School Transport Bill

Public Bill Committee, 11 November 2004.

Standing Committee A

School Transport Bill

Bill O'Brien (Labour, Normanton)

Order. I wish to remind everyone in the Room that we will observe two minutes' silence at 11 o'clock.Clause 1 School travel schemes

Clause 1 - School travel schemes

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to move amendment No. 45, in page 3, line 4, at end insert

', or

'(f) who attends a specialist school having passed an aptitude test for admission to that school.'.

I welcome you back to the Chair, Mr. O'Brien.

There must be common ground between the Government and the Opposition on amendment No. 45, because we both support the concepts of choice and specialist schools. It would be useful to allow a child who lives on the wrong side of town and who has a particular interest in attending a specialist school, because of the nature of its speciality, to attend that school and it would be useful to provide some support for their transport costs to it.

That raises the question of how one assesses whether the child ought to go to such a school and whether the school is a suitable one for the child. The Government have made some suggestions as to how we might determine what is a suitable school for a child and how we might introduce an objective test to measure it. In their response to the report by the Select Committee on Education and Skills on school admissions, they accepted the need for aptitude tests for certain types of school. The examples of that were special sports schools, and schools that specialise in visual and performing arts, and that specialise in languages. Those schools will be able to continue to set an aptitude test and select up to 10 per cent. of their pupils on the basis of their aptitude in sport, visual and performing arts or languages. If we are to go down the route of trying to encourage more pupils to attend a school that will meet their particular needs, in this case one that will give that specialist support, we ought to provide free school transport to the pupils who pass that aptitude test; it is an objective measure of whether that school is suitable for them.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

I shall begin with a personal observation. Prior to this sitting, I had not realised the mysteries of starred amendments. I tabled a number of amendments yesterday and discovered that they would not be debated. Such are the penalties of being a novice. I am sure that the Committee is as disappointed as I am that I have not been able to prolong the sitting with amendments of the utmost ingenuity that would severely challenge the Government's proposals.

However, that is all history and I will address this particular amendment. It is a logical corollary of having specialist schools—well, the Government say that it is—that some pupils will be accepted on the basis of aptitude; I think that about 6 per cent. of them currently are. If that is the case, the nearest appropriate school to a pupil might not be the nearest community school, but the nearest specialist school. That may be 3, 4, 5 or many miles away.

As the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) said, the amendment is in line and in keeping with the Government's thinking: provision should be made for transport to the nearest appropriate school. It is the same logic that applies to special educational needs and to denominational schools. He has missed a trick, because the same logic could equally apply to local authorities that have secondary modern and grammar schools. If it regards the secondary modern school as the nearest appropriate school for an individual and that is more than 3 or 4 miles away, transport provision ought to be laid on by those authorities as well.

That illustrates quite nicely the kind of muddle that we are getting in over this legislation. It also indicates one of the motives behind it: challenges with regard to the provision of specialist education and transport thereto will lead to an increasing transport cost for local authorities. The Government can see that coming and they have calculated how horrific that cost might be. Therefore, they are very comfortable with a piece of legislation that reneges on existing entitlements as given under the Education Act 1944. I can see reasons why some people might not wish to support the amendment, but I cannot see any reason why the Government should not.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I, too, welcome you back to the Chair, Mr. O'Brien.

The amendment is very interesting; it highlights some of the anomalies in existing legislation and the need for the piloting approach set out in the Bill. As the hon. Members for Fareham and for Southport (Dr. Pugh) made clear, existing legislation does not give any particular transport support to someone who goes to a specialist school on the basis of passing an aptitude test. I cannot accept that pupils who pass such a test should simply receive free transport. If they attend their nearest school, they should be treated in the same way as other pupils; if they do not, they should be treated in the same way as other pupils whose parents exercise parental preference.

Every comprehensive school in the country is obliged to provide the full national curriculum, and we expect our plans for greater diversity and freedom for schools to drive up standards. If the amendment were agreed to, we might find parents applying for places in specialist schools some distance from home simply because that would secure free transport, and that could distort the admissions system. A further problem is that school travel schemes are likely to propose charges based on ability to pay rather than on the characteristics of the school attended or on pupil aptitude or ability. Providing free transport to pupils attending specialist schools simply because they had

passed an aptitude test would be unfair to their peers, who might have to pay even if their family circumstances were less favourable.

I hope that the hon. Member for Fareham will agree that the amendment would create division between pupils in the same school and would not reflect the sentiment of the Bill, which is that the cost of school transport for all pupils should reflect family circumstances first and foremost. In light of that, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the amendment.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

First, I shall comment on the admission made by the hon. Member for Southport. In the opening sitting, he described the Minister and me as amateurs. The hon. Gentleman is an experienced and distinguished Member of this House, who has served on many Committees. Perhaps in this case the amateurs have taught him a lesson.

I did not touch on the issue of grammar schools because that might have been divisive. However, the same issues apply to such schools and any form of selection or choice in relation to schools. It is interesting how this issue is developing; the Department would like some areas of Government policy to be supported through free school transport, but the Government are happy to leave other policy areas to scheme authorities.

I shall give an example. I rarely believe what I read in the newspapers, but today's edition of The Times reported that there might be free school transport between schools and places where extended school activities take place. It would seem that the Government are using free school transport to support one of their policy directions, but trying to deny people that right when they exercise a choice to go to a specialist school. Parents will choose whether they want to use those extended school facilities and will be provided free school transport to them, although some parents will not choose to exercise that right.

The Minister talked about some of the anomalies in existing schemes. Clearly, LEAs operate discretionary transport schemes at the moment; some operate such schemes for grammar schools, and provide free transport to those schools. Would the Minister be happy if, in their pilots, LEAs that had developed a good network of specialist schools came up with schemes that supported the choice of parents to send their children to such schools rather than to the nearest school? Although all schools are required to meet the full requirements of the national curriculum, most of us recognise that a specialist language college has greater resources and expertise for teaching languages than a school that does not specialise in languages. It would be helpful if local authorities had some indication from the Minister whether schemes that help to promote choice and enable parents to exercise choice by sending their child to a specialist school would be permissible.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

Clearly, we want to support parents in making such choices and to ensure that the full

benefits of the specialist schools programme are enjoyed by those who can benefit from it. However, to repeat what I said just now, I do not want to create a position in which one child would get transport simply on the basis of having passed an aptitude test, while another in the same class would not. Through the Bill, as a consequence of the additional resources in the local system there is the potential for children attending specialist school who do not currently receive any assisted or free transport to gain access to subsidised transport whether or not they are at the school via the aptitude test. That is the route I want us to follow, rather than that of separating out the children who happen to be at the specialist school because of an aptitude test.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I am grateful for that clarification. It appears that LEAs will be able to support specialist schools through the transport schemes. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw that amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

I beg to move amendment No. 27, in

clause 1, page 3, line 7, leave out from 'that' to end of line and insert

'there are met in relation to the child such criteria as the scheme authority shall select from the following:

(a) that the child is within section 512ZB(4);

(b) that the child's parent or guardian is in receipt of Working Tax Credit; or

(c) that the child's home is in an area of rurality of a degree specified by the scheme authority.'.

Bill O'Brien (Labour, Normanton)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments:

No. 34, in

clause 1, page 3, line 7, leave out

'the child is within section 512 ZB (4)'

and insert

'the parents or carers are in receipt of Child Tax Credit for that child.'.

No. 36, in

clause 1, page 3, line 11, at end insert—

'(4) No charge shall be paid in respect of a child in any family where charges are already paid in respect of three children.'.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

It is a pleasure to serve under a Chairman as distinguished as you, Mr. O'Brien.

Amendment No. 27 is intended to invite the Committee to probe the Minister about why the Bill puts on English LEAs the straitjacket of having only free school meals as the marker for free transport. The Bill contains the entitlement for a protected child to have the right to free school transport. However, English authorities have a different criterion for what is a protected child than that which is proposed for Wales. In England, the criterion is simply that the child is entitled to free school meals, whereas in Wales the Assembly is left to choose any set of criteria that it wishes. What is it about the National Assembly for Wales that enables it to decide that for itself, whereas for English LEAs the criterion has to be free school meals, as dictated by my hon. Friend?

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

It is probably appropriate for me to be very clear at this stage that in England the protected

child is a category in legislation. We are not saying to LEAs that they cannot widen that category.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

I thank my hon. Friend, and I look forward to hearing his clarification on that when we get to the appropriate place in our proceedings.

The amendment relates to the Bill's provisions about who are the protected children; at present, it simply refers to free school meals. Under current legislation, that means a child whose parent or carer is in receipt of income support, income-based jobseeker's allowance or child tax credit, but not working tax credit, with an annual income of less than £13,230. Would it not be better if the legislation offered LEAs a menu, leaving them free to choose one or more of those criteria with the free school meals entitlement being the base level that nobody may fall below?

Local authorities should be allowed to have the additional mark of the working tax credit—not the child tax credit because that seems already to be covered by free school meals, which makes amendment No. 34 otiose. Giving local authorities the opportunity to choose working tax credit as well as free school meals means that, for example, where there are concentrations of parents just above the free school meal entitlement level but below that for the working tax credit, they would be able to tailor their scheme to meet the needs of the people of their area.

That would be consistent with the way that the Department has been moving, for example with regard to the new formula for distributing central Government grant to LEAs, which came into effect in April 2003. That moved away from free school meals being the marker of deprivation to a wider marker of working tax credit. Therefore, it would be consistent even within Government itself for working tax credit to be a marker for entitlement.

My amendment adds an extra criterion to do with rurality. I did so with hesitation; it is not a financial entitlement, so I wondered whether to add it was inconsistent. However, I added it because I was impressed by contributions on Second Reading about the long distances that some pupils in very rural areas have to travel to get to school, and I wondered whether it would be appropriate for some local authorities to say that if a child travels a particular length of journey or comes from a particularly small settlement, they ought to be entitled to free school transport as a matter of course.

