HC Deb 18 October 1950 vol 478 cc2188-96

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Mr. Bowden.]

11.5 p.m.

Mr. Macdonald (Roxburgh and Selkirk)

I wish to draw the attention of the House to some of the problems which are facing Scottish road passenger transport and to give an account of the Scottish road passenger transport situation.

Since 1st April, 1948, about 90 per cent. of the Scottish road passenger transport system has come under the control of the British Transport Commission. South of the Caledonian Canal it is operated mainly by the S.M.T. group of companies. North of the Caledonian Canal there is the Highland Transport Company, which is a particularly rural organisation for the most part. On the West Coast there are the MacBrayne steamers, and then there are separate corporation transport undertakings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. In referring to the S.M.T. group, I refer mainly to them as an example because they are the group operating in my constituency and the one about which I know most.

The difficulties which the road passenger transport system in Scotland is facing are that its revenues for the most part are dropping and its costs are increasing. All the organisations that I have mentioned have approached the licensing authorities to endeavour to secure increased fares; but if these costs continue to increase, then many of the existing rural bus services will have to be either cancelled or seriously curtailed. That is a very important and serious matter for Scotland, which depends so much on her agriculture. It will mean that many of the agricultural workers, deprived of transport, will in all probability leave the land, and the nation as a whole will suffer.

Let me give a few of the details of the increased costs that have arisen. In 1939 motor spirit was 1s. 0⅛d. per gallon; in 1949 it was 1s. 10 7/16[...]d. per gallon; in 1950 it is 2s. 8⅜d. per gallon. In 1939 fuel oil, with a tax of 9d., cost 1s. 0⅜d.; in 1949, with the same rate of tax, it was 1s. 7 13/16[...]d.; and in 1950, with a tax of 1s. 6d., it cost 2s. 5⅜d. The cost of motive power per vehicle-mile operated in 1939 was 1.17d.; in 1949 it was 1.72d.; and in 1950, due to very heavy tax and other factors, it is 2.55d. As a result of the difference in the price of fuel and the increased level of taxation, the increase in the S.M.T. group costs in 1949–50 was £637,000.

Other costs which the bus companies have had to face have been these. A single-decker bus in 1939 cost £1,500; in 1950 it costs £3,500. A double-decker bus in 1939 cost £1,775; in 1950, £4,000. The cost of the uniforms for the staff has gone up 100 per cent. since 1939. Wages show a very substantial increase. Tyres and spare parts are very much higher in cost than they were before the war. In addition to these increased costs of running, there are the quite legitimate demands of the public for more amenities, such as bus shelters and bus stations, and in certain cases bus stations fitted with all modern conveniences. The provision of these shelters and stations will become more necessary as the public become more dependent on bus services.

A further cost that must be faced is the application for an increase in wages by the bus operators. If their application for an increase of 3d. per hour were granted, it would cost the S.M.T. group alone £400,000 a year. Drivers and conductors now work a 44-hour week, and I am sure this application for increased wages will be sympathetically and carefully considered. But it must be realised that if it were granted, a complete reorganisation of the fares structure of the buses must be undertaken.

With regard to present fares, so far as I am aware bus fares in Scotland are one of the few items that have not increased since before the war, and as a result you find anomalies such as that in the industrial areas the fares are as low as a halfpenny a mile, whereas in the rural areas fares, often for shorter distances, vary from 1¼d. to 1¾d. a passenger mile. It might not be possible or desirable to have a standardised rate but it is wrong that such wide differences should be allowed to continue.

The suggested alteration in the fares schedule is that all single fares below one penny a passenger mile should be eliminated, that return fares where they work out at below .875d. per passenger mile, should be eliminated, and that workmen's tickets should be increased from .5d. to .625d. per mile. The introduction of an up-to-date fares schedule would enable bus operating companies to maintain their present rural services and, if possible, increase them. It would almost certainly allow them to meet part of the present wage claim if they thought it justified, and to maintain and erect the new bus shelters and stations which the travelling public require.

The first point I want to make is that there should be a new fares structure for bus services in Scotland. The second, and equally important matter, is that there are many rural areas where it will never pay to run a bus service but where there must be a bus service or we cannot expect the people to remain on the land. The only remedy, in my opinion, is that a substantial sum must be set aside by the Treasury, say £500,000 a year, to be administered by the Transport Commission. They would receive applications from rural areas requiring bus transport, and decide which of these routes can be supplied with transport, how frequently it should run, and what type of transport should be employed. The accounts of this £500,000 fund would be kept separate from the profit and loss accounts of the British Transport Commission, so that its outlay in providing necessary but unprofitable services would not militate against the profit and loss accounts of the Commission.

