risks deepening existing inequalities and leaving many people isolated. This legislation is about improving bus services and enabling local authorities to have a choice about how local services are provided, but unless there are affordable bus fares, we think there is a hole in the plan.
The amendment that passed in this House on Report was about a review. It was not about providing a £2 bus fare scheme to support bus routes, particularly socially necessary routes, which are a lifeline for many villages and rural areas. The Motion in my name that we will get to would insert Amendment 8C into the Bill and ensure that the legislation contains a statutory commitment to the £2 bus fare scheme for socially necessary routes. It would require the Secretary of State to take all necessary steps to ensure that the £2 bus fare cap is maintained for passengers using socially necessary local services. We believe this is a far clearer amendment to the legislation, putting into action what we are committed to and ensuring a focus on the £2 bus fare cap by the Secretary of State. I hope Members on all sides of the House will see the merit in this provision to enhance further this bus legislation. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and look forward to testing the opinion of the House on this later.
My Lords, I want to say a few words on this issue as the introducer of the £2 bus fare cap and the person who wrote the relevant sections of our manifesto, which committed to keep it for the duration of the Parliament and fund it, importantly, from savings that we were going to make in rail services. We do not spend enough time in this country talking about buses. Two and a half times more journeys are made by bus than by the national rail network. You would not know that from the national press, which is very London-centric on this subject, but in most parts of the country buses are critical, so I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate.
I shall say a word or two about my noble friend Lord Moylan’s purpose clause and his remarks on that. He talked about the Government trying to help their friends in local authorities. What is interesting about this legislation is that, if you look at what has happened to bus services, the real challenge, and one of the problems, is that what happened during the pandemic is that a significant number of people stopped using buses for rather obvious reasons and never returned. That caused a huge financial problem for the bus network and has caused lots of routes that were previously profitable not to be profitable. The thing that is missing in the legislation is that you can offer local authorities the powers to franchise services all you like, but unless the Treasury is going to give local authorities the money to pay for those bus services, all you do is take loss-making services that are being reduced by private sector operators or by local authorities that cannot pay for them, and the local authority ends up having to take them away because it has no ability to pay for them.
When this legislation gets on to the statute book, I will be interested to see whether the Government fund the powers to the level that you would have to in order to deliver an improvement to bus services. I suspect, given the dog’s breakfast the Chancellor is making of the economy and the fact that there is less rather than more money available for public services, that that is not going to happen, but we will see how that develops in the future. I think my noble friend Lord Moylan does not have to worry in one sense, because I do not think this cunning plan that the Government have implemented to help local authorities is going to help them at all.
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Harper for reminding us of the importance of funding and the fact that the Bill is almost meaningless unless large amounts of funding are attached to it for local authorities. That is not an original point; it is one that was made forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, at an earlier stage of debate on the Bill, but we have still heard nothing about the large amounts of funding that the Government are going to have to put into buses in order to make the Bill a reality.
I turn to the Motion by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who happens today to be sitting behind me, and who is apparently my new best friend. I understand—I hope I am not traducing her here—that she is not intending to divide the House on her Motion, but if she did then we would stick loyally with her as we did before. The Conservative Party is and always has been the party of villages, and whoever speaks up for villages in your Lordships’ House will have our support. It is a tragedy that the Government are willing to defer for a whole five years—into a new Parliament, when there is no doubt that they will not be the Government—a commitment to look at the effect of their policies on villages.
None the less, I have made it clear that I do not intend to divide the House on Motion 1A, so at this stage I beg leave to withdraw Motion 1A.
7:45 pm
Motion 1A (as an amendment to the Motion on Amendment 1) withdrawn.
Motion on Amendment 1 agreed.
Motion on Amendments 2 to 7
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Motion 8A also looks at reviewing the impact of national insurance contributions on the provision of socially necessary local services, including transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND. This would be impossible to implement, because it seeks a review three months after Royal Assent. Socially necessary local services are likely to take some time to be identified and agreed by local authorities, making any assessment premature.
I understand the ambition behind Motion 8B from the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, but I cannot support Amendment 8C, which seeks to ensure that the £2 bus fare cap is maintained for passengers using services that have been identified as socially necessary local services. I have already set out that the £2 fare cap has been assessed as poor value for money and that work is under way to review the £3 cap. Therefore, any further legislative requirement would be duplicative and unnecessary. In addition, socially necessary local services have not yet been identified and any review into these will take time.
Finally, I turn to Motion 29A from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, on reviewing the provision of services to villages. I thank her for her engagement on this issue. I reassure her and others that the Government expect local transport authorities to consider the needs of everyone in their area, including those in more rural parts. Measures such as franchising or setting up a local authority bus company take time, so an assessment within two years would not leave enough time to capture and assess the full impact.
