Local Transport Bill [HL]

My Lords, like the noble Earl, I pay tribute to the Minister, to the Minister in another place and to officials, who have been very patient. There has been a lot of consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny. We have a fairly clear understanding of what the Bill is about. My noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market will address the issues of governance, because many of them are important, and my noble friend Lord Mar and Kellie will talk about the effects on the devolved administrations. I want to talk first about congestion, because it is by far the worst enemy of the bus. A number of seminal papers on the subject have shown that congestion is a self-exciting phenomenon—which means that as it gets worse, it gets even worse. Something has got to be done to break the deadlock in our cities; otherwise they will grind to a halt. That is why I am particularly pleased that, regarding inquiring into the poor quality of bus services, local authorities will be asked—in fact, required—to appear before the traffic commissioners to give an account of their stewardship of the roads, a power conferred by the Traffic Management Act 2004. I am pleased that the traffic commissioners are to be reinvigorated. I would ask the Minister to give particular account to the status of the people who will be appointed to these jobs, which have to be of sufficient status to attract people of quality. They should not be part-time jobs that you can do after you have retired from the Army. You should need some background in the industry to be able to do the job properly. In particular, the traffic commissioners’ powers over registration of services need to be fairly wide, a point made by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. At the moment, traffic commissioners have no power whatever to reject a registration made under the 1985 Act. They should exercise some judgment as to what is in the public interest. If one person operates a service on the hour and someone else registers a service at 55 minutes past the hour there will be no buses for the next 55 minutes. That is clearly not in the public interest. We want the public interest to become the paramount consideration. On local transport plans, Clause 8 states that local transport authorities should ““take into account”” the directions of the Government on environmental matters. I would like to think that that could be slightly rephrased to take into account ““as a minimum”” the Government’s guidance on environmental matters, because I believe—and the Prime Minister acknowledged this yesterday—that environmental targets will be raised substantially. I am sure that local authorities involved in this will have to work with those increased standards. I am very interested in the question of highway powers. Who is going to exercise them? Will the integrated transport authorities do it? Will authorities with highway powers, such as county councils which have responsibility both for the bus service and the highway, do it? What happens in a place where there is an integrated transport authority but two districts decide that they do not want the bus lanes, integrated traffic lights or enforcement? In those circumstances, will two of the constituent authorities be able to vitiate the policies advanced by the integrated transport authority? Will the consent of constituent councils be required? That is particularly important in any road pricing scheme. It would be nonsense to have a 10-district area where two of the districts decided that they did not want to be part of the road pricing scheme. In fact, that would torpedo the whole scheme. Like the noble Earl, Lord Atlee, I want to know what admissible objections to quality partnerships are. I would not want bus operators, or anybody else, to have a veto over a quality partnership. Their objections must be considered but they should not be in a position to undermine what there is general consensus to achieve. While we are getting clarification in describing quality contracts—which I think are going to be difficult to achieve—the meaning of the words ““economic, efficient and effective”” in Clause 18 needs to be spelt out. How is somebody going to judge whether a scheme is economic, effective and efficient? The Bill refers to an approvals board chaired by a traffic commissioner. Who constitutes the board? Is it an employer or a trade unionist, or is it somebody who has some expertise in the subject? The material put before them will be very technical and it needs to be judged by people with technical knowledge, as well the traffic commissioner who we assume is competent in such things. The competition test is extremely important. I can single it out as one thing in the 1985 Act and the Competition Act 1998 that is necessary. I could quote from my own knowledge, but I am quoting from the brief from the Campaign for Better Transport: "““We commissioned an opinion from John Swift QC (a pre-eminent authority on competition law) … on the exercise of powers under the Competition Act with respect to the bus industry. They concluded that the revised schedule 10 criteria could be applied to all agreements between operators, rather than … those involving local authorities””." Outside quality contracts, if a number of bus operators—two or three—get together and bring forward proposals which may involve recognising one another’s tickets—it is one of the biggest annoyances to passengers when they do not—or combining their timetables to provide a better service, somebody ought to be able to say that it is in the public interest to accept that and it should be exempt from inquiries by the Office of Fair Trading. