HC Deb 25 March 1969 vol 780 cc1471-9

1.11 a.m.

Mr. James Scott-Hopkins (Derbyshire, West)

It seems rather an anti-climax to turn from the important matter of whether we should have a Select Committee for Defence to considering the catering facilities on the motorways of this country, but I make no apology for doing so, except to say that I shall be as brief as I can.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary who is to answer the debate may say that there is not much more to be said about this matter which we have discussed by question and answer on the Floor of the House. I would disagree with him if he were to say that, because the catering facilities on the M roads are of growing importance to a huge number of people who travel on them. As more M roads are made available, so more people travel on them, and the facilities they find on those roads are of importance to them while they are undertaking their journeys.

There is a great deal of interest in what is going on, and in the standard of service which the public receive at these service stations. It is not my purpose to lambast the Minister or to try to make him give any particular assurances that things will be changed. Nor is it my purpose to complain bitterly about the catering contractors, who are doing the best they can in all the circumstances. I understand the Minister's position over this matter. He will say, as he has said before, that contracts have been entered into between the contractors and his Ministry, and that there is no question of these contracts being set aside and renegotiated. I understand that, and I do not intend to ask him to do that.

I want to put forward only two suggestions, but before I do so I think that I should describe to the House, or to those who will read HANSARD tomorrow because the House is now as empty as I have ever seen it, the hon. Gentleman and myself being the only two Members present, what I am trying to get at. I am not criticising the standards of hygiene in the cafeterias, the restaurants, and the lavatories. I travel a great deal on the Ml and the M4, and I stop at many of the service stations on those roads. I have no complaint to make about the standard of hygiene at these service stations.

My complaint is that the standard of service in the cafeterias has deteriorated, and has been doing so particularly over the last 18 months. The service is extremely slow. There appear to be fewer people serving now than was formerly the case. The quality of the food has deteriorated. I do not want to weary the House by describing the thickness of the sandwiches, or the kind of cream filling in the buns. I hope that the House will take it from me that the quality of the food has declined. The bread of the sandwiches is thicker than it used to be, and one gets stale bread and buns. And the prices have not gone down: like all catering prices, they have risen. I am talking about the cafeterias and transport cafes, where the general public normally go, not the restaurants, where slower service means that one must wait an hour or more. Such things as skim milk instead of pure milk are offered in the cafeterias. As I found out only a week ago, one has to queue for a quarter of an hour for a cup of tea, or, if one has been immediately preceded by a coach party, half an hour.

The standard of service is one side. But the contractors have the capital cost of their buildings, a conservative estimate of which must be £500,000. The Ministry lays the road surface, and the contractors must then maintain it, which must be a considerable expense. They must also pay a fixed rent and a percentage of their turnover. Their agreements with the Ministry are freely negotiated, so they must be far, so long as they are able to tender on a fair basis. But this is not exactly what happens. The Minister does not behave like an ordinary property owner and tell them, on tender, the price he wants. The Treasury is bound to accept the tender of the person who is prepared to pay the highest rent and presumably the highest percentage of turnover. Some contractors have rushed in with tenders which were too high. The Minister might say, "More fool them," but the public suffer. So far as I can tell, after speaking to all the contractors on the M1, only one is making a profit. The rest are either just breaking even or losing money, which a public company cannot afford, so the public suffer.

The Minister has no control over conditions of service. When new contracts are negotiated on virgin land as more M roads are built, instead of sticking to the existing formula of accepting the highest tender, the Minister should tell the contractors what he thinks is a fair rent, perhaps £10,000 or £15,000 per annum, or between the two. The Minister should say, "This is the rent I want for this service area. I will provide the tarmac surface and, from then on, you are on your own". The Minister should then negotiate the percentage of turnover required and lay down the standard of provision which the contractor should provide to the general public.

It would then be up to contractors to do their computations and either accept the Minister's terms or reject them. The main thing is that the public should be provided with adequate facilities. I appreciate that the Minister will not be able to simply agree to my suggestions off the cuff. He must consult his colleagues at the Treasury. However, I hope that he will agree to look into the matter, remembering that we both have the benefit of the public at heart.

Secondly, as I understand that only one contractor is making a profit—with the rest either breaking even or making a loss, with the result that the public are not receiving the service to which they are entitled—and while I appreciate that the contracts with the contractors cannot be renegotiated, is it possible for the Minister to reconsider the percentage of turnover factor so that, at least for a time, these contractors may improve their facilities?

