Clause 3 - Power to repeal new provisions
School Transport Bill
2:45 pm
Mr John Pugh (Education Spokesperson, Education & Skills; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
I shall briefly say very much the same as the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban). We have arrived at the sting in the tail. The Transport Committee, the Education and Skills Committee and the hon. Gentleman have all said things that are more or less identical. The Bill is a kind of amalgam piece of legislation; there is a proposal for pilots, and something that would enable a nationwide roll-out. Those two things joined together give cause for suspicion all round, because the Government's rhetoric about the Bill was predominantly about the pilots. Of course, as long as people are talking about pilots, concerns can always be allayed, because pilots are temporary and do not last long, then they are evaluated and people learn from them.
The normal procedure, which the Government might have followed, would have been to legislate for pilots, leave adequate time for evaluation and produce some wider enabling measure at a later date. The fact that that procedure is not being followed and is not the framework for the legislation will give grounds for suspicion that the Government are trying to sell us something that will ultimately turn out to be fairly unpalatable—and there will also be suspicion because they are cutting Parliament out of any further scrutiny of the schemes as they continue.
On Second Reading the Secretary of State said that he did not believe that there were such beasts as gullible councillors. He thought that if they were clamouring for the legislation, they would know exactly what they were clamouring for. The hon. Member for Fareham and I doubt that very much. In some sense this is a mixed Bill that asks for something modest, but—again, to use the word used by the Transport Committee—it achieves something audacious.