That is not an obvious point. One could say that paying a flat-rate fee for using a school bus might be as consistent for somebody living 15 miles away as for someone three miles away. That is quite a good argument. Perhaps we should be leaving it to financial eligibility to establish whether those who are entitled should receive free school transport because of their family finances. That is one way in which the debate is open and I would be grateful to hear my hon. Friend's response. Overall, should not the proposed legislation allow local authorities in England to choose from a menu of options regarding which protected children are entitled to free school transport?

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The purpose of amendments Nos. 34 and 36—and to some extent the purpose of

amendment No. 27, tabled by the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney)—is to enable a debate about the financial impact of charging on families. I am concerned that we will see a number of already hard-pressed families suffering financially as a consequence of the proposed legislation. Using the free schools meals threshold of £13,400 as the cut-off point for free school transport will make many families far worse off.

In my constituency the £13,400 threshold is just over half the average wage. During Tuesday's sitting the Minister was using the figure of £1 a day as the cost of school transport. In Hampshire, a child travelling more than three miles would be charged just under £200 as a consequence of the £1-a-day charge. For some families, particularly those with more than one child, that could become an onerous burden.

In a sense, the child tax credit was deliberately chosen because the relevant entitlement goes pretty far up the income scale, to almost twice the average earnings of people in Fareham. That demonstrates that we have various means-tested benefits tapering out at different points, and perhaps we need to be more generous in providing concessionary fares in the schemes.

We talked on Tuesday about charging for denominational schools. Given the social mix in some of those schools—some are heavily weighted towards poorer families—the families of children attending them will be quite hard pressed if there is not a more generous measure regarding available concessionary fares than is currently set out in the Bill. We may end up with a different measure. The hon. Member for Stafford talked about a menu of options. However, limiting the entitlement to free school transport to people earning £13,400 a year may not be sufficiently generous to give that range of options to local authorities, which may want to reflect on the local circumstances in their areas, or apply regionally based cut-off points for means tests.

Local authorities may have some requirements in terms of obtaining data from parents about their financial circumstances if they move away from free school meals. There is a process in place now to enable schools to collect that information, but it will need to be more sophisticated and more widely set than at present, thereby leading possibly to an additional administrative cost for processing means-testing being incurred by LEAs. The implementation of any menu of options would need to be considered by the Department and may need to be addressed in some of its consultations with LEAs.

In the light of the admission by the hon. Member for Southport that he has four children, amendment No. 36 could be called the Pugh amendment. If the hon. Gentleman lived in Hampshire and had four children attending school, he would pay just under £800 a year for free school transport. That is a significant burden, which we have placed on families with incomes of upwards of £13,400 a year, and it will have a severe effect on family income.

Therefore, amendment No. 36 aims to cap the charges that a family could pay: where school

transport for three children is already being paid for, no costs will need to be paid in relation to additional children. I again use the example of my county; the family charge for school transport would be limited to £588, assuming that there is a flat-rate charge and that that is only £1 a day.

The hon. Member for Stafford talked about rurality. There may be situations where LEAs would seek to impose some sort of distance-related charge as a means of recovering some of the transport costs that they incur. Large families in rural areas could face a significant increase in their financial costs if there were such a charge.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

As it happens, I think that the sentence in paragraph 30 of the prospectus that the Department has produced contains all three issues that the hon. Gentleman mentioned: families with a low income that is just above free school meal entitlement; large families; and people living a long distance from the school. He and I are raising all the issues that the Government state that they are concerned about. Does he agree that his proposed solution for large families is simply illustrative and that a progressive local authority might want to develop a much more sensitive scheme for large families, and might even start to give discounts at an earlier stage than the one that he suggests?

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I think that there is an opportunity for local authorities to exercise discretion. However, at the same time that we are talking about minimum entitlements for low income families as they relate to free school meals and income points at which free school transport should be given, we need to give families some protection. It may be that three children is the minimum point and that some local authorities may want to go further. We ought to think about giving families some protection, rather than relying on guidance. As I indicated on Tuesday afternoon, what is issued by way of guidance is simply guidance; it is not a requirement or an entitlement, and it is not statutory. My concern is that local authorities, in bringing forward these schemes, may ignore that guidance.

David Drew (Labour/Co-operative, Stroud)

I am pleased to see you in your place again, Mr. O'Brien.

I am pleased also to rise in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford. I do so in order to ask the Minister whether he would care to outline further the points that he was intimating—or those that were being discussed—on Second Reading. I had the strong feeling then that the Government were looking very hard at the way in which free school meals are a very blunt instrument in rural areas, and at how we might find another way of allowing accessibility to free school transport.

The reality in rural areas is that free school meals are an ineffective way of determining whether someone is eligible for other passported benefits, for the simple reason that it is one of the most discriminatory approaches that could possibly be imagined. I still have memories of children who were put on separate

dinner tables because they were entitled to free school meals; they were the ones that got the sandwiches brought in every day. That is humiliating for children and completely unacceptable for parents.

We need to look much more delicately at the way in which we allow accessibility. Although we may be talking about a measure rather than a practice, the reality is that it is taken as a practice and many parents choose not to take up the entitlement. If they do not take up their entitlement when it comes to their children's eating habits, there is every chance that it will be difficult to manage entitlements to transport arrangements.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point about take-up. My experience is that children who take up free school meals at primary schools will not do so at secondary school. Given that there are fewer secondary schools than primary schools, children will be further from their secondary school and may require free transport. However, the take-up rate for free school meals in secondary schools may have an impact on the number of children who exercise the right to have free school transport on their journey to secondary school.

David Drew (Labour/Co-operative, Stroud)

The hon. Gentleman is right. The way in which the system operates becomes more difficult as we go up the age profile. There is no magic answer, and we need to look hard at the matter. Clearly, this is a core issue, given the number of people who are looking for solutions. I never cease to be taken aback by that.

The second point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was about rurality and about how, in drawing up the prospectus and encouraging flexibility, which is a byword for the Bill, we might encourage a fairer distribution of support if and when people have to send their children long distances to the nearest or most appropriate school. That is an important point. All of us who represent rural or semi-rural constituencies know that schooling is inevitably a key reason for people to locate to an area, and that that is particularly true of rural areas. However, we have lost many village schools, and if we are to keep our rural communities alive we must bolster the remaining facilities to the best of our ability.

I hope that we can look at flexible arrangements and particularly at some form of federation or clustering among schools. I hope also that we can use the Bill to organise transport and give local authorities the wherewithal to find and then keep in place the best arrangements not only for children from lower-income backgrounds, but across the board. In addition, I hope that there will be not only an implicit recognition, but some explicit understanding of the fact that rurality is a key factor in the type of schooling that is available to our children.

Perhaps the Minister will say something about that issue, although it is an open question whether it is possible to include a provision in the Bill. However, when the Government sell the pilot to local authorities, they should be radical and seek ways to make education better. There is no better place to start

than where children have to travel long distances because there are no longer any local schools. A fair and accessible transport system needs to be made available to them.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

In moving the amendment, the hon. Member for Stafford seems to have made life very difficult for the Minister. He raised legitimate concerns about how a protected child is to be defined. Other hon. Members have said that some children who ought to get free transport do not take up free school meals and that the uptake for meals is not as good as it might be. The uptake for free transport, however, is almost 100 per cent.—it is a well taken-up benefit.

The Minister tried to make a pre-emptive strike against the amendment by suggesting that, even though the legislation says that a protected child should be entitled to free school meals, there is nothing to stop authorities varying that provision. The hon. Member for Stafford countered that ingeniously by saying that there is nothing to stop the Minister including a menu in the Bill rather than defining a protected child in a particular way. I have a great deal of sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman said, and I would be intrigued to know how the Minister intends countering his argument.

The hon. Gentleman also raised the issue of rurality, which will haunt our debate from beginning to end. We do not have an obvious solution, because the legislation will have greater consequences for rural areas, particularly the hardship provisions, and costs are already higher in rural areas. The way in which we deal with the rurality question goes to the heart of the debate, and the Minister does not have an effective handle on it.

As the hon. Member for Fareham said, I am a member of the trade union of large families. In bringing up four children, I have always felt that people like me are substantially disadvantaged, as no system makes sufficient allowance for them. Be that as it may, large families are most likely to have a motive to use a car, as the cost of paying for transport would be considerably more. Indeed, if the costs are totalled, those who do not have a car would probably find it worth buying one, or even hiring one.

I shall use two arguments that the Minister has used against our amendments to persuade him to concede the argument on amendment No. 36. He says that one reason for removing an entitlement is that only a few people can take advantage of it. I assure the Minister that there is only a small number of families with four or more children. Another argument that the Minister often uses is to say that an amendment would give people an incentive to do something that they otherwise would not do. I can assure him that the prospect of reduced costs of school transport will not encourage people to go out and breed more. It does not work like that—the other incidental costs are far higher.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

This group of amendments poses three of the greatest challenges. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford said, that is already reflected in the draft prospectus that we have published.

Amendment No. 27 would create two new categories of children to be protected from charges. Our initial assessment is that the amendment could result in about 40 per cent. of pupils being exempt from charges if all three criteria were to be applied. That would vary from place to place, but many local education authorities would probably not find it viable to put a local travel scheme in place. As a result, some of the anomalies that exist for poorer children who do not benefit from free transport at the moment—anomalies that we discussed in earlier debates—would remain in place in those areas. That would be an unintended consequence of a well-intentioned amendment. I shall come in a moment to the arguments that surround the amendment.

Amendment No. 34 would have a different effect. As drafted, it would remove protection from charges for pupils eligible for free school meals but extend it to pupils whose families are eligible for the working families tax credit. I am sure it that is not the intention, but it would switch the benefit from non-working families to those who are working but who are on moderate to low incomes.

It might be helpful to review the different categories of pupils covered by amendments Nos. 27 and 34. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford set out the eligibility for free school meals. Pupils are eligible if their parents are in receipt of income support, income-based job seekers allowance, support under part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, and child tax credit provided that they do not receive working tax credit and have an annual income not exceeding £13,480.