I am not trying to cause difficulty in raising this matter. The position is unsatisfactory. If the Minister drove on the Ml now to, say, Sheffield or further north he would be horrified at the standard of food and general facilities available.

1.23 a.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. Bob Brown)

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) for raising this matter because it gives me an opportunity to get the facts straight about service areas. I am also grateful for the generous way in which he dealt with the subject.

The rents paid to the Ministry by service area lessees were not laid down by the Ministry. They were freely offered by the companies in their tenders in open competition with rival concerns. We did not twist their arms to make the offers. They bid what in their judgment would secure them the lease and give a reasonable financial return.

In return for the rental and their investment in the site, the companies are given a 50-year lease of a valuable site, with a franchise to provide catering and to sell fuel, with virtually no competition, over a considerable length of motorway. The lessees on their part undertake to provide good quality meals and refreshments at reasonable prices for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, if required.

This is the basic policy adopted when the leases for the first service areas were let in 1959. Although some changes in detail have been made since then, the same basic policy is broadly being followed today.

The business of running a service area is a commercial undertaking. Day-today management must be left to the lessees, who are experts and have other interests in this field, and who themselves have invested large sums in the business. The Ministry, on its part, carries out regular and frequent ad hoc inspections at all hours of the day and night to ensure that the terms of the leases are being complied with. Ministry staff maintain a close liaison with service area lessees, and discuss suggestions for improvement wherever they see the need. All complaints are followed up, and we know from experience that lessees are most meticulous in seeing that where complaints are merited matters are put right.

Motorway service areas are probably more open to public scrutiny than any similar undertaking. There is no lack of unofficial inspectors. Hon. Members on both sides have looked into their operation with critical eyes, and all sections of the Press have carried out surveys of varying depths from time to time. The A.A. magazine Drive, Motoring Which? and several national dailies have recently looked at service areas in fairly great detail.

Surveys of this kind provide a reliable yardstick for measuring the standard of service and quality. They do not support the allegation that standards are deteriorating. The Motoring Which? report of last summer said: With very few exceptions, we found that motorway service areas were places to stretch your legs, rather than havens of luxury—as you might expect. In particular, the food was rarely very tasty—good enough to cheer the weary traveller but not up to Good Food Guide standards…lavatories were, in the main, spotless…one or two places also stood out for their good food,… The Times article of 3rd March said: The lavatories were particularly well looked after. The food was by no means imaginative nor was there great variety; but it was reasonably good. Nor did I find prices much different from, say, those of a railway buffet". There is general acceptance of the fact that service areas on the whole do the job for which they are intended.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins

In the articles in Motoring Which? and The Times no differentiation is made between restaurant facilities, which I have said are quite adequate, and cafeteria facilities, which I have said are not.

Mr. Brown

The Motoring Which? article was fairly comprehensive. I am sorry to have to correct the hon. Gentleman, but it specified restaurant and cafeteria services. Its comments were fairly comprehensive. I freely concede that service areas do not set out to provide a cordon bleu service, and we would not want them to do so, but they aim to provide not only what the great majority of their users demand but also to lift the standards within the prices that the public are prepared to pay.

This brings us to the vexed question of prices. Of course, we would all like to see prices lowered. Of course, we would all like to see larger portions, and thicker slices of ham for our money. But many many factors go towards the make-up of the price of a cup of tea and a ham sandwich.

There is much more to a service area than the cafeterias. Included in the price of a customer's tea and sandwich are elements for building, maintaining and cleaning the free toilet and wash-up facilities, which lessees have to provide for all-comers—whether they spend a penny in the service area or not; elements for maintaining the free parking areas and, on newer sites, rest and picnic areas, and elements for the cost of providing a 24-hour, all the year round service.

The knowledge that one can be certain of getting something hot at 3 o'clock on a winter's morning on a motorway, when everywhere else is closed, is something that many people have found comforting and valuable and in some of our recent icy spells such meals would have been cheap at twice the price. Other catering establishments are free to close down completely whenever business slacks off. The cost of keeping service area, open 24 hours a day has to be paid for. General overheads, rent and rates; and the cost of cleaning and litter collection must be met: so must the cost of bringing in staff from surrounding areas, especially in the more rural districts. To digress on the question of prices, it might well be that if the general public were not quite so filthy in the amount of litter they deposit, service areas would be much cheaper to maintain.