An alternative method by which these routes could be provided and this sum dealt with would be that county councils throughout the whole of Scotland should be asked to forward to the British Transport Commission details of the additional rural services that must be run in their counties, even though these routes will never be able to earn a profit. The information sent to the British Transport Commission should be an estimate by the county council of the cost of running the services, whether once a week or more often. The type of transport that would be most suitable for an area could then be decided, and the Commission would advance, in those cases which they consider should have priority, an amount up to 80 per cent. of the estimate, while the county council would find the other 20 per cent.

This second alternative scheme has this advantage, that it would make a county council apply for a share of the transport fund only where it was essential that a service should be run, as they would have to face paying 20 per cent. of the total cost of running that service.

The forms of transport that could be used on some rural bus routes could consist of shooting brakes, small buses or even, in sparsely-populated areas, private cars. The Transport Commission could pay a subsidy to small private operators to conduct these services and, possibly in conjunction with the Post Office, a payment could be made to them for carrying mails. In my constituency there are several places that have a bus service only once a week and even then some farm workers and their children have to walk four to six miles to the bus stop and the same distance on the return journey. Under the scheme I have suggested, small buses operating on these roads would link up, at places to be decided upon, with existing transport so that a complete integration of bus services, rail services and privately-operated cars and buses could be created throughout practically the whole of Scotland at an early date. It is possible that a similar scheme may be necessary for rural areas in England and Wales, and this could be operated in the same manner.

To sum up my points, it is well known and accepted by all that bus fares in Scotland, although at the moment no scientific fare structure exists, are on a far lower basis than and compare most favourably with any other bus fares. It is the desire of the bus-operating groups to work in the closest harmony with the railways so that a highly specialised and completely universal system of inter-availability as between the nationalised and private road industries and the railways should be established. An up-to-date fares structure along the lines I have suggested, together with the putting aside of a lump sum to meet the special needs of certain rural areas whose bus services can never pay, will provide all urban and rural Scotland with adequate transport at a very reasonable cost to the public.

Mr. Ivor Owen Thomas (The Wrekin)

Would the hon. Gentleman be kind enough to indicate to the House whether he is actually and consciously advocating a system of State subsidy for rural transport, and, if so, whether he has consulted the hon. Members on his Front Bench in regard to this proposal and, in particular, the hon. Member for Monmouth (Mr. P. Thorneycroft)?

Mr. Macdonald

Replying to the hon. Member, my party has no Front Bench, and we are not responsible to the hon. Member for Monmouth. I am advocating, in the interests of the rural population of Scotland, that the only way they can secure transport is by a form of State subsidy to private operators and. if necessary, to State-owned vehicles, but it must be treated in a separate manner and should not come under the normal administration of the British Transport Commission.

Mr. I. O. Thomas

I apologise to the hon. Member for confusing him with the Opposition Front Bench. I take it that, as a member of the Liberty Party, he at least does not associate himself with the opposition against any idea of State assistance for the provision of reasonable transport services?

Mr. Macdonald

I would welcome State assistance to provide adequate transport for a rural population that so badly needs it.

11.20 p.m.

The Minister of Transport (Mr. Barnes)

I must confess that it was some time before I was able to detect exactly what the hon. Gentleman the Member for Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Macdonald) was submitting to me. He gave a long catalogue of increased costs and expenses, which appeared to me to support the argument I was submitting in our previous Debate. It caused me to wonder whether the hon. Gentleman was in the Lobby supporting me on that occasion, or whether he was in the Lobby supporting the Opposition Amendment. I hope that I do him no injustice, but I find that he was voting against the Government in the earlier Division, which is rather difficult to understand in view of the case he has been putting up in this Adjournment Debate.

Mr. Macdonald

I wish to say that I voted against the Government on a totally different matter: it was against the bad administration of the transport system of this country at the present time.

Mr. Barnes

Yet the hon. Gentleman is now coming forward and proposing that the taxpayer should put up a sum of £500,000 and place the responsibility for the distribution of that sum in the hands of the British Transport Commission. It would be exceedingly difficult to find any greater case of inconsistency in such a short period of Parliament.

If I may direct myself to the substance of the hon. Member's complaint, he has made it plain that S.M.T. and other bus operators are not responsible for the problem he has mentioned. He has detailed the rise in costs—and our previous Debate, as I have indicated, revolved around that problem—and I would submit that what he has stated about the transport difficulties in his area is not peculiar to it. It applies right throughout the country, and if he wants to put forward seriously the proposal that a sum of £500,000 be put up as a subsidy for this particular area, I do not see how he could deny in all equity that similar sums should be put up for other areas throughout the country. The final result would be that the deficit of £20 million would be wiped out by a process of this description.

