Local Transport Bill [HL] Bill

I, too, apologise to noble Lords for missing parts of this debate. I shall be extremely brief in what I have to say. It is fascinating that one of my noble friends thought that partnerships included fares and services. There have been demands for them to do so but partnerships mean just that, and you cannot call it a partnership if you lay down detail to that extent. We will come in due course to the debate on quality contracts and their value or otherwise, but if you are in a partnership, fares and services should be discussed. The view in the bus industry is overwhelmingly that if you are spending £750,000 a time on a double-decker bus, you want some say in the fares charged to passengers on that bus and in where and at what time of the day you operate it. That is not unreasonable. I welcome the proposal to ease the present restrictions. Again, at the risk of boring noble Lords, during my time as chairman of Travel West Midlands, we introduced a new service in Coventry known as Prime Line in partnership with the city council. I emphasise that the city council provided the infrastructure. The service was quite successful and the number of passenger carriers increased dramatically. Along came another operator who wished to operate on the same route. Despite the view that the private sector is full of wicked capitalists and pirateers, TWM could make no objection to that. In fairness to the other operator, he too provided new vehicles to a satisfactory standard, which is not always the case. The problem was that, under the existing legislation, we could not co-ordinate fares or timetable services because of the danger of the OFT saying that we were colluding unnecessarily. It is impossible to talk about integration of various modes of transport when, under the existing law, directors are likely to find themselves getting their collars felt if they try to integrate one mode of transport—that is, the bus. I hope that the Minister will offer us some comfort on that point. We will return to the vexed question of fares and services under a later clause.