Local Transport Bill [HL]

Ministerial gratitude is not a commodity that is in long supply at the best of times. I am afraid that the Committee will have to put up with this spat between the two of us. Whether the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, were aimed at me or not, I did not find them particularly new. That view has been held by local authorities for many years—certainly since the passage of the Transport Act 2000. As my noble friend Lord Smith of Leigh said, it is a question of partnership, but it is not always the bus operators who fail to implement partnerships. I have a couple of examples involving not so much local authorities, although they are involved as well, but when Passenger Transport Authority executives—the elected element—have not followed through. Sometimes that is because of change in the political control of PTAs, of which Birmingham is a fine example—or perhaps not so fine an example—of the sort of situation that I am outlining. Because of the change in political control, the money to the constituent authorities and policies are seen through a different prism. Despite agreements being made at PTA level, because the district councils are themselves the highway authorities responsible for implementing some of those agreements entered into at a different level, such agreements have not been implemented; indeed, they have been countermanded. There are examples of failure on both sides since the passage of the Transport Act 2000; I am sure that my noble friend will accept that. Taking the example of the bus industry—I hesitate to start quoting my own experience once again, but I shall do so. I served on a passenger transport authority in greater Manchester in the early 1970s as an elected councillor. It was then known by the long-winded name of south-east Lancashire and north-east Cheshire PTA. I do not think that any bus passenger would have said at the time that the services that we ran were quite as comprehensive and as rosy as those that both my noble friends seem to feel would be run if only the local authorities had a greater part to play once more. On Second Reading and during our discussion on an earlier amendment, I pointed out to noble Lords that the biggest survey of bus passengers carried out by my noble friend’s department indicates that outside London something like 83 per cent of bus passengers are content or reasonably content with the services provided by the ““wicked capitalists””—if I might put that phrase in inverted commas—whereas, despite that increase of 1,600 per cent, only 78 per cent of passengers in London are satisfied with the socialist paradise provided by Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London. That does not indicate—although these surveys are not 100 per cent accurate—that there is massive happiness with the situation in London. As a regular bus user in London, I am very impressed by the system, but whether I would be impressed enough to fork out the money that I am going to be asked for as an occasional council tax payer in London remains to be seen. The bus services are far superior to those before the mid-1990s. My noble friend Lord Rosser felt that there should be no independent approval for quality contracts and gave his reasons why. Again, it is a strange system where one side makes one proposal, another side makes a counterproposal and the side that made the first proposal then says that they are going ahead anyway. There has got to be some fallback position and some independent element that makes that decision. Having met quite a few of them, I am more than happy that the traffic commissioner, some of his staff and other people participate in this decision-making process. Traffic commissioners, by and large, are pretty under-resourced and I hope that if they are going to play this role my noble friend will tell us that there will be much greater resources passed in their direction. Most people in the bus industry would agree that if anyone is capable of making an independent decision on a quality contract or some other controversial aspect of such a scheme, a body chaired by the traffic commissioners is as good as any that I can think of; although I would be interested if the Minister can think of another. I will paraphrase what my noble friend who replied from the Front Bench said on Second Reading when this point was debated. He felt it was important that an independent assessor looked at these matters before this decision was made. My noble friend Lord Rosser talked about people seeking compensation. Again, I have no wish to add to the so many guineas a word that our learned friends in the legal profession make out of these matters, but it is an inevitable consequence of the quality contracts scheme that someone who loses out will seek some sort of reparation. I am not saying that that is right, sensible or a course of action that I would advocate. But it seems to me that someone would seek some sort of judicial review if they lost out under the terms of this clause. I return to the point that it needs two to tango and that once they make agreements both sides should stick to them. It has been a justified long-time criticism by local authorities that they had to provide the resources—the highways and the bus priority measures for the private sector which operated the buses—and yet the private sector benefited financially from that provision, in some cases enormously. In the West Midlands, we, as the major bus operator at that time, sat down with the passenger transport executive to try to agree some system of payment that we as the bus operator could make for the provision of those facilities, because we thought that that was fair, since we were going to benefit from them. We agreed a sum of up to £30 million over a number of years in part-funding. If the executive paid 50 per cent of the cost of the highway arrangements, Travel West Midlands, the bus company that I chaired at the time, would pay the other 50 per cent. After five years in the job, when, somewhat wearied and feeling the strains of old age, I stepped down as chairman, the bus company had spent about £300,000, because getting these schemes to come to fruition was enormously difficult. Despite the best wishes of the Passenger Transport Authority, highways authorities—again perhaps because of a change of political control—were all too often not very keen on bus priority measures in their area. I left in 2000, but even now, nearly eight years later, the National Express Group, the last time I checked, spent no more than £1 million on these facilities because of the nature of getting agreement with the highways authorities and the PTA that were implementing these schemes. It is not a question solely of private bus operators failing to deliver; there are weaknesses on both sides. I have to say to my noble friends that, without the benefit of a brief provided by someone else, local authorities are not good at taking quick decisions or implementing them. I am sure that one of the reasons why the previous Prime Minister wanted to change the system of local government in this country was that he felt equally frustrated. That is not an attack on councillors—I was one myself—but the system these days does not lend itself to quick commercial decision-taking. I apologise for detaining the Committee for so long, but that leads me to my last point. It is important that an independent element rules on these decisions, although I do not encourage private operators to go to court. I do understand the fears expressed by many local authorities that the bus services are not as comprehensive as they could be if they had a greater say, but services and fares in many areas are discussed by both sides in this community. It is for the private operator, who after all invests a considerable amount of money in a bus fleet, to take the final decision as to how its assets are deployed. That is how private operators see it, and it is very difficult to argue with that. As for the point that councillors make pledges which independent approvals boards overturn—a sentence that I wrote down as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said it—many local authorities would be quite glad when they make these pledges that someone else has to say yea or nay. It is easy to make pledges when seeking election at any level—those of us who have sought election have all been tempted to make pledges in certain areas—but it is not always easy to implement them afterwards, and the fact that there is an independent body that can decide whether those pledges should be implemented might be somewhat welcome, whatever councillors might say publicly. My very last point—I mean it this time—is about competition. I have listened to this debate continuously since 2000, but I am still not sure what local authorities want. My company in the West Midlands—I had better stick to that area as I know it best—was part of the National Express Group at the time and was accused on the one hand of running a monopoly. On the other hand, when there was competition—the private sector working the way it does, bus drivers whom we had fired for various actions, and who were working quite often for small bus operators, would buy a couple of buses and, under some of the Barnett provisions of the 1986 Act, would turn up on the most lucrative route in the area and invariably run two minutes in front of our buses vehicles that quite frankly would have disgraced provisional Birmingham in the 1930s—we were accused of driving them off the road. I know nothing about the Stagecoach discussion in Preston, so I cannot comment in detail on what the noble Lord said earlier, but I certainly had enough experience in Birmingham of never knowing what the local authorities wanted. They were against us having a monopoly, then they were against unbridled competition, and I was never quite sure exactly what they wanted. These days, Birmingham has a new chairman who is not me, argumentative as my noble friends might think I am, and a new chief executive of the Passenger Transport Authority, both of whom appear to be united in the view that quality partnerships are the best way forward and that, by working together, they provide a better service for the customer, which is what the Bill and our amendments should be about, rather than about who runs the buses and who does not.