HC Deb 10 April 1974 vol 872 cc601-8

11.51 p.m.

Mr. Paul Hawkins (Norfolk, South-West)

I want to draw attention to the state of rural transport in my part of England—Norfolk—and in particular to the withdrawal of some services that we used to enjoy in the county.

The problem is obviously enjoyed or suffered by many other rural areas where villages are widely spaced and there are no cross-country railway lines left. Indeed, the only communication by rail is between London and King's Lynn and London and Norwich.

There are many more motor cars per 1,000 population in country areas because most people need cars to get to work. Many people who have to travel long distances to work—this includes farm workers—feel that they ought to have some reimbursement or tax allowance for their motor cars. This matter is not particularly within my remit tonight, but it is one about which people are increasingly concerned. The cost of transport in rural areas measured against the wages earned is a major factor in driving people from country districts. People must have cars to get to their work, and this leaves the elderly, the women, the young, the newly retired and others entirely without transport during the day.

Matters are made much worse by the withdrawal of many bus services. The furthest westernmost village in my constituency is Welney, near Wisbech. Welney is well known because one of Peter Scott's wildfowl preserves is on Welney Washes. That village is often split into two by the fact that the Washes are flooded and the road between one half of the village and the other is also shut for several weeks at a time. Bus services have also been withdrawn from other villages.

I appreciate the bus company's troubles. I have had many communications from the bus company, which has had to alter its services because it does not get enough passengers to make them profitable.

The most isolated villages are now entirely without any form of public transport. People need transport to get to the shops, to go to the dentist, the doctor, the solicitor, the cinema, and the youth club in the evening. They need transport to get to the welfare offices, employment offices, hospitals, and so on. Where a bus service does operate, it generally runs on a Saturday. That is understandable because in the country a large amount of shopping is done on Saturdays and it is the usual market day. Nevertheless Mr. Speaker, as you will know, on Saturdays the solicitors' offices are closed, as are the welfare offices and the employment offices. Dentists and doctors often do not hold surgeries then.

So on the only day of the week that many people can travel by bus from their village to the local market towns many of these vital services, including of course the banks, are closed. That has grown into a major problem for our villages.

It is a matter which has roused more and more feeling in my constituency. A large number of retired people who are not by any means wealthy have moved from North London, Essex and Southend into my constituency. They can perhaps afford to buy a house in Norfolk when they could not afford to do so in London. These people live perhaps on the old-age pension supplemented by, say, a police or gas board pension. All their lives they have lived close to good bus, rail and underground services and they have never run a car. On reaching retirement they cannot afford to run a car, and they are therefore dependent on the bus and other forms of public transport.

Local authorities may pay subsidies towards the bus service and I know that my new local authorities are considering this. The burden of rates this year, however, is heavier for rural areas than for anywhere else. The rates were already high and to grant subsidies to the bus companies to keep even the limited services running will cost two or three times as much this year as last. That is without taking account of increasing services to the villages.

I had hoped that my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) would be present tonight because he has inaugurated a mail bus service in his area. I understand that a similar service has been, or was to have been, inaugurated in Wales. But this mail bus service can have only a limited effect on the people who want to travel. We want minibuses and other vehicles which can operate at times suitable to groups of people, such as women's institues, young farmers' clubs—although members of those clubs would probably have their own cars—and many other groups who want to go out together for shopping, bingo, whist drives, or to the cinema or theatre. Many local groups of people would be enabled to get out of their villages to the local town if a small vehicle were provided. The mail bus would be of some help, but it would be limited.

The main help for the rural communities is contained in Clauses 18 to 21 of the Road Traffic Bill which was introduced into this House from the House of Lords on, I believe, 15th January this year. Clauses 18 to 21 provided for a relaxation of the bus licensing system. At present anybody who wants to start a bus service in which he will ply for hire has to go to the licensing authority, and as a general rule he is opposed either by rail operators or existing bus companies.

