Concessionary Bus Travel Bill [Lords]

When the Prime Minister, in his then capacity as Chancellor, announced that there was to be a national bus pass scheme, he created an expectation and a hope among many people that they would be able to get to their relatives, friends, hospital and doctor using their bus pass. At the moment, many people in many constituencies find that they are not able to do so because of the cross-border problems. They depend on enhancement at the expense of the local authority. The importance of the new clause is that it calls for a review of funding on the basis of whether local authorities have had enough money to carry out the scheme. I want to draw particular attention to the relevance of that to border areas, where the Bill as the Government propose to implement it will not solve the problem and where local authority enhancement will still be required. The Government have made it pretty clear up to now that they are in no hurry to negotiate a reciprocal scheme with the Scottish Executive or the Welsh Assembly Government. In the words of the Secretary of State in an earlier debate, that is regarded as a matter for ““another time.”” That means that local authorities such as the borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which has a population of 26,000—it is a very small authority—would still have to put in extra money to give access across the border so that people could get to their nearest shops or hospital, or to friends and relatives. At the same time, the funding arrangements that the new clause seeks to expose would put the authority under great pressure anyway, because the area also has one of the highest proportions of old age pensioners in the country—the highest of all being in Christchurch, which my wife used to represent and which was mentioned earlier. She well knows that that is top of the league, but the little borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed is also very high up. Where the bus journeys are long and the reimbursement element accordingly large, the financial pressures of the scheme will be great. At the same time, whereas other local authorities will no longer have to put in extra schemes to enable people to get across local authority boundaries—as they do now in many areas—Berwick will still have to put in some kind of extra scheme to enable people to travel on local journeys to Eyemouth, to the doctor’s in Coldstream, and to Kelso. Clearly, I want the Government to use the powers that they are rightly giving themselves in clause 10 to go ahead with negotiating a scheme, which they still have time to do. New clause 3 offers the second-best solution: a review after two years that would demonstrate conclusively that the scheme had not worked satisfactorily in border areas. I support new clause 3 on the basis that if all else fails, there must be a mechanism of showing that border areas need help. A better solution would be for the Government to use the time between now and next spring to get into negotiations with the new Government in Scotland, difficult though that might be. They might find negotiations easier with the part-Labour, part-nationalist Government in Wales. If they do not carry out such negotiations, the new clause, if accepted, will reveal that there is a serious problem in border areas. Such a problem should not arise, so I ask the Minister to think again.