Bus Services Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-07-20
Topic: Transportation
Peter Snape (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I have every sympathy with this amendment, although I doubt its practicality. I do not know whether the noble Baroness who has just spoken saw the BBC "Countryfile" programme about four months ago. It was about rural bus services and was very interesting. Indeed, at Question Time I asked the Minister whether he had seen it—I do not know if he remembers—and he replied that he had better things to do on a Sunday evening than watch television, which I understood. However, all the answers to the questions that the noble Baroness has just read out from that pre-prepared speech were given over the course of that programme. The fact is that resources for local authorities to run bus services, particularly in rural areas, have been decimated by the Government. The Minister partially acknowledged that that was the fact at Question Time after this programme appeared My noble friend on the Front Bench talked about the impotence of local communities to provide these services. That impotence is the direct result of those reductions in local authority funding. The reductions have been country-wide but have particularly hit the rural areas that the Conservative Party professes to care about most. Those are the facts, and designating certain routes as community routes will not make any difference in restoring those services of concern. It is about money. Under the 1985 Act, the noble Baroness or anyone else can set up a bus service anywhere they like. However, people do not do so in rural areas because it is not thought possible to make a profit there. One could argue, as the noble Baroness did, that in life there are things other than profit, but most bus companies, small and large, depend on making a profit if they are to continue In moving the amendment, my noble friend on the Front Bench talked about designating community bus routes. One could argue that as all bus routes run through communities, they could all be so designated. However, I fear that if the Government accepted this amendment, operators big and small would be even more cautious about running services in the areas just graphically outlined by the noble Baroness, particularly if they have to operate for a minimum six-month period. If I were still involved in a bus company and someone suggested running such a service, telling me that although there was no guarantee of making any money it was regarded as an essential service in that area and would have to run for six months, I would be inclined to say, "Forget it". I am not sure what the thinking is behind tying a route to a six-month timescale, but it makes it less rather than more likely that such a service will be introduced. In any case, what would happen to services such as the New Forest explorer bus network, which runs for short periods—in fact, serving those communities—but for less than six months? What would happen to park-and-ride schemes that are run at holiday periods? Operators would surely think twice about introducing services such as those if they had to operate them for six months at a time In the debate on the last group of amendments, we made it clear that in some cases the service registration function has been taken away from traffic commissioners and given to local authorities, but the amendment proposes that traffic commissioners should be responsible for the designation mechanisms for these services. That is a bit of a contradiction in terms, and in fact I am not sure how it would operate in some areas. The brutal fact is that it is for local transport authorities to decide whether a service is of community value and, if they so decide, it is open to them to support it. Obviously, many of them do not have the money to do that but the fault for that lies with those responsible—the Department for Transport and the current Government—rather than with bus operators generally I close as I started: people will not run a service—community or otherwise—if it obviously does not pay and if the local authority involved does not have the function to enable it to run the service in the first place.