The Bill proposed that cars with eight seats or less and privately operated minibuses be excluded from the licensing system. In such circumstances an enterprising man with perhaps a part-time job and who may have a minibus which he uses for business during the day could, in the evenings take parties out and charge for the service. He would be able to take people out at times most convenient to them and bring them back home when the bingo, whist drive, theatre or cinema was over. He could perhaps also operate a similar scheme during the day.

Other minibuses run by professional bus companies would be exempted from the licensing system if not used on existing bus routes to pick up and put down passengers. Such a service would be a great boon for rural areas. I am sure there would be many enterprising people who would use their cars or minibuses to run such services which would enable people to get away from their villages at times most convenient to them.

I urge the Minister to ask the Government to reintroduce this part of the Bill immediately, if they do not intend to bring back the whole of the Bill. I hope that Clauses 18 to 21 of the Bill, with suitable amendments as the Government may think fit, could be introduced quickly as a small Bill. This would bring relief to rural areas, particularly in my constituency where many bus services have been withdrawn in the past few months.

12.4 a.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Gordon Oakes)

The House is indebted to the hon. Member for Norfolk, South-West (Mr. Hawkins) for bringing to our attention the problems of his constituents, who now find that, because of the alteration in the bus passenger services, they are deprived of transport from various points.

The provision of an adequate network of public transport services in a predominantly rural area is not confined to South-West Norfolk, but is only too familiar up and down the country.

Bus operators in urban and rural areas alike have found themselves squeezed by falling levels of demand and the pressure of rising costs, in a period of increasing competition from the private car. The figures for the industry as a whole are dramatic and eloquent. In 1950 there were some 16,000 million passenger journeys. By 1970 this was down to about 9,000 million. Over the same period there was an increase in the number of cars on the road from about 2 million to over 11 million. That means that passenger journeys were down by nearly half in 20 years; the number of cars on the road was up fivefold.

Successive Governments from the mid-1960s have made increasing amounts of money available to the bus industry chiefly in the form of a rebate of fuel duty, on which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that the Government are upholding the decision of the previous administration to allow full remission of the duty on fuel for stage services instead of the previous 12½p per gallon remission, and new bus grants on the capital cost of new vehicles for stage carriage use. Direct Government assistance to the bus industry from these services is running currently at over £40 million a year.

By the late 1960s it was also clear that general support of this sort to the bus industry would still not be enough to arrest the decline in rural transport which had been taking place which he so graphically described. Traditionally, rural services which could never have been very attractive commercial operations to the bus operators had been kept going by cross-subsidisation from more profitable routes. The general deterioration in the finances of the bus industry meant that this prop was rapidly crumbling. So further measures were needed to try to meet the specific transport needs of people living in small villages or isolated hamlets who did not have alternative means of transport.

Section 34 of the Transport Act 1968 made provision for the payment of rural bus grant, which enabled local authorities, at both county and district level, to give financial support to bus services running for the benefit of persons residing in rural areas". Where the local authority gives this support, central Government contribute half. But it is up to the local authority in the first place to assess what it regards as the needs of the area; and this is a rôle which I am sure that central Government are right to leave to the local authorities.

So far as the particular services mentioned by the hon. Member are concerned, I understand they are not grant-aided under this section, as they previously were. The fact that they are not grant-aided at present does not mean that the county or the district has refused them. It is merely because of the local government changeover on 1st April. I have no doubt that changes will be made within the county of Norfolk to restore these grants. The hon. Member may well approach either Norfolk County Council or West Norfolk District Council, and the district would then be responsible for 50 per cent. of the cost.