In a powerful contribution to the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) reminded us of some of the limitations of free school meals. The entitlement is relevant in three ways. First, it ensures that poor children get free meals, despite the problems of stigma that he described. I utterly decry the practice of separating those children eligible for free meals, and I am pleased to say that many schools do not follow that sort of practice. Secondly, free school meals can be used as a trigger for other benefits, which in a sense is what we are talking about today. Thirdly, free school meals can act as an indicator of deprivation, which then triggers other forms of funding. My hon. Friend will be interested to know that the rural schools group, which I chair, met last week and discussed those issues in a context broader than school transport.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford has also raised some legitimate questions. It is true that some 4 per cent. of parents do not take up their free school meal entitlement. The hon. Member for Fareham is right to say that the figure is higher in secondary than in primary schools. There is no reason for someone who has not taken up the meal entitlement not to take up the transport entitlement—one might be taken without the other—and we would encourage people to take up both. We are doing our best to address the stigma referred to explicitly by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford and implicitly by the hon. Member for Fareham, and and we are considering

making proposals, as soon as parliamentary time allows, for ways of making it easier and more private to check free school meal entitlement.

Let me say a word or two about rurality, then I shall return to the key contentious area in the amendment—the definition of poverty. The effect of the proposed amendment is impossible to judge as the rurality criterion is not firmly defined—to be fair, I must add that my hon. Friend acknowledged that. I understand the concern of parents and children living in rural areas, where the school bus is essential because of the long journeys that the children have to make. The Bill requires local authorities to provide school transport, as they do at the moment.

There are clearly large differences in character between rural areas. That came out in our discussion on Tuesday about local authorities' powers to come up with schemes for parts of their areas. One of the factors is different degrees of rurality. Some rural settlements contain a high proportion of people who commute to large cities and who might be affluent. In others, the economy is heavily reliant on farming and other primary industries, which can be vulnerable to shocks and changes to EU subsidies.

We want LEAs to develop schemes that reflect local circumstances, and we need to be sensitive to the needs of different communities covered by those authorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford made an important point about recognising their flexibility. I make a commitment to him to look again at the prospectus to ensure that it explicitly recognises the differences within LEAs, and even within rural communities. Both he and the hon. Member for Fareham mentioned the nature of fares. The Local Government Association's shire authority group not only supports the Bill but recommends that LEAs adopt flat-rate fares. The legislation does not require that, but it is a clear LGA recommendation.

Returning to the other issue, we have some estimates of the number of children who would fall into the different groups identified in the amendment. We know that about 1.4 million children are eligible for free school meals. Of relevance to amendments Nos. 27 and 34 is our assessment that a further 600,000 could claim if we set the limit at the maximum level for working tax credit. If we included all children in families eligible for WTC the number protected would rise to some 3 million—almost 40 per cent. of the pupil population.

It is sensible to limit the category of protected children to those in the poorest families, in order to give schemes greater capacity to help those who at present have to meet commercial bus fares from their own resources. The hon. Member for Fareham made the point about regionally based cut-offs. The proposal enables LEAs to have the flexibility, at regional and local level, to determine such issues for themselves.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

Is the Minister suggesting that entitlement might apply

at different income levels in different parts of a local authority's area?

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I was not suggesting that; I will have to reflect on whether we would consider it. I was suggesting that cut-off levels might differ between LEAs, not within them.

At this stage, I do not want to widen the category of protected children as is suggested in either of the amendments. However, I believe that a persuasive case has been put, especially by my hon. Friends, the members for Stafford and for Stroud. Therefore, I undertake to examine the merits of extending the protected child category to cover some of the poorest working families. I will report back to the House on our deliberations in due course.

Amendment No. 36 would exempt the fourth sibling and any subsequent siblings from charges where the first three siblings already pay charges for school transport. I acknowledge that the impact of charges for home-to-school transport is an important consideration, particularly for larger families. The families of at least of half of those travelling to school by bus or taxi do not receive free home-to-school transport, so the fares that larger families have to pay are likely to be particularly burdensome.

I am, however, confident that local education authorities, which are accountable to local communities, will reflect carefully on local circumstances, and it is unlikely that we will receive applications from authorities that do not reflect the important point about larger families. If we do receive such applications, the Bill contains mechanisms for the national authority—the Department for Education and Skills, or the National Assembly for Wales—to respond appropriately.

I fully agree with hon. Members on both sides that charging is a sensitive issue that needs to take account of family and local circumstances. The prospectus is sufficiently reassuring on those points. It asks scheme applicants to set out in detail their proposals for charging, which must have been consulted on locally, as we said on Tuesday. It emphasises that charges must be affordable and not pitched at a level that would increase car use. It also requires local schemes to take full account of the effects of family size and the pressures on low-income families. It requires scheme applicants to provide transparent information about local imbalances between areas generating and absorbing charges.

I am convinced that that is the right approach, and in the light of my assurances, I ask my hon. Friends and the hon. Gentleman not to press their amendments.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said that the key requirement was for LEAs to have maximum flexibility. I understand the Minister's position to be that setting the base entitlement at free school meals gives LEAs the maximum flexibility to make their own suggestions. These schemes are, in a sense, pilot schemes—the greater the flexibility, the greater the opportunity to see different models in play and to decide which one works best. I understand that argument, but one

question still nags at me: why is the base entitlement in England free school meals, but in Wales it is whatever the National Assembly sets? Is the Minister not being fairer to Wales than to England?

I agree with the hon. Member for Fareham that our concern is about the base entitlement. Should we simply leave it at free school meals and leave everything else to the guidance and the prospectus, over which we have no control, or should we, as legislators, say that the base entitlement should consist of other factors that we want to ensure are in every scheme?

The point of tabling an amendment was to ask for a debate on the matter. We have now had that debate, which was very useful. The hon. Member for Fareham argued against my proposal and made a point about bureaucracy: namely, the more conditions we impose as legislators, the more forms there are to fill in and the more questions there are to ask of people who take part in these schemes. I do not want that to happen, because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud pointed out, even now the take-up for free school meals—a fairly straightforward scheme—is still not brilliant. The more schemes we devise, the less the take-up will be.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

Is that not, in a sense, an argument against charging and against ending up with a complex system of concessionary fares, discounts and means-testing, all of which lead to lower take-up rates? Such complexities would not arise if we had free school transport.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

In a way, that is a naughty question in that it opens up the larger issues behind the Bill, rather than the amendment. The Bill has the potential to bring enormous benefits to many more people than the 10 per cent. of pupils who currently gain from free school meals. We need to develop through the pilots robust and simple schemes with a minimum of red tape. Again, I am in favour of experimenting.

I was interested to hear that my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud strongly supported what my amendment would do about rurality, which clearly the Minister should consider. However, I bear in mind the Minister's warning about the possible unintended consequence of the wording of my amendment. I obviously do not want to derail pilots that I support in principle. I also bear in mind his commitment to come back to us with the Department's thinking on working tax credit before we get to the end of our consideration of the Bill, I am happy to beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to move amendment No. 50, in

clause 1, page 3, line 11, at end insert—

(7A) Expenditure under the scheme may include—

(a) payment for transport arrangements,

(b) improving the safety of walking routes,

(c) purchase of assets that will be employed to further the objectives of the scheme, and

(d) infrastructure improvements that would meet the objectives of the scheme.'.

This is a relatively straightforward amendment. It would set out, with due clarity, what expenditure on the schemes can be used for. Sub-paragraph (a) is fairly straightforward; ''payment for transport arrangements'' should be covered under the Bill anyway.

As for sub-paragraphs (b), (c) and (d), under existing regulations, where a walking route to school is not safe, pupils are entitled to free transport. It would be a worthy use of some of the expenditure on the scheme, and perhaps of any revenue derived from charging, to improve the safety of walking routes to schools. That could be done by improving street lighting, for example. There is a road in my constituency that might benefit from street lighting, which would enable more children to use that road to walk to school. New pedestrian crossings could be installed to enable children to cross the road safely.

There are examples from overseas. When the Transport Committee considered the Bill it commented that in Denmark, legislation requires there to be a safe route to school for every child, and it gives a definition of a safe route. The legislation says that if there is no such route, free bus transport must be provided. There is a real imperative for the relevant authorities in Denmark to invest in safe routes in order to reduce the cost of free school transport. That sounds a sensible way of proceeding.

So often, the measures governing school transport arrangements that we talk about concern the hard assets that we can acquire, such as buses, equipment that will facilitate children getting to school, or minibuses. However, there are also softer areas that we could consider. On Second Reading, mention was made of the reduction in resources available for teaching children how to cycle safely to school. More resources to enable children—particularly those in urban areas—to cycle safely to school, such as cycling proficiency tests, might help to reduce congestion in urban areas where children do not have free school transport, and where many journeys are undertaken by car. Cycling to school might be a way of reducing congestion. Of course, in the context of the concern about childhood obesity, it would also improve the health of our children.

It is interesting to see what happens when some of those measures, including improving the quality of cycle training and road awareness, are introduced. According to the Select Committee's report, in York there has been a reduction of one quarter in child cycling casualties since training was introduced in 1993. That demonstrates some of the uses to which money available under the scheme could be put.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

I want to make some observations, and probe for more clarity on the amendment. When I first saw it, sub-paragraph (d) caught my eye. It mentions

''infrastructure improvements that would meet the objectives of the scheme.''

At first, I took that to mean that there was an intention to use money raised from parents to provide some kind of subsidy for general safety improvements on the roads. That struck me as being not the most appropriate road to go down, because I feared that

parents paying for school transport would, in the end, replace elements of the general highways budget. Then I reread the amendment, and saw that the very beginning mentions ''Expenditure under the scheme''. Presumably, that includes not just money raised through charging, but any money that the local authority wants to put in.

My problem is that local authorities do many things to make the environment generally safe for children, which overlap with school travel schemes. When auditing a scheme, we need to include elements that properly belong to it and exclude those elements that local authorities should be responsible for anyway, irrespective of whether school travel pilot schemes exist. I should hate a pilot run to raise money from parents and simply be a substitute for hard-pressed highways budgets elsewhere. Although the spirit of the amendment is fine, I am not entirely clear what it seeks to achieve.

