Buses (Deregulation)

: I begin by thanking all hon. Members for their kind words on this my penultimate day as a Minister. I should resign more often. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) on securing this debate and on initiating a useful set of contributions. I listened to what everyone said with a great deal of interest. I hope that it will be of some reassurance that I do not intend to try to make the case that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. The Department recognises that there is a case for change, and I shall outline some of the changes that can be made. I wish to respond to some specific points, particularly those of my hon. Friend. I assure him that this is not the only opportunity that we have had to hear the concerns of passenger transport executive areas. There is regular official dialogue with PTEs and Ministers—in fact, last week I met bus partnership forum representatives of the authorities as well as the operators—and meetings take place every couple of months at both the departmental and Government office level. I assure him that we do pick up on these arguments. I am aware from those activities and from the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Pudsey (Mr. Truswell), for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford) and for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland) that there is real strength of feeling about these issues and that there are genuine concerns that we need to address. We all agree on the importance of the bus as a key strand of public transport policy. Buses provide about two thirds of all public transport journeys—4 billion journeys in England, with about one quarter in PTE areas. They play, and will increasingly play, a vital role in tackling congestion and promoting accessibility and social exclusion. Outside London, bus deregulation has been with us for some 20 years. Those years have not been easy for buses because of the growth in car ownership as well as the factors that hon. Members set out today, in particular the increasing cost base, which is a reality for whoever provides bus services on whatever basis. We must respond to the genuine and almost historically inevitable relationship between economic growth and rising car ownership. It is fair to point out that deregulation has brought some benefits as well. It is important to keep some balance in the debate. There has been considerable investment over the years in new and better quality buses that has not been borne by the public purse. The average age of local buses has fallen to 7.2 years, which is comfortably below the target set by the industry earlier in this decade.