Concessionary Bus Travel Bill [Lords]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, and I accept the point about through-ticketing for the Metro system and the bus service. I am not saying that deregulation of the bus services was entirely beneficial; it was not, and it certainly needed some adjustment. However, the principle was right. The principle was that we would eventually get a great deal of innovative new companies, vastly better buses paid for by those companies, and extremely good long-distance coach routes. We need to defend the original decision, as I believe that it was right—and now that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) has left the Chamber, I feel it safe to say so. I join in the general welcome given to the Bill, which will reduce an enormous number of anomalies. The hon. Member for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland) rightly concentrated on the financial problems from which the Tyne and Wear area is suffering, but of course the scheme will be of great benefit to my constituents, too. About 25,000 of them live on the fringes of the Tyne and Wear area, and they could never understand why they could not travel for free, even though the buses started only about a mile down the road from them in some cases. In one sense, our gain will be Tyne and Wear’s loss, because it will subsidise the change. The original system created by the Government had some ludicrous anomalies. In a village on Hadrian’s wall called Heddon-on-the-Wall, the only journey that any resident could make using a concessionary fare was one of less than two miles between one authority boundary to the west of the village and the city of Newcastle boundary to the east. It was great nonsense, and I welcome the fact that we are removing those anomalies. I shall briefly hijack the debate to discuss the problems of providing bus and transport services in rural areas, a subject that the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) covered to some extent. There is a problem in that regard. Rural people pay income tax and council tax, so when we talk about providing £250 million for the scheme and having provided £350 million, or whatever it was, for the earlier scheme, we are talking about their money. If they do not have any bus services to use, they reasonably feel somewhat aggrieved. Clearly, in all rural areas, there are problems providing public transport systems, but as soon as the Bill is enacted, we should start to consider how its provisions could be extended. One of the local authorities in my area, Tynedale council, used to have a taxi token system. People collected their taxi tokens, then they would often join together to share them and hire a taxi to go shopping. That was an extremely important scheme. In other areas, people rely on the postbus; that is another crucial lifeline in parts of Northumberland. I am not quite sure how that will fit into the system. I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) to support the notion of help for a community transport system, which is a good way of proceeding with public transport in very rural areas. It is difficult to envisage a regular bus service in some remote communities: it would simply not be practical and the subsidy would be too great. A community system could work quite well. For instance, I mentioned earlier the system that serves Kielder, which has the distinction of being the most isolated village in England—and also the most tranquil, I heard the other day. The village relies on a community transport service for villagers who want to go shopping across the border in Hawick once a week. It is a valuable service because it allows them to go to a supermarket. Otherwise, they would have to travel a great distance to Hexham to do so. The other problem with rural services is that the buses are often in poor condition as a result of lack of use. Many of those services run off the back of the school transport system: they double up as school buses at either end of the day, but they operate on service bus routes during the day. The trouble is that they are old. They are not low-level buses, and as a consequence people who need public transport—for example, the elderly and young women, usually with children and buggies—have difficulty going up the steps of those buses. It is an unattractive prospect, and it discourages them from using the service. We therefore need to look closely at the issue of rural transport, particularly the cost of travel for young people. My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge mentioned a scheme in London. We do not have such a scheme. In fact, children going to and from school, and young people going to and from college in Northumberland, have to pay £360 a year for a bus pass unless their parents’ income falls below a certain level. For families with two or three children, that is a considerable sum of money.