The Government has ducked calls for quality bus contracts to be made easier to draw up outside England’s largest conurbations.
In answer to the transport select committee’s push for the forthcoming Road Transport Bill to remove obstacles to establishing quality bus contracts in the shires, the Government replied: ‘Quality contracts will remain as available to rural areas as to a passenger transport authority.’ This failed to provide the commitment to reversing the 1986 bus deregulation outside the big conurbations such as Manchester and Birmingham that the MPs had sought. The committee had found ‘no reason’ why quality contracts should not be used to secure socially-necessary rural bus services, as well as improving urban services.
The County Surveyors’ Society said it would be unfair to only make franchising easier for the passenger transport executives, and even detrimental for the shires next to the major conurbations. The response comes despite transport secretary Douglas Alexander’s declared aim at a recent transport conference ‘to exploit the full potential of the bus in every part of our country’. The December policy paper Putting passengers first stresses that ‘one size does not fit all’.
Bob Saxby, chair of the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers, who is on the working group drawing up the proposals, told Surveyor: ‘I will be emphasising that there can be circumstances where a quality contract might be the only way of providing an efficient rural network. ‘This will be much simpler animal than an urban QC, since most services are already tendered – it merely needs to ensure that no cherry-picked services are registered.’ The Government also revealed more details on the forthcoming draft legislation to allow contracts to be introduced where this is in the public interest, due to be published in spring. Quality contracts would no longer have to be rubber-stamped by the secretary of state, but would instead need to be assessed by a panel of experts. Longer time limits on contract durations could also be allowed, ‘improving the conditions for operators to invest and innovate’.
The introduction of franchising is likely to be phased – the DfT ‘does not want to see local authorities introducing a quality contracts scheme for the whole of an urban area under one contract, but rather let contracts for smaller parts of networks’. This would encourage greater competition and bids from small as well as large operators, it claimed.
Bus services across the UK: Government response.: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtran.htm
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