An element of cost must be allowed, too, to cover the appallingly high level of pilferage and vandalism. We have a great deal of sympathy with the lessees on this score. I want to quote just one or two random examples: In one service area, 7,500 teaspoons were stolen in seven months. Every porcelain fixed ashtray in the men's toilets was smashed with a hammer in one evening. Large china and glass ashtrays were all stolen from a transport cafe on the very day they were put out. One thousand yards of lavatory chain were stolen from one service area in six months. I do not know what anybody wanted to do with 1,000 yards of lavatory chain. All this has to paid for by the ordinary service area user in the price we pay for meals and snacks.

The thoughtlessness, and sometimes downright destructiveness, of a few makes conditions very unpleasant for many others, until the mess can be cleared up or the damage repaired.

I was extremely impressed with the organisation and cleanliness of a service area which I visited last week. Shortly before I arrived a coach load of 42 youngsters drew up and used the toilets. They put their hands over the taps and squirted one another with water. The net result of their visit was that the toilet floors were covered in several inches of water, liquid soap, comics and chewing gum. By contrast, on the previous Saturday, 8,000 Swindon supporters had been catered for, I believe to their satisfaction, with absolutely no damage or litter. All credit is due to the Swindon supporters, particularly in these days of mental aberration which seem to afflict many football fans.

The effect which rents have on prices can only be marginal, and even if it had been possible to renegotiate leases, as suggested by hon. Members, the reduction in prices which could be achieved would be so small as to be unnoticeable. But we could not agree to renegotiation. Considerable public funds are invested in these sites and must be recovered. Although clearly the operators want to make a return on their capital, the public also are entitled to a return on their investment.

It is complained that we have caused developers to over-provide by giving over optimistic estimates of traffic flow and likely usage. We have never attempted to give forward estimates of likely usage, and with only two exceptions traffic on the motorways has reached forecast figures within three years of opening at the very latest.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins

The Parliamentary Secretary should make it clear that the public investment in the service areas consists solely in making up the surface area. The buildings comprise capital expenditure undertaken by the contractor and not by the public purse.

Mr. Brown

The hon. Gentleman must realise that the laying out of the site ready for the developer to develop his facilities is a considerable public investment. Just as the service area operators wants a return on his money, so does the public. After all, we are the guardians of the public purse. The public have a right to expect a return also.

We have reason to believe that, contrary to what the hon. Gentleman suggested, most service areas are in, or before long are likely to be in, a profit-making situation. Naturally, one hears more in the Press about any which are not making the profits they had hoped for. In two cases where action by the Ministry, in diverting traffic away from the motorway for a protracted period, has affected service area operations, agreement has been reached with the companies concerned on some easement of the terms until the situation changes.

There is no evidence that rental terms or non-profitability have affected standards and service. In The Times article of 3rd March the Rank Organisation was quoted as saying that high overheads had not lowered standards. The article reported: On hygiene they said they had to adhere to the strict requirements of the Ministry. The hon. Gentleman has confirmed that they are doing so.

Nor is it true that existing operators are holding back from tendering for new sites. So far this year we have awarded two concessions for new sites, and we are now considering tenders for two more. We have also tested the market on the normal basis for sites at the northern end of the M6 motorway, where conditions are much different from those on most of our other motorways. As a result of a lack of response we are now asking for tenders on a new basis. The first of the new type tenders were opened this morning, and the response has been encouraging.

Since the first service areas were opened almost 10 years ago many lessons have been learned and applied in the more modern developments. Some features of the earlier sites which could with justification be criticised are not being repeated on later developments. One of the major problems of the first service areas is that they were soon found to be much too small to cope with the enormous demands made on them. The blame for this cannot be laid at the door of the lessees; no one in those days was able to foresee what the demand would be, but the lessees are severely hampered in their efforts to improve the service they give by the lack of room for expansion. Before long we may have to develop "infill" sites to relieve the pressures.

Some of the service areas on M.1 are dealing with more than 6 million customers a year—in peak periods up to a quarter of a million people a week. It is the complaint that makes the headlines, not the praise. Some measure of the success with which the service is run can be gauged by the fact that during the last 12 months when 15 service areas were in operation, only 28 written complaints were received by my Ministry.

I suggest to the House that this very low level of complaint is the significant point at issue in the debate.