Local Government Finance

The settlement that I announced on 6 December included £212 million extra from central Government to support the additional right to national free bus travel that people will have, which is of value to perhaps more than 11 million elderly and disabled people. The funding that continues to support the existing concessionary travel will remain, and will continue to be paid through the rate support grant, so this is additional funding just to cover the extra required to fund the new entitlement in April. Clearly, none of us quite knows what the impact of that will be, but the travel figures suggest that at present only 4 per cent. of people's bus journeys go beyond the county boundary. The cost of the additional journeys that we look to fund is about £1, so the hon. Gentleman could use that amount as a proxy for each additional journey. The hon. Gentleman has the figures and I do not, but if—through a specific grant to allocate this extra funding, which was what the LGA urged upon us—his authority has indeed been allocated £600,000 next year for the new national travel entitlement, that is the equivalent of about 600,000 journeys from Cambridge. Unusually from the point of the view of the Treasury and the Government, all the assumptions that we built into the aggregate of £212 million extra for next year err on the side of generosity—but we will have to see how it works in practice. The overall provision that we are making for people's additional responsibilities and rights is generous; even in his own local case, the hon. Gentleman would have to recognise that there would need to be a lot of additional journeys over and above those made and funded at present for it to be insufficient.