I apologise. In that case, she will have heard some of her hon. Friends making similar comments. All the studies have shown that, while British Rail receives only 29 per cent. of its total costs from the Government, the average Government contribution in no fewer than 10 other railway systems that were recently examined—I know that the Secretary of State is not good at reading such documents, still less at comprehending them—received on average 47 per cent. in subsidy.

The Department's Transport and Road Research Laboratory 1980 report on the subsidisation of urban public transport in 15 Western countries found that the subsidy in Britain was only 30 per cent. of operating costs, compared with an average for Western cities of 50 per cent. The Select Committee on Transport, in its recent report on transport in London, drew attention to the fact that in 1981 London Transport received 32 per cent. of its operating costs in subsidy, whereas the subsidy for the Paris underground was 54 per cent., and for the Brussels and Milan systems 76 per cent. Of the nine European cities mentioned in the report whose transport systems were funded on a basis comparable with ours, only one — Munich—approached the low level of subsidy received by London Transport, and even then its subsidy was significantly higher at 40 per cent.

All those investigations show that the consequence of low subsidies in Britain has been a vicious circle of higher fares and service cuts, resulting in declining patronage, leading in turn to still higher costs, thus setting off the chain of fare increases once more. That is the road on which we shall embark yet again if the Bill becomes law.

The Government's aims are patently contradictory. They cannot have both an improvement in services and a reduction in subsidies. It will certainly take more than a speech from the Secretary of State today to convince us otherwise. If the Government really wish to improve services, greater capital and revenue support is essential.

The Paris underground has been much mentioned today. When Conservatives talk about publicly owned industry they always talk about productivity—by which they mean redundancies. It is true that the Paris metro has 40 per cent. fewer employees than London Transport and carries 200 million more passengers per year, but those facts do not embarrass us. The reduction in the number of employees was the result of a decade of high investment in the system. The Conservatives, however, want it both ways. They talk about inefficiencies and the desirability of redundancies in London Transport, but they withhold the very capital investment that would make more economical operation possible. They have taken a truly Jekyll and Hyde attitude to this debate.

I had intended to congratulate the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry) on an eminently sensible speech, but having led up to the obvious conclusion that the Bill was nonsense he then behaved like other Conservative Members who can only be described as chocolate soldiers. Having marched to the top of the hill with fixed bayonet, he threw down his rifle at the first whiff of grapeshot in the shape of the first angry glance from the Government Whip and announced that, despite the views that he so expertly expressed, he intended to vote for legislation which would cause even greater problems and take us even further down the dark road that he described.

On the whole question of public transport subsidies there has been — I hesitate to use the term but I can think of no more suitable phrase—something of a cover-up at the Department since the right hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley) took over as Secretary of State. A magazine which does not normally favour higher subsidies for public transport, and which does not normally express much opinion on these matters —Motor Transport—published an article on 13 August this year under the heading: Department of Transport Backs Higher Subsidies". The content of the article may seem somewhat odd, but it was certainly interesting. It said: Subsidies for public transport in major urban areas give good value for money and should even be increased, according to Department of Transport research. Details of this potentially embarassing result"— they were not wrong there— were given to the annual planning and transport research computation conference at Brighton last week. The Department of Transport is currently trying to reduce public transport subsidies and is building a new computer model to divide the subsidy money between London and the other metropolitan counties. No wonder my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) could not get a reply to his question. He asked the Secretary of State about the amount of the subsidy in London. Either the computer has not yet arrived, or the right hon. Gentleman cannot change the plug, because he failed abjectly to give a straight reply to that question.

However, I must not keep regressing, if that is the right word, to the right hon. Gentleman's speech, because the article from which I quote is much too interesting. It went on to say: The model has also produced results on the value of transport subsidies. It shows that subsidies in south Yorkshire, already the highest in Britain, are worth increasing and suggests cutting fares by up to 25 per cent. in Greater Manchester and west Yorkshire. It added: The results support the fares cut in London Transport introduced by the Greater London Council earlier this year, but suggest a 28 per cent. rather than the 25 per cent. cut implemented". The report concluded: But the Department of Transport is not going to use its computer model to increase public transport subsidies. There is a waste of public expenditure for a start! The computer is probably the biggest one that we have at present and it will probably be changed for an Atari which will come up with something different.