Janet Dean (Labour, Burton)

I have sympathy with the amendment, although I have similar worries to the hon. Member for Southport. Some good safer routes to school schemes have been developed in my area and have provided infrastructure on the ground with extra crossings, footpaths and, in some cases, walking buses. We could argue that such developments could be expanded under the Bill to encourage more walking to school as well as more transport for children who have to travel longer distances. However, I am worried that it could be seen as though the money is coming from parents, even though there is general local taxation for school transport. I welcome the fact that local authorities might want to deal with matters on the ground within the school transport plans, but I do not want the effect of that to be that parents are charged to implement such developments.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

My hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mrs. Dean) and the hon. Member for Southport have raised an important issue, which related to one of our discussions on Tuesday. We want the proceeds of any new charges to support the improvement and expansion of measures to encourage safer and environmentally friendly routes to school and to reduce the car run, not used in the way that has been feared, which is to replace other forms of expenditure on local transport.

In ''Travelling to School: an action plan'', which we published jointly with the Department for Transport, we referred to several sources of funding that can be and are deployed to further the aim of more sustainable travel to school, including safer routes to school and capital investment being made available through local transport planning. In Wales, funding is available to local authorities through the transport grant, which also includes the ''Safer routes to school'' scheme.

Since September 2003, all local authorities in England have produced strategies showing how they will draw on the full range of local resources to

support sustainable travel to school. We want scheme areas to use the Bill to support arrangements that offer a range of good quality, cost-effective alternatives to the family car on the home-to-school journey. Schemes do not only have to enhance bus travel; they could focus in whole or in part on increased cycling, car sharing or walking. The fundamental principle behind the Bill is that we want local education authorities to develop schemes that will meet local priorities.

The schemes will run for several years and might reveal innovative new ways in which to achieve a shift to more sustainable transport modes. Some categories are set out in the amendment, but it is not an exhaustive list. One category could be the purchase of car-sharing software or the training of staff to use it. Another might be funding for cycle training to support the installation of new cycle routes. The example of York was powerful. I welcome the proposal as a probing amendment to enable me to put those points on the record, but I hope that the hon. Member for Fareham agrees that such matters are best handled through the prospectus. I therefore ask him to withdraw the amendment.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

Both the hon. Members for Southport and for Burton referred to the use to which generating charges could be put, but let us not forget that there is already a significant amount of local authority expenditure on school transport schemes. It is not just the charge revenue that could be used: there could be ways of using the existing costs to achieve some of the Bill's objectives.

Janet Dean (Labour, Burton)

I did mention that a lot of the money that funds school transport comes from the council tax payer. However, we do not want it to seem as though charges are funding highway schemes, which should be paid for through general taxation.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The hon. Lady identifies a real risk. As the hon. Member for Southport said: how does one audit the use to which money is put under school transport schemes? For example, should a safe cycle route to a school be paid for through the scheme or through other aspects of the highways budget? In many areas, cycle routes put down to encourage cycling to school have been paid for out of pots other than that for school transport. People are concerned that the money could be used to meet shortfalls in other aspects of the budget. Even if the amendment is withdrawn, the same charge will be levelled at any other scheme that is proposed.

I hope that local authorities will recognise the opportunity to implement a wide range of measures to improve safety. Many secondary schools with catchment areas of 3 miles that do not have free transport will be considering local authority ideas to reduce traffic congestion. A school in my constituency has considered buying minibuses to reduce congestion on busy suburban roads by getting pupils out of their parents' cars and into school minibuses. People in suburban areas might look to similar schemes as a way of using both the proceeds from charging and school transport money.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

This is a slightly technical point, but if one puts money from charging into an account and

calls it a school travel scheme expenditure account, and allows it to be spent on infrastructure improvement, which is simply general safety improvement, one cannot preclude the possibility that a local authority will use money that parents have paid to get their children to school to pay for pavement improvements.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The hon. Gentleman is right: the schemes will allow that. Nothing that the Minister has said contradicts that.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I sought to address that issue at the beginning of my remarks. We will not look kindly on schemes that seek to use money raised directly from charging to pay for general local transport expenditure. We want to see a direct relationship between moneys raised and improvements to the home-to-school run to reduce car use in the way that I set out. There are already charges for those who do not benefit from the current arrangements, so, what the hon. Gentleman describes could happen already.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The Minister's clarification is useful, but unless he and his Department intend to vet every use to which the money is put, some will inevitably leak out into general transport improvements. That is the reality of the situation; if local authorities are so inclined, they will find ways to use the money for general transport improvements. Unless the Minister recruits more civil servants to check every item of expenditure, the good intentions set forth in the scheme rules might well be ignored.

The debate has been useful in flushing out this issue. I hope that the Minister will think carefully about how scheme applications can be vetted to ensure that money is ring-fenced and used only for school transport plans rather than being filtered off for other transport improvements. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

I beg to move amendment No. 28, in page 3, line 14, at end insert—

'(1A) In deciding whether or not to approve a school travel scheme the appropriate national authority shall have regard to its compliance with the terms of the prospectus published by the Secretary of State.'.

Bill O'Brien (Labour, Normanton)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 55, in page 3, line 19, at end insert—

'(1A) In their application to the national authority, the scheme authority shall publish the measures that it will use to determine whether or not it should seek to exercise the powers set out in 9(1) during the pilot, including—

(a) the impact on traffic congestion,

(b) the proportion of children using different ways of travelling,

(c) the effect of charging on car usage,

(d) the impact on families on low incomes,

(e) the impact on children with special educational needs,

(f) the impact on after-school activities and extended schools, and

(g) the impact on school choice, including the education of children in accordance with the religious, philosophical or linguistic preferences of their parents.'.

Amendment No. 61, in page 3, line 20, leave out sub-paragraph (2).

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

Many times in the debate so far we have heard reference to the prospectus, but I do not think that the Bill itself contains any references to it. The amendment seeks to include a mention and would require Ministers or the Assembly to check that a travel scheme up for approval complies with the prospectus.

The issue reminds me of my legal training. When a legal document mentions another document to which people are going to refer, that other document must, for certainty, be properly identified. We ought at least to be sure what the Bill will refer local authorities to in their deliberations and what, therefore, the Minister will be looking at when local authorities propose schemes for approval.

Under the Bill as drafted, a local authority may produce a scheme that continues the present transport arrangements for pupils who are more than two or three miles away from school, and so on, and the Minister or Assembly must approve it. That is it. However, there are some vital things in the prospectus that we as legislators would want the Minister to take into account when deciding whether to approve a scheme.

For example, on the objective of modal shift, the prospectus is clear that the intention of such schemes is to try to persuade people to take fewer cars on the road at school start and finish times. We would like people to come forward with schemes that say so. We have also debated fair charging, which we are all anxious about. We would like the scheme produced for approval to comply with the prospectus as drafted, to ensure that there is a fair charging scheme.

Again, the prospectus requires quite extensive local consultation, although during the Committee's first sitting the Minister said that it could go a little further. The answer to the pertinent question of what the Minister would do where a scheme for approval had not had adequate local consultation was that perhaps—only perhaps—the scheme would not be approved. If the amendment were accepted, however, perhaps a Minister would say, ''I will not approve a scheme that does not comply with the prospectus''.

To give some examples, what if a scheme came to the Minister that was hotly contested locally, but had not been consulted on well? What would the Minister do in those circumstances? What if the local education authority completely ignored the prospectus, but put forward a creditable scheme and the Minister proposed to approve it? What could local people who objected do about that? What if a local authority scrupulously followed everything in the prospectus, but the Minister said that the scheme would not be approved?

Those examples are extremes, but, because the Bill does not mention the prospectus, dissatisfied people in such cases would take to the law courts to have their day. Since we are legislators who would like our legislation to be certain and unnecessary legal challenges to be avoided, we should take the precaution of inserting a reference to the prospectus. With my legal hat on, I think that that is sensible,

although I would be interested to hear what the Minister says with his political hat on.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

I shall speak to amendment No. 61, in my name, and say, at the risk of breaking the consensual atmosphere, that it is not a probing amendment.

Local authorities are free to decide whether to involve themselves in a pilot scheme, and throughout our deliberations we have heard what I call the ''Twigg defence''—if they do not like it, they do not have to do it. That is a legitimate response. Indeed, on Tuesday the Minister said:

''There is no compulsion in the Bill; neither is compulsion implied by it.''—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 9 November 2004; c. 67.]

If the Bill was to be consistent, however, local authorities would be able to withdraw from the pilot as easily as they could enter it; but under paragraph 9(1) and (2) of proposed new schedule 35B to the Education Act 1996, a local authority that enters into the scheme cannot withdraw from it without

''the consent of the appropriate national authority.''

The libertarian streak that inspired most of the Bill has been temporarily put to one side, and the authoritarian streak has re-entered those provisions. My amendment would withdraw it.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

That is fine for a local authority that seeks to withdraw because it has found that it does not like what it has signed up to. The amendment would enable it to amend the scheme without the Secretary of State's approval. Surely, if my amendment were passed, the authority was totally compliant with the prospectus and the Minister approved it on day one, on day two it could amend the scheme to take out all the things that we thought we were safeguarding.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

I think that it could amend it within the terms of the original application that had been approved. Perhaps the Minister will shed some light on that. I am more concerned about revocation.

At the moment, this bit of the Bill is a disincentive to local authorities to engage in the pilot scheme. I wrote to my local authority, Hampshire county council, to ask for its views. It specifically referred to this paragraph, stating:

''The current proposal is a disincentive to participation and an unnecessary level of central control.''

Local authorities are concerned about that, and in the case of my local authority it may influence its decision about whether to become involved.

I want to explain why the amendment is important. Let us take the case of a local authority that, in good faith, introduces a scheme, which is improved, but after six months, two things happen. First, the authority does not achieve its objectives and does not get the modal shift that was hoped for. More importantly, let us say for the sake of argument that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister decides to rate-cap the authority and it has to reduce its expenditure in a relatively short time. It would

consider all the options available—such as libraries, road maintenance and social services—and it might consider the option of withdrawing from the pilot, partly because it was not reaching the objectives, but partly to get expenditure down.

