My Lords, we recently had a Statement in the other place given by the Secretary of State on bus franchising. My understanding is that this instrument gives effect to that Statement—at least its initial parts. I recall that, when we debated that Statement in your Lordships’ House, I had the temerity to describe it as being essentially a bogus offer.
I gave two reasons for that, but I have now found a third, which is that the instrument does not actually allow local authorities to go in for bus franchising at all. All it does is allow them to apply to the Secretary of State for permission to prepare a plan for doing so, but nothing is said, and nothing has been said by the Minister, about what criteria will be applied when such plans are submitted. In order to understand the implications of this instrument, we need to understand that. The Minister has said nothing about how many applications he or his department expect to receive, or about what proportion of such applications he considers it likely that the department will grant. It is perfectly possible that the answers to all these questions is “zero” under this instrument, and that bus franchising will be no further forward as a result of this very grand announcement, which was made with great hoopla in the other place, and of this instrument than it is today. We really would like to know some of the answers to some of these questions in practical and not simply theoretical and legislative terms.
I return to the two reasons I gave when we debated the Statement in your Lordships’ House. The first is that the policy comes with no money attached to it. At the time, the Chancellor had not made her Budget Statement. She since has, so it should be open to the Minister to say how much money has been allocated to supporting local authorities to undertake franchising, because the whole purpose of franchising is to generate services which the market will not bear. Nobody denies that there is a cost to local authorities in undertaking franchising—a cost that they are most unlikely to be able to support from their own resources—so what money is the department, or are the Government in general, putting behind this greatly trumpeted policy?
My second cause for complaint in that earlier debate has already been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson: the complete lack of capacity of local authorities, certainly outside the metropolitan areas, to put together and run a bus service as an integrated operation. There is more to this than simply saying “We’d like the buses to run here”. Route planning involves thinking about demand, the locations of passengers and their relationship to places of work, hospitals and other destinations, and so forth. That is a skill; it does not just come to a committee of local councillors sitting around a table. Even if you have experience of route planning, as we have seen in Manchester, you have to think about branding, fares and ticketing, and what you will accept by way of tender. Are you accepting cash or is it cashless only? You have to know what sorts of discounts, season tickets and so forth you are willing to offer. As the noble Lord knows, and as I have had the privilege of observing in the past, in the various positions that he and I have occupied, real skill is required to do this well.
The answer that we have had from the noble Lord so far is a mildly amusing one: the Department for Transport is going to set itself up as a centre of expertise in how to plan routes, and do branding, fares and ticketing, for bus companies and services throughout the country. Now, I fully acknowledge that there is at least one person in the Department for Transport who has the skill to do that, and that is the noble Lord the Minister. But he is going to be jolly busy doing all these jobs, being both a Minister and planning routes for modest settlements and hamlets in the remoter counties of England.
However, if it is not going to be the Minister, who will be recruited to do this skilled work in the Department for Transport? Will they be recruited on a sort of ad hoc consultancy basis? Is this department waiting speculatively for applications to arrive, which may or may not meet criteria that have not been vouchsafed to us so far, and which may then be rejected or accepted by the Secretary of State? How will this wonderful offer of skill and expertise inside the Department for Transport be achieved in practice? The noble Lord should not be allowed to leave this Grand Committee without explaining those things to us in some detail.
I come finally to a point that is new to me, because it struck me only yesterday evening when I went to a reception given by the Accessible Transport Policy Commission and found myself speaking to the chief executive of a private bus company—a commercial operation in a large provincial city; I will not say which. He described to me all the good work it was doing to make its fleet more accessible to people with disabilities. We even talked about something that was new to me, which I am interested to explore—dementia-friendly flooring.
He described to me the close relationship he had, working with the local authority, then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re going to confiscate my business”. That took me aback, because I had not thought about it in those terms—but in practice that is what franchising will do. It is, in effect, the confiscation of a business. Of course, he may still secure the franchise, but then he would simply be operating services for somebody else, for a fee. He would no longer be running a business; he would simply be somebody else’s agent in doing that.
This is confiscation, like the nationalisation of the train operating companies, which is happening. I have to say to the Minister that there is an increasing whiff of Bolshevism about this Government’s transport policy—and we know that that did not end well.