My Lords, I support the comments made by my colleague and noble friend Lady Randerson. As she has said, young people between the ages of 16 and 19 are required to be in training or education, and there are a great deal of inequalities across the country around the provisions that they receive—in many cases none—to help with transport.
In deep rural areas, such as where I live, there is no transport at all. Therefore, unless young people have parents or friends to take them to their college or training provider, they are stuck. From my village to the FE college it is walk of five miles, down a road that is simply not safe for people to walk on because it goes through a sandstone cutting and there is no refuge. There needs to be provision of transport in rural areas and reduced concessionary fares for young people.
As my colleague already said, these huge inequalities result in people sitting next to each other on training and FE courses who, having travelled different routes, have been charged different rates. I cannot add anything to what my colleague said, except to say that many young people could choose not to further their education because of the cost of transport. That would be a great shame. Young people need to have every opportunity to advance their futures and this is a small way of helping them to do that.
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