The Minister conceded on Tuesday that an authority was likely to have to increase its expenditure if it were involved in the pilot scheme. He said:

''The sum that we are talking about in pump-priming is too small for that.''—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 9 November 2004; c. 68.]

In other words, the pump-priming money available from the Government is too small to fund a scheme. In a short space of time, the authority might want to withdraw from the pilot scheme in order to meet the requirement from the ODPM to reduce its expenditure. At the moment, it cannot do that without a decision from the Department.

The Minister may say that the application would be quickly turned round, but every single member of the Committee knows that Departments are not always quick at making decisions. The ODPM has just sent out a letter that says that people will have to wait 12 months before their planning appeal is even heard. From our correspondence with Departments, we know that Ministers are not always quick to make decisions. There is an inbuilt delay that may fetter the discretion of a local authority when deciding how best to respond to a demand from another Department to reduce its expenditure.

If the local authority is grown up enough to decide whether to enter a scheme, it is grown up enough to decide whether to leave it. It should not need the approval of the appropriate national authority to withdraw and go back to the default position, where it was before it embarked on the pilot. It would have to comply with all the other legislation, but it would just want to go back to square one.

We heard a little earlier about unnecessary bureaucracy. That provision is an unnecessary piece of bureaucracy. The authority has to write to the Department, the Minister has to get advice, and consultation has to take place through the Government office for the south-east, or the Government office for the north-east, or whichever Government Department is appropriate. The decision, I assume, is then subject to judicial review, as Ministers have to act reasonably. It can slow the whole process. I genuinely do not see why the provision that one cannot go back to where one was without the consent of the appropriate national authority is in the Bill.

The hon. Member for Stafford may have a point about amendments, and I am open to persuasion on that. I look forward with mounting anticipation to hearing why the Minister thinks that the provision is consistent with the tone of the Bill, and with the degree of responsibility that he expects local authorities to exercise, and whether he can give some indication that he will revisit the issue and whether, if he will not accept my amendment, he will undertake to introduce one of his own that gives the flexibility and speed of response that I am after. I am encouraged to see that

my speech has generated some activity from the civil servants on the Bench, and that the Minister is getting some in-flight refuelling while the debate continues. At the appropriate time, I might wish to push the amendment to a Division.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

My right hon. Friend's objection is valid. There is a danger that, if a scheme were disastrous for a local community, the unfortunate and detrimental effects would be allowed to persist until the Secretary of State had made up his mind. He might not agree to the scheme's revocation or amendment, and such effects might continue until the termination of the pilot at the end of its natural life.

I shall not talk at length about amendment No. 55; I shall come to it when we debate amendment No. 52. However, it is important that when an authority draws together a scheme it should set out the criteria for its amendment or revocation. When the pilots are taking place, we need to be careful not to allow schemes to go on from year to year without understanding the impacts on the local community. It is important to be clear about schemes' measures of success when applications are developed. If a scheme is not succeeding in achieving its objectives, it should be amended or revoked. Local people would feel far more comfortable with the consultation process and the scheme if they felt that scheme authorities had a clear idea of the objectives and that, if such objectives were not met, scheme authorities would amend or revoke them.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

The hon. Member for Stafford is a good friend of the Minister because he points continually to work that still needs to be done. The Minister has had a fairly easy ride during this debate; he has said, ''It's all in the prospectus; do not worry about it. You can trust us—honest.'' As we have not seen the prospectus, we have no real comeback on that. The hon. Member for Stafford appears to suggest that the prospectus should be used as a kind of benchmarking exercise.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

I feel some disbelief at the hon. Gentleman's claim that we have not seen a prospectus. There have been two publications of the prospectus so far, and the Minister has promised a third. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he has not seen them?

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

I am not saying that I have not seen them, but that we are waiting for the third prospectus, which has been promised in time for our debates on Report. Presumably, only that prospectus will take on board the deliberations of the Standing Committee. Nevertheless, as the hon. Gentleman proved in his intervention, the prospectus is something of a movable feast. I firmly anticipate that once we have seen a prospectus on Third Reading, there will be a subsequent one and another after that, which will be introduced under the label of flexibility. Some of the hard and firm criteria that we thought were there in the first place will gradually be eroded or vanish.

There is merit in the amendments tabled by the hon. Members for Stafford and for Fareham. The hon. Member for Fareham's amendment No. 55 would require a set of clear objectives for the legislation; a

mechanics by which the working of the Bill could be evaluated. I back off from demanding targets, but the Bill should be fairly explicit on how schemes will be evaluated. The hon. Member for Fareham has considered, and lists, many ways in which the Bill could be evaluated. The problem would be in deciding how to wait for such objectives. The last objective is on how school choice and people's ability to attend a variety of schools would be encouraged. Earlier objectives are about the need to reduce the amount of congestion on the road and the number of routes that pupils follow to school.

I would be intrigued to find out how a mature and considered judgment would be arrived at when the evaluation along the lines suggested by the hon. Gentleman had taken place. Although all the objectives are worthy, one scheme would score highly on one, but dismally on another—and vice versa.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I do not wish to prolong this debate unnecessarily. However, the schemes are complex; different criteria of success will be used. Is the hon. Gentleman advocating that there should be one measure of success for the schemes?

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

I am not advocating this legislation at all, so I do not need to apologise for it. I simply point out the obvious and true point that under amendment No. 55 one of the criteria for evaluation is the effect of charging on car usage, and another criterion is

''the impact on school choice, including the education of children in accordance with the religious, philosophical or linguistic preferences of their parents.''

Both of those objectives are entirely worthy. However, a scheme that scores highly on one of them may not score highly on the other, in which case a judgment will need to be made—I do not know on what criteria—about whether the scheme is a success. That is an intrinsic difficulty in the legislation, which I make no effort to defend.

Amendment No. 61 appears to increase discretion for local authorities, and I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about it. As the hon. Member for Stafford pointed out, one of its effects would be not that local authorities could simply back out of a scheme when financial circumstances arise that make it impossible for it comfortably to continue with it, but that they could amend a scheme without any further reference to anybody else.

Parents are a group of people who should be referred to at that point. They are intimately a part of the scheme, and the local authority has made a commitment to them. Local authorities might adjust to the kinds of financial pressure sketched by the hon. Gentleman not by backing out of a scheme but by substantially bumping up the prices for the parents who are in it; they might modify the terms and conditions, or reduce the numbers of those who are covered in the scheme as a protected child, or alter the provision for special educational needs.

That all seems to follow consequentially from allowing authorities entire discretion to modify schemes when the need arises. I am not bothered in the slightest about them backtracking on

commitments made to central Government in this regard, but I am concerned about them backtracking on commitments made to parents who will be expecting schemes to be delivered over a number of years.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

My amendment would enable local authorities to amend or revoke a travel scheme without the consent of the appropriate national authority. As I understand it, a local authority can amend or revoke a travel scheme if it wants to do so. All I am saying is that if they want to do that they should not have to refer it to the appropriate national authority. They should of course refer it to everybody else. My amendment would delete sub-paragraph (2).

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about the effect of the amendment. I simply put on record my concern that the scenario that the right hon. Gentleman describes whereby a local authority extracts itself from an arrangement might not at the end of the day be particularly displeasing to the Government because they can simply accuse the local authority of bad faith, but it might be fundamentally problematic to a range of families that are expecting the scheme to continue to run for a period of time.

The legislation is not simply about pilots, although we are largely talking about them; it allows schemes to be implemented for an indefinite period.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

Amendment No. 28 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford. We have always made the prospectus available alongside the Bill because it sets out what we want scheme authorities to do. We have always said that we will use the process and criteria set out in the prospectus in deciding on which local schemes to approve. There is a great amount of goodwill in LEAs about that, and we do not foresee that any LEA would enter into a scheme agreement and then do something completely different.

However, if something does go wrong, remedies are available. The Secretary of State could require a scheme LEA to meet its obligations through either section 496 or section 497 of the Education Act 1996. Section 496 would apply if the scheme authority were acting, or proposed to act, unreasonably. Section 497 would apply where an LEA failed to discharge a duty.

Nevertheless, my hon. Friend—along with other Committee members—has reminded me that I have relied on the prospectus in a number of these discussions, and he has raised some legitimate questions about including a reference to the prospectus in the Bill.

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

Having just now seen the prospectus for the first time, I wonder whether a few copies could be made available for the Committee's afternoon sitting.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I have no problem with making paper copies available; the prospectus is also available on the

Department's website, but we will ensure that paper copies are available for the afternoon sitting.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford has raised perfectly legitimate questions, and I want to reflect on the points that he made and return to the matter. I have no problem in principle with the idea that the prospectus should be mentioned in the Bill. However, I am not in a position to accept the amendment, and I ask him, in the light of my assurance to him, to withdraw it.

Talking about amendment No. 61, tabled by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), I want to make it clear that paragraph 9 of the new schedule is intended to allow LEAs that have established school travel schemes, whether as pilots or longer-term schemes, to amend or revoke them in the light of their experience of operating them. Sub-paragraphs (2), (3) and (4) provide that a scheme authority wanting to make such changes must apply to the Secretary of State or the National Assembly for Wales and obtain consent before revocation or amendment.

The amendment would remove sub-paragraph (2). The right hon. Gentleman's intention is clearly to remove the requirement to obtain consent, as he has explained. I think that the other sub-paragraphs, too, would need to be removed to achieve the result that he wants.

There is a key distinction to be made in this context, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford pointed out—indeed, the right hon. Gentleman conceded the point—between the powers to amend and the powers to revoke. We are putting in place arrangements for all proposed travel schemes to be examined and approved in the first place by the appropriate national authority before schemes can start. That, of course, is the effect of paragraph 8 of new schedule 35B.