But when the level of demand gets very low indeed, it is questionable whether support for a conventional bus is any longer the right answer. At this level of demand, which is by its nature sporadic and often unpredictable, there may be better ways of meeting the needs of those people—and there are a great many of them about—who do not have alternative means of transport, but who nevertheless need to get about to lead a reasonable life—shopping, visiting friends, getting to the dentist, visiting hospitals or collecting a prescription from the chemist. Here there is scope for all sorts of local initiatives, as the pilot studies carried out by the Department in 1971, one as close as West Suffolk, showed. Among those studies various considerations were given to minibuses, postal buses and even, in some circumstances, voluntary car schemes—at that stage, where no fare was paid by the passenger but where assistance was given to the car owner by the county council by way of a grant.

The hon. Gentleman raised the interesting point of the Road Traffic Bill which was before the House at the time of the Dissolution. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me for pointing out that under the rules for an Adjournment debate I am not allowed to forecast future legislation. I shall certainly not break that rule. However, on this point my right hon. Friend is still considering the previous administration's Road Traffic Bill and undertaking consultations on it. Consultations are necessary with both sides of the passenger transport industry, the taxi industry, the bus industry, and so on, both from the point of view of the unions and the owners of taxis, because there can be abuses of such a system if there is no licensing. This must all be agreed if it is going to work fairly and properly. Consultations are taking place at present on this point.

I turn now to the specific situation described by the hon. Gentleman in Norfolk. The Norfolk County Council has been closely involved in the question of support for rural bus services. In the past year it has been providing assistance to at least 16 bus services in the county which would otherwise have been withdrawn.

Meanwhile, I understand that the biggest local bus operator, Eastern Counties Omnibus Company Limited, the local subsidiary of the National Bus Company, has been reviewing the whole network of services it operates in the area, on the basis of an extensive market research operation, to see whether it was possible to provide services which more closely match the present-day needs of the population. It looked at the routes which it had served in the past, the scope for rescheduling, and the main patterns of journeys which the people in the area were actually now making. This led the company to put forward proposals for a complete restructuring of services, which I understand was the subject of full prior consultation with the county and district councils concerned. The proper procedures were followed by the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company.

I am also told that the changes were the subject of a substantial publicity campaign by the bus company through newspaper and even television publicity, preparation and distribution of individual village timetables, and local public meetings at which representatives of the bus company were in attendance to explain the new schedules and timetables, and the need for the restructuring of the bus timetables in Norfolk.

These are essentially matters within the responsibility of the local bus company and the National Bus Company, and I would be venturing into territory which lies outside my responsibilities if I were to enter into any more detailed discussion of the local services provided by the Eastern Counties company. But I understand that the new pattern of operations offers improved services in most areas and services which more closely reflect the pattern of journeys which most people want to make. But it has also, as the hon. Member has explained so clearly this evening, unfortunately meant a deterioration in the services to one or two villages which fitted less well into the general pattern. It is of course this feature of the situation which has led to this evening's debate.

I understand also that Eastern Counties has written to the hon. Member setting out some of the background and the details of what it has done. It is not for me to comment on any of this except to say that I know that Eastern Counties is very willing to consider any particular problems which have arisen as a result of the revised schedules, and to have local discussions about them. To the extent that any additional services impose a financial burden on the company, it would naturally look for financial support from the local authorities—again, either county or district.

I have already stressed the crucial rôle played by local authorities in the operation of the rural bus grant. From the beginning of this month the new county authorities have a duty under Section 203 of the Local Government Act 1972 to develop policies which will promote the provision of a co-ordinated and efficient system of public passenger transport to meet the needs of the county". They are also given specific powers to make payments to public transport operators in their areas. These provisions clearly give the new county councils a very important rôle with respect to public transport in their areas. The new system of transport supplementary grants and transport policies and programmes which will come into effect on 1st April 1975 will encourage the new county councils to reassess their transport policies and priorities and relate their assessment of the rural transport needs of their area to their total programmes.

The hon. Gentleman has done a service not only to his constituents in the villages but, by raising the matter so clearly, to all rural communities that unfortunately have to suffer from difficulties of transport to and from their villages.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at sixteen minutes past Twelve o'clock.