Local Transport Bill [Lords]

Let me begin by welcoming the Bill and indicating clearly that my colleagues and I will support its Second Reading. That is not to say that we do not have problems with it—naturally, we do—and we will seek to raise some of those this afternoon and again in Committee. However, the Bill undoubtedly takes us in the right direction. Before I come to those concerns, I must say something about the speech by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers), which was the apex of incoherence as regards putting forward any sort of argument. She said that the statutory quality partnerships and contracts that had already been introduced were not working. That is quite true, and Bill has now been introduced to ensure that they do work by making it easier for local authorities to take part. She then said that certain issues in the Bill are worth exploring and acknowledged that it has some good points, but she then reached the conclusion that we should vote against Second Reading and abandon the Bill entirely. But that would mean that we would be unable to discuss those good points as they come up in Committee, unable to reform the current quality partnerships and contracts that she recognises are not working, and that we would be forced to carry on in some sort of Neverland where buses do not work properly, bus fares are going up and passengers are unable to get the service that they require. I do not know what kind of transport policy that is. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) says, it shows the strategic understanding of Olive from ““On the Buses””. We deserve rather better than that. The hon. Lady said that she did not want to wind things back to the 1980s, but that is precisely what she is doing. She may not look like Mrs. Thatcher, but she certainly sounds like her at times. The Minister was kind enough to nick my line from last night about Mrs. Thatcher saying that that nobody over 30 uses a bus unless they are a failure in life. That is part of the problem. Buses have not been seen as a sensible transport alternative, instead, people have been driven on to the roads, and the consequence is that congestion is worsening, climate change is worsening as result of increased emissions from transport overall, and bus usage is declining. The Bill does not offer the perfect answer to that problem, but it goes some way towards resolving it. The Conservatives' alternative, in so far as there is one, is to go back to the days of unrestricted deregulation in the 1980s, but that has failed us. Hon. Members may remember Nicholas Ridley—the person who wanted councils to meet once a year to hand out contracts and who said, when he was Transport Secretary, that the aim of deregulation was"““to halt the decline that has afflicted the bus industry for more than 20 years.””—[Official Report, 12 February 1985; Vol. 73, c. 192.]" Since then, there has been a catastrophic decrease in bus usage, which has halved from nearly 9 billion journeys in the 1970s to 4.7 billion. However, there has been an increase in bus journeys in London—20 years ago one in five journeys were made by bus in London, and now it is almost two in five. London has been a rip-roaring success and the fantastic deregulation-world presented by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet has been a total failure.