Part of School Transport Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:15 pm on 11 November 2004.
We have had an interesting exchange. My reading of section 6 of the Transport Act 1985 is that if the Government were to want to legislate to change notice times to fewer than 56 days in relation to school transport schemes, which otherwise have to be registered under that section, they could do that under proposed new paragraph (9), so this power would not be needed to achieve that.
I made a point about the fuel duty rebate. Many people, particularly in rural areas, feel that it is unfair—and bad and unnecessary in terms of the environment—that the dedicated school bus goes by with subsidised passengers on board and that ordinary people who pay their council tax cannot gain access to it even if they are prepared to pay a fare.
If more school bus services were registered services under the Transport Act, my understanding is that they would then be able to qualify for the fuel duty rebate, because that is payable in respect of all bus services that are registered. One way of being more radical about this would be to encourage more school transport services to qualify for the rebate. Perhaps, however, that is not the Government's intention. It would be a sensible strategy to make the rebate subsidy available for further forms of public transport, but at the moment it is not. I do not understand why the Government wish to exclude from the provisions of section 6 of the Transport Act services that would otherwise have to be registered because they would be able to collect fare-paying passengers and thereby qualify for the fuel duty rebate. The argument about the need for flexibility and the rigidity of the 56 days' notice is not an answer to that point, because that point is already covered by the regulation-making power in the 1985 Act.
The Government need to think a bit more about what their agenda is and about the need for people in rural areas to get access to good bus services. Why should not someone who wishes to go to work—at the school itself, perhaps, or nearby—be able to board a bus with vacant seats as a fare-paying passenger, as part of a radical reappraisal of journeys to work and school?