My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. This is one of these usual discussions that we have in this House on lists and on who should be included and who should not.
There are many similarities between the list on page 5 and that on page 42. Amendment 91, which my noble friend will probably speak to, makes the extraordinary suggestion of adding in the customer or the customer’s representative. That is missing from both lists. It is quite extraordinary that stakeholders and their representatives—whether it is any of the bus passenger representative groups, local or national—are not included. As my noble friend said, they might be,
“such other persons as the authority or authorities think fit”,
but I think that we all know of instances where authorities have chosen not to consult a particular body of stakeholders because they do not like them for some reason. That is not a good reason, but it happens and I have plenty of experience of it happening. It would therefore be good to include the two amendments in my noble friend Lord Whitty’s name and the two similar amendments to do with stakeholders’ involvement.
While I am on my feet, I might say that it is interesting that paragraph (d) in both lists refers to “a traffic commissioner”. If I lived in Cornwall, it would be no good consulting a traffic commissioner for the south-east of England. He or she as a traffic commissioner would probably not know much about the area. Given that the subsequent paragraph in each list states,
“the chief officer of police for each police area covering the whole or part of that area”,
it seems to me that the traffic commissioner should be relevant to wherever the services will run. I have not put down an amendment on this, but perhaps the Minister will consider it for the next stage.