It strikes me that after taking the trouble to assess LEAs' planned travel scheme arrangements and checking that each scheme accorded with the underlying principles set out in the prospectus, it would be perverse to allow schemes then to be altered without further reference to the relevant national authority. Without the safeguard of a requirement for such consent, scheme authorities could alter their charging regime, remove transport provision without adequate warning or alter their arrangements in such a way that the aims of the scheme would not be achieved; the hon. Member for Southport gave examples of that possibility.

I will give the Committee an undertaking—another Twigg undertaking, perhaps. We shall study the prospectus with regard to this issue, to ensure that similar consultation will be required at local level—to deal with the point made by the hon. Member for Southport. If amendments were proposed by a local authority, that would require a consultation similar to the one required in the first place to establish such a scheme.

I suspect that there is consensus in the Committee on that aspect of the amendment—that the power to amend a scheme should still entail a requirement to

refer to the national authority. I do not believe that LEAs will behave unreasonably in such matters, but we think that some sort of check is needed. We would not want schemes to be revoked suddenly, or without good reason. The requirement to obtain consent before revoking a scheme signals clearly to LEAs that their travel schemes are medium to long-term commitments that should not be lightly entered into or abandoned.

Mr. Hoban rose—

Mrs. Dean rose—

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I shall give way first to the hon. Gentleman and then to my hon. Friend.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

May I put a possibility to the Minister? If a scheme were introduced across the whole of an LEA, and it proved so unpopular that after an election control of the LEA changed to another party—the crucial issue being the scheme's impact on parents, children and schools—it would need to be revoked quickly, without reference to the Secretary of State. The will of the people would have been expressed clearly at the ballot box.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point, and I shall respond to it in a moment, but first I shall take my hon. Friend's intervention.

Janet Dean (Labour, Burton)

Will my hon. Friend assure us that on revocation there would be consultation with parents and the general public similar to the consultation about amendment of the scheme? People who gained from a scheme would be affected by its being revoked.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

My hon. Friend raises an interesting and important point.

The concern raised by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire has not been raised with us directly by any local education authority during consultation, and a significant number of authorities have responded. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the right hon. Gentleman has set out the concerns of Hampshire county council—which clearly decided to write to its excellent MP rather than to the Minister or the Department.

There is a great need to be careful about the potential effects of revocation on parents and children, as my hon. Friend has suggested. In general the Department advises that changes in school transport policy should, for example, not commence until the start of the school year, for obvious practical reasons concerned with parents and pupils' planning.

Nevertheless, the right hon. Gentleman has raised a legitimate issue about revocation, although not amendment. I undertake to the Committee that I shall consider that aspect of the amendment further, in the light of what he and other hon. Members have said, as well as the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mrs. Dean) about ensuring that there is a mechanism for local consultation on revocation. In the light of that assurance, I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will not press his amendment.

Amendment No. 55 would insert an additional sub-paragraph into paragraph 9 of new schedule 35B—a

non-exhaustive list of criteria that would in effect be used by individual scheme authorities to set their own performance measures. I agree that we need to set out clearly what we expect school travel schemes to achieve, and the list in the amendment closely reflects the success criteria in paragraphs 8 to 10 of the draft prospectus.

The amendment suggests that the authorities should be obliged to adhere to set detailed success criteria in primary legislation, rather than using the more flexible approach that we have set out. We do not think that that approach is in keeping with our desire that authorities should make a thorough assessment of the needs of their area and, from that, develop appropriate objectives and targets for local schemes. We think that the more devolved approach is more in keeping with the spirit of the Bill and the desire for local innovation and autonomy. In the light of that, I ask the hon. Member for Fareham not to press the amendment.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

My concern is of course for my amendment, but in responding to the debate I congratulate the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire on raising an important issue, which has given rise to an important debate.

I urge the right hon. Gentleman to accept the distinction drawn by the Minister between amendment and revocation, and I appeal to both to have regard to the idea of a de minimis provision. Surely we do not want widespread consultation and applications to Ministers for approval for very trivial changes to schemes.

As for my amendment, I have won, so it would be gracious of me to withdraw it, and I will ask the Committee for leave to do so.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

During the debate we seem to have stumbled across an omission in the Bill. As I understand it, the Bill would enable an authority to amend or revoke a school travel scheme with the approval of the appropriate national authority. However, it is not made clear that it should first consult with what are called the stakeholders. Do I understand from the Minister that under the Bill a scheme authority could obtain the approval of the Department to amend or revoke the scheme without having gone round the course with all those involved? Is that the present position, and will the Minister put it right?

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I am happy to look into that and give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that he seeks. As the national authority, we will clearly not be in the business of giving approval to changes at local level that do not have that support. However, if that is not sufficiently clear, I shall consider whether an amendment is required to the Bill or the prospectus.

George Young (Conservative, North West Hampshire)

I think that the Minister is saying that if the local authority had not consulted on amending the scheme, the national authority would not give approval. I am happy with that, and I can see the distinction drawn by the hon. Member for Stafford between amendment and revocation. I was rather hoping for a Division, but as the Minister has given an undertaking to consider the point that I raised, it

would be churlish to press the matter, and when the time comes, I shall not move my amendment.

David Kidney (Labour, Stafford)

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to move amendment No. 37, in

clause 1, page 3, line 41, at end insert—

'Annual report by scheme authority

11A (1) The scheme authority will present an annual report to the appropriate national authority setting out an assessment of the effectiveness of the scheme in the relevant school year to include—

(a) the revenue and costs of the scheme,

(b) the number of pupils affected,

(c) the number of pupils being charged,

(d) an assessment of the impact on children with special educational needs,

(e) an assessment of the impact of the scheme on school choice, including denominational schools and Welsh language schools, and

(f) an assessment of the impact of the scheme on traffic volumes.

(2) The annual report under subparagraph (1) shall be presented to the appropriate national authority by 31 December following the end of the school year to which the report relates.

Power of national authority to revoke scheme

11B Following the receipt of the annual report, the appropriate national authority may amend or revoke the scheme if it is failing to meet its objectives.

Annual report by appropriate national authority

11C The appropriate national authority shall lay before Parliament an annual report compiled from the reports received from scheme authorities as required under paragraph 11A(1).'.

The amendment has three purposes. The first is to require scheme authorities to submit an annual report, and I have suggested in a non-exhaustive fashion some of the topics that it might cover. To refer back to comments made by the hon. Member for Southport, although we oppose the provision, it is important to try to improve its effectiveness. We need to give more guidance to local authorities about their obligations under the scheme and about how they can best communicate what they have achieved to the national authority—the Department for Education and Skills—and to Members of Parliament, so that we are made aware of progress.

My proposed new paragraph 11A sets out some of the topics that an annual report to the national authority should cover and the deadline for submitting it to the Department. Proposed new paragraph 11B is an authoritarian measure, in the sense that it gives greater powers to the Secretary of State. The current situation, which bears slightly on the previous debate, is that scheme authorities can seek changes or the revocation of a scheme during the pilot phase. The Secretary of State does not have the power to bring the scheme to a halt or to force it to be amended.

There may be circumstances in which such action ought to take place: where the effects on the local community are so significant that it would be inappropriate for a scheme to continue, based on the information supplied by the local authority to the relevant national authority. The proposed new

paragraph 11B gives the Secretary of State a power where the scheme does not meet its objectives. It is not a blanket power; it asks what the scheme seeks to achieve. The prospectus sets out some of the things that it could achieve, and the application will set out what it seeks to achieve, but if it does not achieve those objectives, the Secretary of State should have the opportunity to revoke or to amend it.

Proposed new paragraph 11C aims to ensure that Members of Parliament have the opportunity to look at the consequences of the scheme on the local level. In many respects, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to legislate on school transport. When the pilots come to an end there will be a chance to examine the effects and, possibly, for the pilots to be revoked and terminated at that point. It is important that throughout the life of the pilots we have the opportunity to understand what the impacts are. That would allow us to understand whether school choice is affected, what the impact will be on rural communities and whether the scheme has achieved its objectives in terms of reducing traffic congestion.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I agree that we need an annual report from each school travel scheme area, so that central and local government can watch schemes develop and ensure that lessons learned from the pilot authorities are also available to others. However, I do not agree that the requirement for annual reporting has to be set out in primary legislation.

In the prospectus, we explain that LEAs with approved schemes will be required to produce an annual report for the DFES or the National Assembly, which must contain an account of what has gone well and what has gone badly, and the views of key partners. It already covers most of the areas listed in the amendment, and we are content to add additional text relating to denominational and Welsh-medium schools.

In drafting the Bill we decided that we did not want to give the Secretary of State or the National Assembly powers to revoke or vary school travel schemes, as we see those as local initiatives, and authorities are accountable in their localities. The proposed amendment would give a power the need for which was not raised during the public consultation or pre-legislative scrutiny, and it goes very much against the spirit of the amendment proposed by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire in the previous group. We think that we have probably got the balance right, and in the light of that I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn

Sitting suspended for two minutes' silence.

On resuming—

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to move amendment No. 51, in page 3, line 41, at end insert—

(11A) The Secretary of State shall publish his opinion on the way in which schemes should be structured so as to ensure compliance

with the Human Rights Act 1998 (c.42) including but not limited to compliance with Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.'.

I tabled the amendment because of an important issue, which we have already touched on from time to time, that underpins the Bill: how to ensure that school transport schemes provide for parental choice to be expressed but in a way that complies with the European convention on human rights.

Paragraph 99 of the report on the Bill produced by the Selection Committee on Education and Skills says:

''The human rights implications of school travel schemes are complex and we have found evidence of existing confusion over legal obligations. In this context, the guidance given to LEAs in the draft Prospectus is woefully inadequate.''

That refers to the original prospectus, not to the revised prospectus published in the past couple of weeks. Paragraph 99 continues:

''It is unacceptable simply to state that local authorities should take legal advice before submitting their applications. The Government should provide clearer guidance to LEAs on those school transport practices which it considers would be discriminatory, particularly as the Secretary of State could be subject to legal action for approving any discriminatory scheme. The Government should pay heed to the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the draft Bill when drawing up this guidance.''

