Clause 1 - School travel schemes
School Transport Bill
10:30 am
Sir George Young (North West Hampshire, Conservative)
I shall speak briefly to amendments Nos. 25 and 26 in my name, which pick up the hon. Gentleman's theme. I want to focus on seat belts in the context of safety. At the moment, there is a rather confused regime; if one gets on a bus in London, as many children do to go to school, there probably will not be a safety belt on it. If one gets on a school bus, it may or may not have safety belts. As I understand the position, the Government leave it to the discretion of the local education authority to specify in a contract whether the school bus should have safety belts.
A number of families who take their children to school by car, but who are interested in the pilot schemes and are moving towards a more environmentally sympathetic means of transport, have raised with me the question of whether the school bus will have seat belts. At the moment, while they are driving their children to school, they are secure in their seats because the car has safety belts. If the proposition
is that the children should get on the school bus, and the school bus does not have safety belts, that acts as a disincentive.
As I mentioned on Second Reading, in the village of Shipton Bellinger in my constituency there is a campaign among those who send their children to school in Andover to substitute the current bus for one fitted with safety belts. Only yesterday I had a letter from a constituent on that very theme. It says:
''The new contract''—
between Hampshire county council and Clegg and Brooking—
''means that the children are conveyed in safe, clean, warm and seat belted vehicles.''
The previous contract did not provide for seat-belted buses. The letter continues:
''I now can go off to work myself knowing they are in capable hands.''
There is a different regime for coaches, because there is a difference between a coach and a bus.
The Government want pilots and want to get people, including children, out of cars and on to buses. Under this brave new scheme, it is important that the best buses are available. If some clapped-out bus with no seat belts arrives under a travel scheme, a lot of the support for pilot schemes will disappear.
My two amendments are basically probing amendments. Are the Government planning to take the opportunity offered by the pilots to get the best, safest, warmest buses available in order to change public attitudes, or will they be neutral and leave it entirely to the local education authority to decide what sorts of buses are put into the pilot schemes? I hope that the Minister will give LEAs a signal that the pilots are an opportunity to change public perceptions and make a statement about safety, and I hope that he will encourage the LEAs that are part of the pilots to specify that they want buses with seat belts.