However, following discussions, the Government will commit to undertake a review of socially necessary local services and rural services after five years, which will include local bus services used by children with special educational needs and disabilities. The Bill is about improving local bus services. Therefore, this is the appropriate scope for a review of its impact. It is important and right to understand how these services are performing and supporting the local communities who truly need them. I hope this therefore delivers on the ambitions of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and those behind Motion 8B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon.
For special educational needs and disabled children beyond this Bill, the Government have committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools so that fewer children need to travel long distances to a school that can meet their needs. The Government will bring forward a White Paper with plans to improve the SEND system.
I hope noble Lords will accept the other changes in this group that were made in the Lords and have not yet been debated. I beg to move.
Motion 1A (as an amendment to the Motion on Amendment 1)
Finally, on the SEND review, we talk about vulnerability. I remind noble Lords of the fragile structure of the services on which SEND pupils depend. It may be that the Government will resolve all this in the long term and there will not be any distinct SEND pupils because, as the Minister said, they are all going to be mainstreamed somehow, so they will not need to travel, but the fact is that today they do. They rely on a network of small providers, engaged by local authorities, that depend on part-time workers, many of whom earned less in each year than was required to be eligible for national insurance contributions. Because of the drop in the threshold from roughly £10,000 to £5,000, they are now caught by those national insurance contributions, which is having a devastating effect on the cash flow of those small operators, many of which now refuse contracts or are withdrawing from them where they are permitted to do so by their terms. The only result of that will be higher costs for local authorities, with fewer providers—the worst possible outcome.
The Government say they have provided money to local authorities to cover those costs—which, of course, they have. I do not doubt what the Government say as a matter of fact; they have provided money to local authorities. So what is the problem with a review that will actually identify whether that provision has been directed towards those local providers, is working and has been effective, and that the sum involved is correct? There can be no problem with such a review—except that the Government are keen to hide something. Again, when we come to Motion 8A, which captures both those subjects—I ask noble Lords to bear in mind that it has two parts to it: SEND and the £2 fare cap are both comprised in that Motion—I will test the opinion of the House.
I think it is time that the Government listened to what this House says. When it sends modest amendments, simply calling for reviews, to the other place, the Government should start listening and not simply turn everything down as a matter of course, which increasingly seems to be the way in which they want to conduct themselves. I beg to move Motion 1A.
Specifically on the cap, the Minister talked about the review of the £2 bus fare and said that it was not good value for money. What he missed out was that the Government decided, without having concluded the review of the £2 bus fare cap, to have a £3 bus fare cap, which suggests that they like the principle, but introduced it and picked a number without having done the review on the £2 bus fare cap in the first place. That demonstrates not sensible, evidence-based policy-making but a Treasury-driven “Let’s just reduce the cost of the policy and not look at the impact it was having”.
When I talked to bus companies, I found there were two issues relating to the bus fare cap that were important in driving up bus ridership. One was the obvious one, which is that it reduced the cost. Particularly in rural areas—as has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords—where you often have to take a number of parts of a journey with a number of fares, it drove down the cost of those journeys. That is really important for people going to work or accessing education, so that had a big impact.
The other thing was the clarity and the consistency that it provided in communicating the level of bus fare to people, which had, I have to confess, a rather surprising impact. When talking to bus companies, I asked the question, “If we were to take this away, what would you do to your pricing structure?” What was interesting was that they all said having a round-number bus fare had a surprisingly powerful effect on their ability to market services to consumers, rather than people not knowing what a bus fare was going to be and a whole range of complexity. I think it needed a bit more time to bed in, and that is why I support a proper review having been carried out.
To go back to the point I made about funding, what we suggested—to take savings from the reforms that we were going to put in place for rail services and use some of that to fund the bus services—would have rebalanced where people chose to take their journeys. More people depend on bus services for important local journeys. Whether to access education, to access the health service or to access employment, far more people across the whole of the country use bus services to do that than use the rail network.
The Government have done the reverse. The first thing they did was come in and give railway drivers—some of the best-paid public servants—a pay rise and ask for nothing in return; they got no productivity improvements for the rail user. That money could have been spent on improving the quality of bus services across the country. That would have been the right decision, and it is the decision that we were going to make. When we do not see increases to funding for bus services—when we simply give local authorities the powers to franchise but with no money to deliver that—then people on all sides of your Lordships’ House will think that making savings in the rail network and putting the money into buses would have been the right decision. I am sorry the Government chose not to do so.