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Public Transport

My hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr. Goodwill) made a very good speech highlighting some of the deficiencies in the Government's concessionary travel funding for local councils. I applaud the fact that he has raised the issue, because Shrewsbury and Atcham borough council has been grappling with it for a long time. When he raised it, various Labour Members tried to suggest that we were making party political points, but it is a genuine issue, and my local council's finance director, Mr. Campbell Thomson, has written to me on more than one occasion to highlight the deficiencies—the big gaps—in Government funding. The council has to find funding from elsewhere to cover the concessionary travel scheme, and it is running to hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is a point well worth making, and I hope that the Minister will assure us of increased funding for Shrewsbury and for Shropshire. We will have a unitary authority—I fought tooth and nail against it—as of June next year. It will cover the whole of Shropshire, apart from Telford, and I shall be watching carefully to see how much the authority receives for the concessionary travel scheme, that the amount is adequate and that local taxpayers in Shropshire do not have to cover the difference. I want to highlight for the Minister some specific points about Shropshire. Shropshire has a much higher percentage of over-85-year-olds than anywhere else in the country, and Shrewsbury has been voted the number one retirement destination in England, because it is such a beautiful town. [Interruption.] It is much nicer than Worthing. I want the Minister to take that into consideration, because with so many senior citizens in Shrewsbury, the travel scheme will be even more popular. The Minister will know just how rural Shropshire is. There are some very big distances between the many villages in my constituency and the county town of Shrewsbury, and as I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman), we have a genuine problem with the growing number of bus services that are being cut in rural Shropshire. I say so impartially again. Just last week, a delegation of senior citizens from the village of Pontesbury highlighted yet another bus service that, regrettably, must stop. They are obviously determined to ensure that I campaign to try to save it, so I should stress to the Minister that, although I applaud her Government for having introduced the concessionary scheme, and I rarely praise socialists or indeed this socialist Government, the scheme must be funded properly and there must be special, extra help for rural areas such as Shropshire, which have large numbers of senior citizens. My hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby also mentioned the important issue of cross-border traffic. Shrewsbury is a border town—my constituency ends on the Welsh-English border—and many constituents on both sides of the boundary travel backwards and forwards across it. Shrewsbury is the main destination for many people living in Wales who travel across the border from villages to shop there, and they also use vital services in Shrewsbury. There are no major hospitals in mid-Wales, so they use the Royal Shrewsbury hospital. They also use education services. I noticed that when that point was made, the Minister looked somewhat perplexed, because the issue is very thorny and potentially costly. However, as my hon. Friend said, we live in the United Kingdom. We live in one country, and some of us feel very passionately about that, so we want to ensure that citizens—our constituents—on either side of the border, living cheek by jowl, are not discriminated against because they live on the wrong side of it. In preparation for the debate, I met representatives of the Shropshire Disability Forum. Mrs. Sue Wood, who runs it, wanted me to raise the following issue with the Minister. I do not know whether things have changed since Mrs. Wood acquired this information, but she is under the impression that the concession is available only after 9.30 am. I agree with what was said earlier. Local councils should have the freedom to decide some of the scheme's nuances, and no mandate from central office—I mean central Government; there's a Freudian slip—should dictate that everything be done uniformly. The Opposition are always calling for local flexibility, but I very much hope that the Minister will assure us that there will be certain guidelines for councils. It would be rather iniquitous for any council to allow a disabled person to use the scheme only after 9.30 am if that person were trying to get to work. Very few people whom I know start work at 9.30 am. [Interruption.] The Minister says that it is up to the councils, but I am asking her whether there are any guidelines. I turn to the most important part of my speech. I should like to inform the Minister that the largest organisation in my constituency is the Shrewsbury Senior Citizens Forum, which has 5,000 members and is rapidly becoming one of the largest senior citizens organisations in the country. It liaises with other senior citizens forums throughout the country, and a few months ago, it organised a national conference in Shrewsbury, with organisations throughout the country attending to debate various senior citizens issues. Bill Harris, the organisation's eminent chairman, would like to meet the Minister to discuss some of the concessionary scheme issues that the forum thinks are important. I very much hope that rather than just talking to politicians such as me, she will take an interest in that body and extend an invitation to its members. I could bring them to the House to meet her, so that she could hear about the issues directly from them. After having campaigned for almost four years for a direct rail service from Shrewsbury to London, I am delighted to inform the House that we finally have the link. It is hugely important for Shropshire and for business investment. Obviously, a lot of senior citizens will want to use the service; I am constantly asking senior citizens in my constituency to do so. I hope that the Minister will give me an assurance on what programmes or Government incentives there are for train operators to have the most imaginative and innovative policies for senior citizens. She may think this an outlandish suggestion, but perhaps there could be Government awards or a national competition for train operators. In that way, we would know which United Kingdom train operator had brought out the most innovative and imaginative schemes to get senior citizens on the trains and give them the best concessionary fares.