Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [Lords]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I start by thanking my friend, the Minister of State for Rail, for being an excellent advocate and custodian of the Bill as it made its way through the other place. As someone who started his career on London’s world-famous red buses, there was no better person in the country than the noble Lord Hendy to kick-start the Government’s bus reform journey. I am proud to call him my friend, and I am grateful every day for his wise counsel, frank advice and gentle good humour.

What we saw in the other place, and what I hope we may be able to secure in this House, is constructive cross-party support. We all recognise how buses connect us to the things that matter most: work and school, friends and family, essential services and the weekly shop. The billions of bus journeys each year—equivalent to over 100 every second of every day—are the difference between vibrant communities and boarded up high streets, between aspiration and isolation, and between getting on and being forced to give up.

The Bill represents years of work in opposition and now in government to discard the failed 40-year model of deregulation in favour of putting passenger needs, reliable services and local accountability at the heart of the industry.

I wholeheartedly agree with the Secretary of State on the importance of buses for connectivity. I note that the Bill talks about “socially necessary” services, but it would be helpful to have a better understanding of the definition of what they are beyond my own interpretation. For example, if a constituency does not have a train station, can we therefore have a greater assurance that we will see no loss in our bus services?

Through the Bill, we will be giving local transport authorities the power to determine socially necessary local services. That relates to access to employment, jobs, things like health facilities, and education. That power will lie with local authorities and it will be for them to determine.

I will make some progress.

Before I come to the Bill’s key measures, I will briefly set out the context. Although it may be tempting for me to lay the blame for the current state of buses entirely at the feet of the last Government, that would be neither right nor fair. They too inherited a broken, deregulated system that forced passengers to navigate multiple operators on similar routes, but with different tickets. They, too, faced declining patronage, with 1.8 billion fewer journeys outside London last year than in 1986, and, to their credit, they tried to fix that. The national bus strategy, bus service improvement plans and greater powers for mayors were all steps in the right direction to improve services for passengers.

Will the Secretary of State give way?

I am going to make some progress.

However, in some areas such as franchising, the last Government did not go far enough, so this Bill will not only build on previous reforms but go further—much further—in fixing the faults that are still holding the industry back from meeting the needs of local people. I hope that Members in all parts of the House will see the merits of the approach that we are taking. After all, we have all heard from constituents about jobs not taken and opportunities missed because bus services are too unreliable, or do not operate on Sundays, or do not cater for night-time shifts.

In London we have benefited for a long time from bus services that are better than those in the rest of the country, and I wholeheartedly welcome my right hon. Friend’s desire to level that up, but in London we also have floating bus stops. I know that matching the needs of cyclists, of whom I am one, with those of others involves a delicate balance, but for someone who is blind, visually impaired or encumbered by, for instance, a buggy, getting off a bus at a floating bus stop is very dangerous. What plans has my right hon. Friend to tackle the issue across the country?

My hon. Friend may know that in the Bill we commit ourselves to producing design guidance for local authorities so that they can look at what is best practice. She may also know that in the other place the Rail Minister said we were committing ourselves to a non-statutory pause on the type of floating bus stop that requires a passenger to alight directly on a cycle lane. I hope that that gives her some reassurance.

I thank the Secretary of State for the work that she is doing in this regard. I am pleased to hear that the Bill requires guidance to be produced to enable authorities to make floating bus stops safe and accessible, but many blind and partially sighted people, including me, have experienced problems with them. Could a proper assessment of their safety be carried out to ensure that no passenger who uses a bus, whether it is to go to work or to attend a health appointment, will experience the challenges that so many people currently experience when trying to navigate them?

We will be looking carefully at this issue. I am very conscious of the needs of the visually impaired community, but I am also very conscious of the need to protect cyclists and pedestrians on our roads, so I am keen for us to look at the issue in the round.

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

I am going to make a little more progress, but I shall be happy to take interventions later.

I was talking about the problems caused by bus services that are unreliable, do not operate at weekends or, perhaps, do not cater for individuals working night shifts. We all know that each of those stories is the story of a life frustrated, but, taken together, they constitute an anthology of wasted potential, of living standards and growth held back. That is why improving bus services underpins our plan for change, and it is why, despite difficult choices made across Government, we confirmed more than £1 billion in funding in the last Budget to protect vital routes and keep fares down.

I am not going to give way again to the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton). I will give way to the hon. Member for North Herefordshire.