I am very pleased to take the noble Lord’s point. The NUS has produced some excellent research findings. It has discovered that in many cases students are spending upwards of £20 a week, which on a student income is a considerable amount, just getting to college and back. My noble friend Lady Maddock made a point in a recent debate in the House about young people in rural areas. Buses travel for long distances through more than one local authority area, and young people at college studying the same course can pay very different amounts for their travel.
I was beginning to refer to the concession for older people. It has been hugely popular and hugely successful from a social perspective. There are all sorts of technical reasons in relation to reimbursement to bus operators, which I will not go into here, why there are problems with this concession being free. That is why our proposal is to reduce fares, rather than make them free, for young people.
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This is a case of taking the long view. This Bill is about building the bus industry up again for the future. If it works, it is about creating a thriving bus industry. You will not have this if you do not encourage young people to get on to buses, to use them whenever necessary and wherever they are going, and quite possibly to discourage them from buying that first car, which inevitably they can never really afford and which becomes a drain on the family’s purse and not just on that young person’s purse.
The most urgent point to make is that the law on this is out of date. As it stands, the law on the rights of young people and the obligations of local authorities to provide concessionary travel relates to the education system and stops at the age of 16. Nowadays, young people have to remain in education or training until they are 18. Many are still there until they are nearly 19 because of the month in which they were born. The purpose behind our amendment is to bring about a bit of fairness. We as a legislature have required them to go to college, to remain at school or to go into apprenticeships, and it is only fair that we as a society make it easier for them to travel to these places with placements on buses. We believe that young people in every area should benefit.