It is very important that guidance is available, because this is a complex area. The Joint Committee on Human Rights scrutinised the Bill in its 17th report, which says:

''In our letters to Ministers we pointed out that in the prospectus there is a suggestion that the Department itself is not clear about the Article 14 obligation''.{**W4**}

The Government's lack of clarity needs to be addressed. The Committee continued:

''we are disappointed that it is not anticipated that the guidance given in the revised prospectus will be comprehensive, and that there is no equivalent undertaking from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools to issue new general guidance to schools expressly addressing the discrimination problem. The Government appears to be maintaining the position taken in the prospectus accompanying the draft Bill that it is for LEAs to decide for themselves whether their schemes are discriminatory . . . The Draft Explanatory Notes are to the same effect''.

The Committee also highlighted the confusion of some LEAs about the obligation to subsidise transport to denominational schools, although the Government do not agree that there is any misapprehension. As we heard on Tuesday, free transport to denominational schools is a matter of guidance rather than being a statutory entitlement.

Given that the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales, as the relevant national bodies, will have to approve LEA schemes, and given that they themselves will have to be clear about the compatibility of those schemes with the convention, the Committee suggested that it was appropriate that the relevant national authorities should ensure that the LEAs are properly guided on the compatibility of their schemes before submitting them for approval. The Committee went on to advocate that, as the National Assembly for Wales will issue new general guidance, the Government, too, should undertake that task. I do not mean that they should give legal advice, but that they should issue guidance on how the obligation

should be implemented when it comes to school transport plans.

The amendment seeks to ensure that the Government produce general guidance to local education authorities, in order to ensure that school transport schemes are not in breach of the European convention on human rights and that they are not discriminatory.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I agree that it is important that local education authorities should consider human rights questions when structuring their schemes. Whether or not individual schemes comply will of course depend on their precise features. The legal duty to ensure that they comply falls on individual local education authorities; but in a sense it is a shared responsibility, as the Secretary of State or National Assembly for Wales should not approve schemes that do not comply. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we in the Department for Education and Skills should give as much help as we can to local education authorities, accepting that we cannot foresee all the issues that might be raised.

The draft prospectus was produced when the Bill underwent pre-legislative scrutiny, and public consultation included a section on human rights. We did not receive any responses on human rights issues during that consultation. However, the Education and Skills Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights both recommended that the Department should produce more detailed guidance for local education authorities on human rights. For example, they wanted us to include material explaining that LEAs must afford equal treatment to parents with strong philosophical and religious views, and give a careful steer on those areas likely to pose particular practical problems.

I am pleased to say that longer and more detailed guidance is contained in the latest version of the prospectus. The sections were forwarded to the Joint Committee in September, and they now include some helpful suggestions from the Clerk of that Committee. We have not yet received any advice from the Committee, but we will make further changes if they are needed.

The guidance explains that three principles underpin human rights obligations in that area. First, every child has the right to an education. Secondly, parents have the right for their child to be educated in accordance with their philosophical and religious convictions. However, there is no absolute right to attend a school of a particular religion and therefore no right to free or subsidised transport to those schools. Thirdly, discrimination is illegal, unless objectively and reasonably justified.

The guidance goes on to explain that the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales will not approve school travel schemes that are incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. It then deals with specific situations that we envisage, such as local schools that do not cater for parents' religious or philosophical beliefs or linguistic preferences. That was already set out in the guidance.

I hope that the hon. Member for Fareham will agree that we have made considerable progress. We are in discussions with the Joint Committee, and we await its guidance in that respect. I repeat the commitment that we will make whatever changes are necessary in light of their comments. I therefore ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I am grateful for the Minister's response. I ask him to endeavour to ensure that the Joint Committee comments on the guidance before Report. Given the reservations expressed in its report, it is important that they are properly dealt with and that the Committee is satisfied with the guidance. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Motion made, and Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill:—

The Committee divided: Ayes 9, Noes 4.

Clause 2 - Piloting of new provisions

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

I want to ask the Minister about subsection (2). The explanatory notes say:

''It is currently anticipated that regulations will impose a limit of 20 school travel schemes in England.''

Will the Minister tell us why the Government feel that it is necessary to impose such a limit on the number of school travel schemes? There are a couple of explanations for that. The first relates to the cost to public funds, but that is surely an argument for limiting the amount of taxpayer subsidy that can be given under the Bill, which it is not included in the clause and is not a reason for reducing or limiting the number of schemes. The only rational explanation for including this centralising control power is because the Government want to control the whole process through rationing. As you know, Mr. O'Brien, that is the preferred socialist method of control, which in turn leads to queuing and can be linked to the ability of the Government to allow its own pet local authorities to jump the queue. That is what this limit is about, and it is the only reason for the inclusion of subsection (2).

Some school travel schemes would not need to be expensive. For example, it would not cost so much to have staggered school starting and finish times. Some

schemes could result in the generation of additional revenue. A local authority, for example, might wish to introduce a radical travel plan including the power to charge parents of children living in the 3-mile limit, but not charge those who live further from the school than that. Giving children access to a bus provided for school transport would prevent them travelling to school by car. Such a scheme would give additional income to the local education authority and would not impose any costs.

Why should those sort of imaginative schemes be limited by number? Surely the important thing is to ensure that all the proposed travel schemes are of sufficient quality to merit acceptance by the Government. I hope that the Minister will accept that by including subsection (2) the Government are relying again—as so often in the past—on patronage and favouritism.

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

The stand part debate gives me the opportunity to draw the Committee's attention to something that I hope could go into the piloting of the new provisions, especially under subsection (3), which says:

''Power to make regulations under subsection (1) is exercisable by statutory instrument.''

I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to consider ensuring sufficient protection to avoid overcrowding. I mentioned that earlier in Committee, and I am grateful to the Clerk, officials and Ministers with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss the subject.

My main concern is about what is known as the three-for-two rule. I, of course, would like that rule abolished in all cases. The issue has come to my attention because of the situation in my constituency. I am talking about service buses—not contracted buses—such as the No. 69, which goes from Chepstow to Monmouth. On reaching the village of Llandogo, it used to have a number of passengers on board. Then, it would take on 40 to 50 pupils, and then some more passengers. Such buses were particularly overcrowded, and the seating capacity of the bus on any particular day determined the level of overcrowding, which was sometimes gross; I have been on the buses in that situation.

My main concern is that the local authority entered into contracts with the bus operator—at the time, it was Stagecoach—that almost assumed that there would be overcrowding, or institutionalised overcrowding, as buses call it, because of the company's ability to take advantage of the three-for-two concession. I understand that the rule goes back to the Education Act 1944 but, more importantly, it is also in the Public Service Vehicles (Carrying Capacity) Regulations 1984, which say—this is mainly in relation to the number of seated passengers—that,

''subject to sub-paragraph (a) above, three seated children each of whom is under 14 years of age and none of whom are occupying a seat provided with a seat belt shall count as two passengers.''

So three under-14s can sit on a double seat. That means that a bus with 52 seats could technically take 52 plus 26 passengers, if they were all under 14—and not under 15, as I told the Committee on Tuesday.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

How is that rule policed in practice?

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

Well, it is certainly policed by the parents of the children of Llandogo. The considerable representations that I made to my local authority meant that eventually the situation was changed. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, because there was no sort of approval to check whether pupils who happened to sit on overcrowded buses were under 14. In many cases it is likely that there would have been one under-14 and a couple of over-14s sitting on the same double seat.

As parents point out, children are heavier than they were in 1944. They are bigger, and are more likely to carry more equipment to school. I saw pupils carrying their school bag—some of them were still carrying satchels—and a kit bag, trombone case or violin case. Many of them were standing, too; it was a horrendous situation. One could not imagine a school trip to Tintern abbey, which is in my constituency and is down the road from Llandogo, on which pupils were allowed to sit or stand on such a bus. There would have to be risk assessments, but no such assessments were made in the case that I mentioned.

There was no obligation on the Health and Safety Executive to look into the matter. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to try to ensure, in the piloting of the new provisions, that a safeguard to ensure that the three-for-two rule is not implemented, and will not be taken advantage of by the commercial bus companies.

I had a mischievous thought when coming to Committee this morning. The prospectus, which I have only recently seen, says that there will be open evaluation of the pilots. I do not have the legal training that some of my hon. Friends have, but I am a social scientist, and am interested in evaluation, policy-related research and the ability to evaluate policy in order to improve it. I wondered there could be, as in a randomised control trial, one pilot in which we were insistent that the three-for-two rule would not be applied—say, a pilot in Burton that extended to near the River Trent—and another pilot that actually maximised the three-for-two rule. We could call that the Moorlands pilot; in that case, the bus would be allowed to carry an excessive number of children under the three-for-two rule. If those pilots were evaluated, I am sure that hon. Members and Ministers would think that the latter pilot was an appalling situation.

Janet Dean (Labour, Burton)

Would my hon. Friend agree that such pilots would help us to examine whether the increased costs involved in doing away with the three-for-two rule would be too great for some parents and lead to more cars being used on the roads? We must balance the need to promote safety on buses and to get rid of the three-for-two rule against the need not to increase the cost of school transport beyond the reach of local authorities or parents, thereby displacing people into cars, which could be even more dangerous.

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

My hon. Friend makes a valid point, and the pilots could demonstrate that.

Interestingly, the three-for-two rule was ended in 1996, but only for new vehicles with seat belts. Of course, the Minister has said, and the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member

for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) has told me on the Floor of the House, that the three-for-two rule will wither away. Well, I have to tell my hon. Friends that it will take a long time to wither away in my constituency, because we never get new buses, only hand-me-down buses. That was the case even when Stagecoach was running the buses. In fact, it lost the contract to provide public transport in my constituency a couple of years ago. Another company now provides a reliable service, although the vehicles are dilapidated and do not really enhance the area, and I wish that they would be improved. It will be a long time before buses containing seat belts are operational throughout the country, and it will take a long time for the three-for-two rule to wither away on that basis.