The article said that it was just going to compare the value of subsidy in different counties. In other words, it seems to the Opposition, after looking at the article and listening to the speech by the right hon. Gentleman, that in this matter, as in many others dealing with the public sector, the one thing the Government cannot stand is too many hard facts. The Government are not very good when faced with the truth. They simply ignored the results of that exercise because the results did not conform to the well-known and long-held prejudices of the Secretary of State. If the Government want stability in public transport, which is what they repeatedly claim, they should let their policies be guided by examination, by analysis and by reason and not by the right hon. Gentleman's prejudices, no matter how long-standing those prejudices happen to be.

During the debate we have heard the typical war cry from the intellectutally bankrupt Conservative Benches that the problems of London Transport are all due to the inefficiency of those who work in the industry. I must confess, as somebody who used to get up fairly early in the morning to help operate a railway system, that I am not too tolerant when I listen to fairly well-heeled and well-cosseted Conservative Members talking about productivity. The House will have a chance to see how much Conservative Members believe in productivity on Friday afternoon when we tackle another restrictive practice in a profession to which many Conservative Members happen to belong. But I must not digress. Let us deal with this myth of inefficiency in the public transport industries of the country in general and London Transport in particular.

The most familiar complaint in the debate and elsewhere lies in the allegedly slow process in the introduction of one-man, or perhaps I should say in these enlightened days one-person, operation of buses and underground trains—OPO if I may use the shortened phrase without causing any offence. The fact of the matter is that over half of London's bus services—53 per cent. to be precise — are now one person operated, and virtually all suburban services throughout Greater London are so operated.

Where crew operation of buses continues to exist, it is on services in inner and central London areas. The reason for two-person operation in inner and central London is simple. It has nothing to do with trade union opposition to change. It has everything to do with the need to encourage traffic flow, as we have heard from Conservative Members on numerous occasions in the debate, in the circumstances of chronic congestion found particularly in the central London area.

Chronic congestion in London appears to be the least of the Secretary of State's worries. Not once as he ploughed tardily through his brief earlier in the day did he mention the question of chronic congestion. I do not know whether Conservative Members have enough wit or imagination to consider the problems that one-person operated buses would cause in the central London area. The Select Committee on Transport quoted in its report "Transport in London" the fact that on a weekday evening at peak time about 25,000 passengers were picked up by buses in Oxford street alone.

I presume that the Secretary of State knows what a bus looks like. Can he imagine 25,000 people trying to board buses in Oxford street and the congestion that would be caused if they were one-person operated buses? I wish that he and his colleagues had reflected for a moment—before they peddled their ignorance about inefficiency in London Transport—on exactly what the switch to one-person operation would mean on public transport in the centre of London.

The reasoning on this issue was accepted by the Select Committee on Transport, an all-party body. It is a pity that some of the Conservative Members who signed that committee's report are not present today to give us the benefit of their enlightened views on London Transport. All the members of that Committee accepted the situation as I have outlined it, and the report, which was unanimous, said: It is not our impression that union intransigence is a major factor in persuading London Transport to continue to run the majority of their central area buses with two-man crews. I regret that the hon. Member for Richmond and Barnes (Mr. Hanley), who made a somewhat confused speech and immediately left the Chamber, is not here, because we could have pointed that out to him.

It is possible to argue, in view of the recent progress with fares simplification, that it may be possible to achieve a further limited movement towards more one-person operation on London's buses. It goes without saying that the conversion of more buses to one-person operation and the building of more buses is an expensive business. The existing crew operated buses cannot be converted for one-person only operation, and the currrent price, for example, of a Metrobus—manufactured, incidentally, not far from my constituency — is over £80,000. That is a lot of capital investment if we are to go in for a wholesale changeover in operation from the present system. It is that very investment that the Secretary of State, by the Bill, is seeking to deny to London Transport. He cannot have it both ways.

The Select Committee made precisely that observation in connection with the system of two-person operation on London's underground trains, when it said: This situation"— that is, two-man operation— is bound to continue so long as rolling stock is designed for this method of operation, and improvements in this direction"— towards one-person operation— are critically dependent on capital investment funds. Again an obvious truth, but one which appears to have escaped the notice of Conservative Members.