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Local Transport Bill [HL]

My Lords, I should like to add a few words to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Snape. I have no financial interest in the bus industry, but I have a lot of experience of it. I want first to reiterate the point I made earlier: traffic congestion is by far the biggest enemy of bus services. Unless there are effective ways of dealing with congestion, bus services will continue to deteriorate. Secondly, quality partnerships, where they are working and where they bring bus companies into partnership with the local council and the police, have a lot of virtue in them. In fact, many local authorities have not yet taken up their powers to clear their highways, monitor bus lanes and fine those who invade them. In my opinion, attention to these areas would result in much better bus services than are likely to be brought about by quality contracts. A further point to make on quality contracts is that many people look jealously at London and say, ““If we had that system in our city, we would be all right””. I ask the Minister to pause and reflect on how much subsidy is put into public transport in London. It is vast compared with that provided outside, and any move along the road to quality contracts outside London will presumably come with a price that I think those who are proposing it intend to present to the Government. That has to be considered. London has a huge number of people who arrive in the city by public transport without their cars and therefore use the bus services. Again, that is not the case in every city. Some cities still offer cheap and plentiful parking, and they wonder why the bus services they operate are not efficient—there is obviously a cheap alternative and the cars being driven into those car parks are in fact blocking the roads along which the buses are to operate. I am not convinced that anyone has shown that vast profits are being made in the bus industry that could be redistributed through a quality contract to subside less well served or less used areas. Where you can make even a modest profit running a bus service, that will be done commercially. It is only in areas where traffic is very thin that a bus service does not work, and you will not make a sensible adjustment by cutting services in busy corridors where there are lots of people travelling—often quite poor people—and saying to them, ““You can have a less good bus service so we can take some of the profits from there to run bus services in the more remote areas””.