Local Transport Bill [HL]

My Lords, as I have already said this afternoon, I am grateful to the Minister for broadening the duty that already exists to have regard to the transport needs of elderly people and people with mobility disabilities so that local transport authorities will now have to have regard to the transport needs of all disabled persons. The Minister has assured us of this. This means that even when permissible objections are raised by transport operators, the local transport authority will have to have regard to the needs of disabled people before taking them on board. The Bill is disability-proofed so far as the impact of admissible objections is concerned. However, there are a couple of other points that I would like to raise about the way the ability to raise admissible objections might work. I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s comment on these. I raise these points with some diffidence because, unlike other noble Lords who have spoken, I am by no means an expert on the way local transport services work. First, in the draft guidance, the department suggests that one of the things that might make an objection admissible would be if the likely demand for services would not be sufficient to enable operators to provide the services on a commercial basis. Other noble Lords have referred to that element in the guidance. Can the Minister clarify whether that condition would be met if just one operator could not provide the specified services profitably or whether the test would be that no relevant operator could provide the services profitably? Admissible objections should not be used to prop up uncompetitive businesses. A quality partnership scheme should not be thwarted just because one operator would not be able to operate the services profitably. Secondly, there is nothing about quality partnership schemes which can force an operator to run unprofitable services. If they cannot run the services profitably, they just will not use the facilities afforded by the quality partnership scheme: that is the veto they already have. Presumably this is why the Minister said in Committee that it was highly unlikely that an authority would promote such a scheme. In fact, authorities will probably go to considerable lengths to ensure that operators wish to take part in their scheme, including informal discussions and so on. Admissible objections may risk giving operators the whip hand over authorities by forcing them to modify already carefully considered schemes—perhaps to the detriment of passengers.