Concessionary Bus Travel Bill [Lords]

May I welcome the Secretary of State back to the House? He is one Scot, I suspect, who is extremely pleased to be back in London. Fortunately, the issue before the House is relatively uncontroversial, and there are certainly no complicated votes at the end of the evening. May I begin by giving the Bill a warm welcome? Indeed, I could hardly do otherwise. The Secretary of State rightly said that it is a Labour Bill, because it is a Labour Government, but it is a Bill, too, that commands support across the House. When I was first elected in 2001, one of my first actions was to hold an Adjournment debate on concessionary fares for pensioners because of an anomaly in my constituency facing many of the pensioners whom I represent. In Worcester Park, a small centre in London that is divided between the London boroughs of Sutton and Kingston and the borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, the boundary literally divided the community on the provision of bus passes. Pensioners living in London enjoyed the benefit of the freedom pass; those living in my constituency did not. Believe me, they let me know regularly how annoyed they were about that. It was not just. I called for change then, and I am delighted that the Secretary of State is leading an initiative to make a genuine change. There was an anomaly and that is to change. I am delighted that the Government’s move to extend the existing schemes nationally makes the likelihood of local anomalies in future much smaller. We have always said that where the Government get things right, we will back them, and on the Bill, we think they have got things right. However, the Secretary of State cannot resist lobbing in a few jibes about buses. He makes the old comments about the decline in bus patronage post-1985. I remind him that the decline in bus patronage was greater pre-1985 than it has been post-1985. I also recognise that there are problems with the current system. He paints a rosy picture of what has happened under the present Government. A few weeks ago I went to Sefton, where people are losing their bus services and losing the means of their journey to work, because of failings in the current system. There are still problems to be addressed in our bus system. If the Government get things right, we will support them, but they do not have a particularly good track record. The last great initiative from the Government on bus reform, quality contracts, has not been an unbridled success. The country is not full of quality contracts changing the face of our bus industry, so I wait with some trepidation to see what happens as a result of these reforms but, as I always say, if the Government introduce positive reforms and positive changes, we will consider them constructively.