Local Transport Bill [Lords]

As a member of the Public Bill Committee and of the Select Committee on Transport, I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate on the amendments relating to quality contracts. I begin by welcoming the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Gillingham (Paul Clark) to his post and as a Report-stage substitute for the right hon. Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), who is now the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions. I am tempted to describe him as the David ““Supersub”” Fairclough of the Government's transport team. He has come on late in the second half and changed the game in respect of quality contracts and the approvals board. The Government's new clauses take on board the concerns raised by both Liberal Democrat Members and some Labour Back Benchers in Committee and introduce proposals to limit the power of the new quality contracts scheme board by effectively making it a super-consultee, rather than a decision-maker. I am happy for the Minister to attempt to take some of the credit, just as the Government did when they took on Lib Dem plans for free travel for the elderly prior to the 2005 election. We are more than happy for the Government to implement Lib Dem proposals. The need to amend the legislation on quality contracts is clear. The Transport Act 2000 has not resulted in a raft of quality contracts, and in large swathes of the country outside London bus patronage continues to fall. Had the amendments not been tabled, there is a great danger that quality contracts would continue to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or that bus companies would be able to cause unending delays in implementing a scheme through a drawn-out appeals process. The need for viable, workable quality contracts is nowhere more pressing than in Greater Manchester. In my constituency, Manchester, Withington, we have seen some of the worst results of bus deregulation. It is true that certain routes have seen additional buses, particularly the Wilmslow road corridor, but that has been at the expense of other less profitable routes. Overwhelmingly, bus deregulation has not increased competition. Where other bus companies have tried to compete—for example, on the 85 and 86 bus routes from Chorlton to Manchester—bus wars have ensued. Stagecoach flooded the routes with extra buses taken off other routes and introduced cheap fares. Buses were prevented from entering the bus station or stopping at certain stops. However, as soon as the competition was run off the road, the additional buses disappeared. Now the cheap fares have been phased out too, despite a local outcry from residents. Bus companies have used deregulation as a way of making services more profitable by cutting out parts of routes that are less profitable or that affect reliability. Again, in my constituency, that has resulted in fewer services running to the most deprived area in the whole of the constituency because more profit can be made by ending most of the services at the bus station. Similarly, the bus companies have attempted to hold the passenger transport authority to ransom on some routes by demanding subsidies to run services for part of the day, particularly in the evenings. When passenger transport authorities have been unable to add that subsidy, the services have disappeared. Those service failings can be addressed through quality contracts and they will need to be if the proposed transport innovation fund bid is to go through in Greater Manchester. The Greater Manchester passenger transport executive has been quick to assure me that the bus companies are keen on partnership working to deliver an improved bus network for the area; I am not surprised, given that £3 billion is at stake. However, I am less convinced that the companies will agree to partnerships whose profits would be low. In Manchester we will rely on the new bus services to provide an easily accessible alternative to the car and persuade some motorists to change their behaviour, and we cannot trust the bus companies to provide such services voluntarily. That is why it is vital that the Bill should provide local authorities with the opportunity to introduce quality contracts without the fear of a long, protracted appeals process.