Clause 1 - School travel schemes
School Transport Bill
2:30 pm
Mr David Drew (Stroud, Labour/Co-operative)
I rise to support my hon. Friend's comments. I wish to make a couple of observations about this group of amendments. As my hon. Friend intimated both before and after the Committee's short intermission, the intention is to try to ascertain from the Government that there are some lines of security, so that we know that we are not going to tamper unduly with the funding mechanism, specifically with regard to the physical or mental needs of special needs children when they travel to school. If such children have to travel further because they have a specialist education, they must not be penalised for that. There is an unwritten agreement on that across local authorities. I do not know of any authorities that would deliberately penalise a child with a particular need by loading them with additional transport costs.
Choice is a word that some of us have fears about, but these days it is part of our vocabulary as politicians. I would not want it to be seen that parents could be deemed at least partly responsible for making a choice, based on whether they could afford to supplement transport costs, about whether their child should go to a better and more specialist provider. I would like the Minister to allay such fears and assure us that there will not be any charging mechanism that will be predisposed to consider means as a way of deciding on appropriate special needs education.