Bill makes promises of local gains for new-look ITAs

15 November 2007

More flexible boundaries for Passenger Transport Authorities and provisions for a new body to represent bus users have been added to the Local Transport Bill.

Passenger Transport Authorities, now to be called Integrated Transport Authorities, will now be able to follow the boundaries of shire district councils, rather than whole counties, as had been proposed in the draft local transport bill.

‘This will enable ITA areas better to reflect local travel patterns, which do not tend to fall neatly in line with county boundaries,’ the bill states. The transport select committee had warned that the development of PTAs would be ‘stifled’ by the requirement for the whole of a county council to join (Surveyor 9 August), while the CSS argued that ‘there may be two or more distinct economic sub-regions in a larger county that may demand different approaches and different partners’.

Welcoming the change to the bill, Colin McKenna, chair of the CSS integrated transport group, said the issue of PTA boundaries was ‘one of our key points. This provides far more flexibility than previously, but it may be overly ambitious at this point to set out the boundaries of a PTA across county borders. And Jonathan Bray, spokesman for PTEG, said it would be hard for ITAs to go lower than district boundaries.

The bill also includes a new requirement for all local transport authorities to take account of the Government’s environmental policies – including climate change – in developing their transport policies. This replaces the duty proposed in the draft bill, which related only to climate change and applied only in ITA areas.

Meanwhile, the Campaign for Better Transport, formerly Transport 2000, offered a cautious welcome to plans for a national bus passenger watchdog. Cat Hobbs, the group’s public transport campaigner, said: ‘Because buses are overwhelmingly a local concern, the Government will need to give local authorities sufficient funding, and the new watchdog a strong local structure, to ensure these good words about improving people’s bus experiences become reality.’

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Bill makes promises of local gains for new-look ITAs

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