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, will speak about services in country areas. I cannot understand why there is a distinction between Section 19 and Section 22 services. Parish councils which might run community transport need as much freedom as possible to operate in the best way that they can. Transport in rural areas is never going to be covered by the normal bus service network. I am talking about country areas that are away from the major routes. People there need to get to employment and training. The Bill allows for the driver to be paid. I would like there to be no restriction on what type of vehicle is used or, indeed, whether separate fares are collected. In Clause 46, I should like to see considerable stringency attached to whether private hire vehicles are allowed to carry passengers at bus stops, as that could undermine parts of the industry. I hope that the private hire vehicles concerned will have to register with the traffic commissioners, that their drivers and vehicles will be suitable and that they will work to a timetable; otherwise—I speak from a lot of experience in Belfast—taxis can very much undermine the quality of bus services. I am pleased that the subsidised service agreement has risen from five to eight years. Any franchising or tendering system is highly disruptive, whether in the rail or bus industries. It costs a lot of money both from the authority’s point of view and from the point of view of those who are tendering. An eight-year tender will encourage people to invest in new buses, which will benefit, for example, the disabled, about whom we were talking earlier. I turn briefly to the question of bus-user representation. There is an organisation called BUS USERS UK and another called the Bus Appeals Body, on which the noble Lord, Lord Hogg of Cumbernauld, sits as chairman and of which I was a previous chairman. It is a non-statutory body but it works. If it were given a little money and if bus operators were required to exhibit information about this committee on their vehicles, that could be very effective. In addition, the Government must realise that in many PTA areas—I cite Liverpool as an example—and in every district council there is a bus users body, there is a body for the disabled at the centre and there is a body that covers the whole area. One of our major queries concerns the integrated transport authorities. At the moment, they are all elected but the Bill provides for there to be elected members and other members. We are very interested to know who the other members will be, whether they will have voting powers and whether they will be able to decide the precept. Like the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, I am very pleased to see something being done about overseas vehicles and drivers, and I shall explain later why drivers are important. I hope that the fees to be charged by the department for passing on information will be modest, as that will allow some abuses of the law in this country, including road-safety law, to be followed up. In Clause 111, I am pleased to see something being done about situations in which the owner of a lorry or the person with the operator’s licence is able to get out of the penalty of having the vehicle detained because a hire company owns it and someone else operates it. The vehicles have to be returned because they belong to a hire company, although the operator is at fault. This matter requires attention and should be dealt with. Generally, this is a very good Bill, and I shall mention just two or three other things. Concessionary bus fares, to which the Minister referred, are causing huge trouble for a lot of councils. Far more people are using concessionary bus fares than was previously the case, and local councils are trying to reduce the amount of money that they give the bus operator for each person they carry. The whole issue needs urgent examination. If a bus operator appeals, he is largely successful, but the money to pay for that is not available. The opportunity could have been taken to do something about licensing pedicabs, which are a big problem. I am also sorry that nothing has been done about introducing a national lorry pricing or road-charging scheme because I believe that that is the essential first step to getting foreign lorries to pay to use our roads. Can something be done about the sat-nav devices which are sending heavy lorries along country roads and causing a lot of damage? Also, operating centres are being established along country lanes because, although the traffic commissioners can rule on the suitability of an operating centre, they cannot rule on whether the roads leading to it are suitable. I turn, finally, to foreign drivers, many of whom cannot speak English. They rely on sat-nav devices because they cannot read our road signs and I am afraid a large number of accidents, particularly with cyclists, take place because lorries are going along roads that are quite unsuitable because their drivers cannot read the signs. The Bill is very welcome and we support most of it but I think that one or two other things could be added at this stage.