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Bus Services

Indeed. The passenger transport authority in west Yorkshire, with its creative and visionary leader, the chief executive Kieran Preston, is coming up with a plan to expand its horizons. The leaders of not only west Yorkshire councils, but some councils in north Yorkshire, will come to the House in November to present a plan to Ministers to extend the passenger transport authority area beyond the traditional west Yorkshire area to such places as Selby, Harrogate and York. Bus services in those places are integrated with Leeds, the dynamo of the local economy, although they should be more so. There is a lot of debate about the choice between regions and city regions, and I know that Ministers are tentatively considering changes to the boundaries of passenger transport authorities. It would make a real difference if, like those people a few miles away over the west Yorkshire border in Garforth, somebody in Selby could get a metropass to go to the same place, namely Leeds. I shall finally make a political point. Nothing shows the bankruptcy of Thatcherite ideology better than bus deregulation. There is an apocryphal story of the then-Secretary of State for Transport, Nicholas Ridley, going to the north-east and asking how many bus drivers owned their own buses, such was the lack of knowledge of how bus services worked at the time. Social democracy, regulation and community involvement will provide the answer, and I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe) that there is nothing inevitable about the decline of buses. Other countries in Europe have not had such massive increases in car ownership as us, and one of the reasons for that is that they have decent, reliable public transport and bus services. Let us not be pessimistic.