Let me explain the procedure for fares. The hon. Gentleman has suggested that the Ministry of Transport should promote a new fares structure. As a matter of fact, and leaving on one side whether the Ministry should do that, I agree with him entirely. That is what is wanted, a new fares structure. In the earlier Debate my main case was that before we considered this question of subsidy—in whatever form it took—we should permit the machinery that Parliament has provided to operate, so that we can have evidence before us on which we might modify our present policy. The present situation, I would remind the hon. Gentleman, is the outcome of previous Conservative legislation. I do not agree with it, but that is its origin. It is that fares of this description for local bus companies should be determined by the licensing authorities.

The Minister of Transport cannot do it; he has not the power. The Minister comes in if the companies who promote new limitations for fares are dissatisfied with the decision of the licensing authority, or if any local authority or any body of citizens, such as the hon. Member has referred to, are dissatisfied. They can then appeal to the Minister of Transport for a final decision. The Minister, however, does not come into the fares determination of the private bus companies. That is left entirely to the licensing authority, and the Minister only enters into the matter if an appeal from their finding is directed to him.

In Scotland the licensing authority is on the spot, and has very wide experience of all the conditions and the circumstances that prevail in rural, industrial or urban areas. It is largely upon their judgment, after an inquiry into all the facts and the circumstances is held, that they determine the limitations on fares. I am informed that generally the fares charged in this particular area of Selkirk and Roxburgh do not compare unfavourably with the fares charged generally throughout the country. I rather gathered from the hon. Gentleman that he was not making a complaint; that, in fact, taking into account all the circumstances, the bus companies were not charging unnecessarily high fares. His case appeared to rest on the fact that they were willing to provide these services, but that rising costs prohibited them doing it, that there were a lot of uneconomic services, and that unless a subsidy was offered, the increased losses from such services would fall upon them.

The hon. Member's first proposal that the Commission should be the distributors of a Treasury subsidy, and his second that the county councils should be brought into this new scheme and that any margin of deficiency that had to be met for the purpose of promoting the uneconomic services for the rural areas should be met by the Transport Commission paying 80 per cent. and the county councils 20 per cent., is something which I do not think would commend itself to the House. The latter proposal is not unlike a similar scheme for the distribution of the Road Fund, where the Minister of Transport pays 75, 60 or 50 per cent. towards grants for road maintenance and reconstruction according to the type of road, and the local authority pay a proportion of the amount.

The scheme which the hon. Member has put forward still depends on the idea of a subsidy, with the Transport Commission paying 80 per cent. from that subsidy and the county council 20 per cent. I should be very much surprised if the hon. Member gained support in this House for the deficiency being made good from the Treasury, and then that we should embark on the complicated procedure of determining on evidence submitted by the county councils how a particular service should be distributed. I cannot imagine a more unworkable scheme than has been put forward this evening, and I would suggest that the hon. Member re-reads very carefully the previous Debate which we had on this subject. I believe if he does that then when it comes to a vote on another occasion he will vote on our side.

Mr. Macdonald

Before the Minister sits down may I say that he has poured a great deal of ridicule upon my attempts to be constructive in the interest of a large section of the rural population which at present is virtually without transport. May I know from the Minister what he proposes to do, as he ridicules my suggestions for an improvement of the transport for a large and important section of the community?

Mr. Barnes

If I may be permitted to speak again, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, my reply is that these people are not without transport services. I understand that this area is perhaps better served today by road services than it ever was before.

Mr. Macdonald

Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will visit the area some time.

Mr. Barnes

If the hon. Member denies that, I shall be only too pleased to look into it. I am naturally not so familiar as the hon. Member is with these areas, and I would not pit my personal knowledge against his in this matter. But I naturally had to ascertain what information I could, knowing that he was going to raise this general problem. I have been informed that the general services throughout these counties are not deficient compared with those of the past, and that probably they are, on the whole, better served now than ever before. However, I undertake to go into that point more fully to satisfy myself about the accuracy of this.

If the hon. Member pins his main case on a fares structure, he will recall that I did not disagree with him on that main point, but on his method of obtaining a fares structure, which, I suggested, was impracticable. With his object of a fares structure I agree. It is a vital need in transport policy throughout the country. I again emphasise that the hon. Member should study the report of the Debate which took place previously. If we get to the position of a charges scheme for the whole country, not covering merely his area, I am sure that the hon. Member, while advocating the claims of his own citizens and his own constituents, will not deny that other parts of rural England and rural Wales, as well as rural Scotland, should have similar advantages.

Adjourned accordingly at Twenty-seven Minutes to Twelve o'Clock.