Local Transport Bill [HL]

My Lords, as was heralded by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, I come to this Bill from the perspective of rural dwellers and providers of rural transport. Residents of rural villages travel nearly twice as far by car as their urban counterparts and although one-third of adults in rural areas do not have personal access to a car, rural people take one-third as many bus journeys as those in towns. The reasons for this include the fact that less than half of rural residents live within 13 minutes of an hourly bus and for many countrymen there are no local buses at all. This can be a major barrier to participating in everyday activities, such as education, training, health services, shopping, leisure and, particularly, employment. Having said that, large—or even small—buses running around the countryside with hardly anyone in them are a waste of public money. Very often it is not more bus services that are required but more flexible, smaller, on-demand services, run by local voluntary groups or in partnership with other service deliverers, such as the ambulance service or even the post bus. Flexibility is the name of the game. There is much to welcome in this Bill from the point of view of flexibility and freedoms, but my overall impression is that it deals largely with urban public transport. Maybe this is intended, which is fair enough, but I hope that public transport in rural areas is of importance to the Government, in terms of both overall carbon footprint and equity of treatment when it comes to access to services. However, I suspect that this Bill is not the right vehicle to make the major improvements to rural public transport and its funding that are needed. We have lost the rural transport partnerships, the community transport fund and the rural bus challenge. With the demise of the Countryside Agency, few of these ground-breaking schemes have survived as there is no real rural transport champion on a national scale. Setting that aside, some minor improvements could be made to this Bill which would help. For instance, Clause 8 requires each local transport authority to develop policies, "““for the promotion and encouragement of ... transport to, from and within their area””." I particularly like the ““to, from and within”” bit of that quote, as all too often the catchment area of a market town does not fall neatly into a local authority area. Perhaps the Bill could be improved if local arrangements were made in rural areas which allowed for the boundaries of PTAs to be different to local authority boundaries. As I understand it, such arrangements are currently possible only in metropolitan areas. For example, Yeovil is a large market town in my county of Somerset but it sits right on the Dorset border. Somerset subsidises the rural bus service into Yeovil on its side of the border, but Dorset does less so, if at all. It would probably be to Somerset's overall economic advantage if it could assist the people of Dorset to come and shop in Yeovil; it could do so by contributing to a quality bus service on the Dorset side. But, as I understand it, at present it cannot do so. I would like to hope that this could change. On the question of consultation, Clause 9 outlines the process of preparing a local transport plan which should be consulted. These plans are very important for rural areas, especially when catering for needs identified by the accessibility planning process. In terms of the consultation process, it seems to me vital that parish or community councils should be specifically mentioned in the Bill. District and county councillors, who are mentioned, are often not the ones who use public transport. In fact, in my part of the world they would not be able to do their duties without a car. So it is crucial that a picture is built up by asking questions at a parish, or even more local, level. It would also seem sensible that the approval boards must satisfy themselves that the views of parish councils have been sought. As I have already indicated, perhaps the most useful aspect of the Bill from the rural point of view is the new flexibility introduced concerning the use of taxis, private hire vehicles and small buses, and the relaxation in Clause 50 relating to community bus services and allowing drivers of such services to be paid. However, I endorse the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, about the need for these services to be able to make a charge for the ride. The charities, which are often running these services, should be able to charge what the market can bear to enable them to keep reinvesting in the service under arrangements in Clauses 19 and 22. Still in the context of flexibility, I endorse Clause 86, which gives PTAs powers and encourages them to work in partnership with other bodies to assist them to discharge their functions and vice versa. There is much that can be done to access services, by PTAs working with others such as the health authority, the local education authority, school buses, the Post Office or even jobcentres and magistrates’ courts. I hope that this clause will encourage such co-operation. The scope for statutory quality partnerships and quality contracts in the rural context is restricted by both the volume of truly commercial operations and the inability of local authorities to offer sufficient infrastructure investment, the opportunities for which are pretty rare in rural areas. Bus lanes, for example, are not suitable in small towns, particularly those with narrow streets. Other sticks used to punish the motorist, such as exorbitant parking charges or congestion charges, go against the grain for rural market towns that are often desperate to encourage customers. Many visitors to market towns just do not have the option of a bus. Thus, in order to achieve the necessary investment in market town bus routes, I propose that it be made possible for a rural PTA to enter into a long-term—say, 10-year—franchise agreement with a commercial operator which incentivises the operator to invest in the route, with newer and more frequent buses for example. In other words, we achieve the necessary investment without the required punishment of the motorists. I hope that this might be made possible. All this points, in general, to the case for a different approach to bringing about an improvement in the quality of services in rural areas. There is a requirement for a strategically planned network that harnesses all the available resources: bus services, community transport, taxis and so on. One way forward would be to give local authorities the powers to franchise a whole network of services in rural areas that would incorporate any existing commercial services and, of course, include full inter-availability of ticketing between operators. I have misgivings about the potential effects of road charging schemes. While I am all in favour of reducing congestion and discouraging people from using their cars, in order to minimise their carbon footprint, road charging schemes in rural areas could have severe downside social effects. It is already hard for deprived rural people to get to everyday services in their local market town, especially healthcare. There is rarely a suitable bus, and a car is often the only possible solution. Any unthought-out charging scheme could have a devastating effect on these people, without them having any real say in the matter. Clause 98 is pretty vague about who has to be consulted over the introduction of such schemes. Another issue of concern to rural communities is the allocation of revenue from any urban road pricing scheme. If, as seems to be currently planned, the revenue raised is used entirely in the urban area itself, it would mean those travelling from and to rural areas would receive no direct benefit from the charges they pay. There is therefore an argument that the adjacent rural areas faced with road charges when entering their town should also receive their share of revenue to spend in their area. Finally, although there are no proposals at present for a national road pricing scheme, there is concern that if pricing were introduced on major through routes it would encourage drivers to divert on to adjacent rural roads that are not designed to carry such a volume or type of traffic. That would add to road safety concerns in rural areas by increasing accidents and causing environmental damage. These issues need to be taken into consideration when such schemes are proposed. I am aware that I have raised a series of rather specialist rural points, some of which may be outside the scope of the Bill, and I do not expect the Minister to answer every one in his reply, but it would be good to receive comments from his department before I am tempted to take them forward at the next stage of the Bill.