Local Transport Bill [Lords]

I shall also discuss new clause 11 and amendments Nos. 151, 152, 153, 156 and 157, in the name of the Government. All these amendments deal with the membership of integrated transport authorities. The strengthened powers for local authorities to improve bus services in their areas—which we discussed under the previous group of amendments—will be most effective if they are supported by the right arrangements for taking decisions at a local level. There is a clear consensus that in our larger urban areas outside London the current leadership and delivery arrangements for transport do not work as well as they might and that they need to be updated to reflect changing patterns of transport. The current governance arrangements in our major cities date from 1968. The Transport Act 1968 allowed for the establishment of passenger transport authorities with overall responsibility for public transport services across each of those cities. By the time of the establishment of the metropolitan county councils in 1974, there were six of these PTAs, covering the west midlands, south and west Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Tyne and Wear and Merseyside. One was also set up north of the border in Strathclyde. Although the PTAs survived the abolition of the metropolitan county councils in the mid-1980s, the power to create further PTAs was removed from the statute book, even in circumstances where local authorities themselves were keen to see new ones set up. So, the broad arrangements for local transport decision making have, almost unbelievably, effectively been frozen since then. Over the last quarter of a century, there have, inevitably, been many changes in the transport needs and patterns of different areas—for example, in the distance that commuters are prepared to travel to their workplaces—yet the existing legislation offers very little flexibility to update local arrangements for the planning and delivery of transport, or for one PTA area to do things differently from another, where local needs differ; hence our provision in this part of the Bill. I come now to the Government's amendments. At present, membership of each of the six English PTAs consists entirely of local councillors representing each of the local authorities that make up the passenger transport area. The Bill offers greater flexibility, both to areas that are considering setting up a new integrated transport area and authority and to those where the existing PTA has become an ITA, as to whether they would prefer to broaden the membership of their ITA to allow a wider range of bodies or persons to be represented on it. At the same time, a majority of members of each ITA would still have to be elected members of the local authorities that make up the integrated transport area.