I hope that I have made my point to the Minister. The three-for-two rule really is an anachronism and should be removed. We should not have such overcrowding, and I hope that we will see the end of it now.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

I rise to speak for the first time in the Committee. I join the marvellous club of novices—someone unfairly called us amateurs—who are leading on the Bill. I am therefore particularly pleased that I am serving under the chairmanship of someone as experienced and as expert as you, Mr. O'Brien.

The hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) asked about the limit of 20 on the number of pilots in England. We came up with the figure not out of favouritism or patronage, but to ensure that we struck the right balance. Having 20 pilots, rather than a very large number, will allow for enough variety between rural and urban schemes and between schemes promoting walking, cycling and bus use. It will allow us to test out different options for charging pupils and different ways of working with bus operators. Of course, we could have chosen a larger figure, but we could also have chosen a smaller one. However, these are pilots.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Surely the Government could have chosen no figure at all. If they had left matters open, they would not be fettering their discretion in the way that they seem to be doing.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

We wanted to assess a certain number of pilots and we felt that it was sensible to have a figure. A huge number of authorities have shown an interest in the pilots, and the proposal has been very successful. We expect more authorities to come forward, and, if they do, we can increase the maximum number simply by amending the regulations. We have set the figure at 20, but we are quite happy to increase it should expressions of interest warrant that and should viable pilot schemes be proposed. The number is not a problem, as the hon. Gentleman suggests. I hope that he will be satisfied with that response.

My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (Mr. Edwards) has raised some important issues. In his constituency and nationally, he has campaigned powerfully against the three-for-two allowance. He has

raised the issue's profile and argued his point persuasively. Indeed, he has become the acknowledged leader on the issue—

It being twenty-five minutes past Eleven o'clock, The Chairman adjourned the Committee without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned till this day at half-past Two o'clock.

Standing Committee A

Clause 2 - Piloting of new provisions

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

Before we adjourned for lunch, I was congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (Mr. Edwards) on his powerful campaign against the three-for-two allowance. As this is the first time that I have spoken in this Committee under your chairmanship, Mr. Conway, it would be remiss of me not to say what a pleasure and privilege it is to serve under your expert stewardship.

My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth has been so persuasive that we agree that local education authorities will have to undertake not to use the three-for-two provision in the buses that they contract to carry out the school transport pilots. I hope that we shall learn something from the schemes. Although parents are understandably concerned about the three-for-two allowance, there is little data to support the argument that the use of the three-for-two allowance poses severe risks to child safety.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I am sure that the hon. Member for Monmouth is delighted that the hon. Member for Burton (Mrs. Dean) expressed scepticism about such matters. Can the Minister explain the cost implications for pilot authorities in moving from a three-for-two allowance to a two-to-two allowance on buses? Some general information would be useful to the Committee.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

I do not know about the costs involved at present, but I am sure that we can provide the hon. Gentleman with such information. We shall certainly be examining the pilot provisions in various local authorities and I am sure that we can draw up some cost implications. The whole three-for-two allowance is very much a matter for the LEA. Indeed, the allowance is withering, not growing.

Let us consider the alternatives to the three-for-two allowance. If there were not enough seats, we could allow young children to stand on the bus to the limit of the standing capacity of that bus or to leave them at the bus stop. Standing passengers are more vulnerable to injury when a vehicle is both accelerating and braking, as well as if there were an accident. If we left children stranded at the bus stop, whether or not in an isolated area, they could be subject to other dangers and would miss out on one of the safest ways in which to travel to school—on the bus.

The three-for-two allowance should be used only as a fail-safe mechanism. No one is suggesting that it should be used as a planned overcrowding measure. The sad accident that occurred in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth was not the fault of overcrowding, but it gave rise to concern among parents about the three-for-two allowance. Ultimately, it is the LEA that has to decide about the three-for-two rule.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

I thought that the Minister said that if a LEA wanted to enter into a pilot scheme, it would have to forgo the three-for-two allowance. Why will the Government not give local authorities discretion in such situations? Why does the hon. Lady want to centralise matters?

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

That is because we are considering pilots. I was talking about the general situation. We shall be examining a range of issues in connection with the pilots, such as improving school transport and various other options, which is why we are specifying that we will not use the three-for-two allowance in the pilots. The allowance has a limited application. It applies only to stage fare buses that have bench seats, the buses that stop regularly and do not have seat belts. The allowance is applicable not only to school transport, but general public transport. However, I appreciate that it is more likely to be used in the school context because that is when overcrowding is most likely to occur. All seats are required to be fitted with seat belts on dedicated school journeys by minibus or coach. The allowance cannot be used in that context.

I hope that my remarks have allayed some of the concerns that have been raised.

Mr. Huw Edwards (Monmouth) I thank the Minister for her assurance that the three-for-two concession will not be permitted in the 20 pilots. On her second point, the accident that she referred to—the Stuart Cunningham-Jones tragedy—took place not in my constituency but in the vale of Glamorgan. I acknowledge that overcrowding per se was not the main cause of that accident.

The Minister says that there is no evidence of the three-for-two rule and the excessive overcrowding that that can permit causing concern. That is a bit like the assurances we always get when we are campaigning for provisions such as traffic calming, which is that there has not been an accident yet. I ask her to imagine a 52-seater bus that has 78 people sitting in it under the three-for-two rule, as well as the 10, 12, 15 or however many who are allowed to stand. Should there be a serious accident involving a vehicle with that level of overcrowding, people would look back and ask why it is still legal for 78 children under 14 to be sitting on double seats.

David Drew (Labour/Co-operative, Stroud)

I do not want to get involved in the wider discussion, but we ought to look at encouraging operators to provide seat belts and proper seating for children. I see no reason why that should not be a priority in school transport.

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. In the case in which I was involved, it was the intransigence of Stagecoach, the bus operator, which caused this issue to be raised. It has plenty of buses

and it could have put on an extra one. However, although it was being subsidised for the route and it was getting guaranteed season ticket sales from the pupils, it wanted an additional subsidy to put on that extra vehicle to avoid the overcrowding. It refused to put on that extra vehicle, and eventually the county council subsidised it itself.

We have been told that it is likely that a road safety Bill will be introduced soon. It may be appropriate for that legislation to give consideration to getting rid of the three-for-two rule once and for all.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

We have had an interesting debate. However, I am more confused than ever about the justification for the Government limiting the number of pilots to 20. The Minister spoke as though that was contained in the Bill, and that we need not worry because things could be altered in regulations. However, the Government have not included any figure in the Bill. They have said that they will bring forward regulations and yet, notwithstanding the much higher than expected demand that the Minister says there is for participation in the pilot process, they seem to be insisting on sticking rigidly to the figure of 20. The Minister said that they could increase that number later through regulations, if that was thought appropriate. Is the Minister saying that when the scheme is initially introduced the Government may well have more than 20 pilots, or are the Government still convinced that 20 should be the maximum number?

It would help Committee members if the Government were able to produce the cost-benefit analysis on the three-for-two allowance, because although that creates increased danger there is also an enormous benefit from being able to have three for two. I am sure that the Minister's prolific officials have been able to produce some material, and we could use that to inform our debate and to test the Government as to whether it is reasonable for them to make non-use of three for two a condition of being able to apply for a pilot.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

I am happy to look at the figure of 20. That was our best guess of the number of pilots that would be appropriate. Clearly, there is a great deal of interest from local authorities throughout the country about going for the pilots. The figure will probably be more rather than less, simply because of the huge interest that the Bill has generated among local authorities.

On the cost-benefit analysis of ensuring that the pilots do not use the three-for-two allowance, I am happy to produce that information. We are very much in a learning experience about the three for two. My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth mentioned a road safety Bill—that would depend on whether it is in the Queen's Speech. I am sure that he will examine that, but I cannot commit anyone to examine three for two in the context of a possible road safety Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 2 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 3 - Power to repeal new provisions

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I beg to move amendment No. 38, in

clause 3, page 4, line 22, leave out 'may' and insert 'shall'.

Derek Conway (Conservative, Old Bexley and Sidcup)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment No. 39, in

clause 3, page 4, line 24, leave out

'such date as may be specified in the order'

and insert '1 August 2011.'.

Amendment No. 52, in

clause 3, page 4, line 27, at end insert—

'(2A) The appropriate national authority shall publish the measures that it will use to determine whether or not the scheme should cease to have effect at the conclusion of the pilots, including—

(a) the impact on traffic congestion,

(b) the proportion of children using different ways of travelling,

(c) the effect of charging on car usage,

(d) the impact on families on low incomes,

(e) the impact on children with special educational needs,

(f) the impact on after-school activities and extended schools, and

(g) the impact on school choice, including the education of children in accordance with the religious, philosophical or linguistic preferences of their parents.'.

Amendment No. 40, in

clause 3, page 4, line 29, leave out '2011' and insert '2009'.

Amendment No. 41, in

clause 3, page 4, line 31, leave out '2013' and insert '2011'.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

I welcome you to this afternoon's proceedings—the final sitting on the Bill—Mr. Conway.

Clause 3 represents one of the most important procedural issues facing the Committee. As the explanatory notes indicate, it in effect gives the power for the school transport pilots to roll on beyond 2013. There will be no other opportunity through primary legislation to debate further changes to the schemes. The schemes beyond 1 August 2014 can be rolled out not only to the 20 or so pilot authorities, but to any local authority that chooses to apply to the Secretary of State to operate a school transport scheme.

In a sense, this is the one and only chance that we have through primary legislation to shape the future of school transport. I want to address that particular issue with the amendments that I have tabled—particularly amendments Nos. 38 and 39.

The Select Committee on Transport, in its scrutiny of the Bill, stated:

''While the provisions relating to the pilot schemes themselves are timid, the draft Bill as a whole is audacious. It gives the Secretary of State power to roll out pilot schemes without any further legislation.''

It expressed concern about that, and also stated:

''In effect, the Secretary of State for Education in England and the National Assembly in Wales would have power to determine the way in which school transport should be provided, without any

further report on the success of schemes, or sanction by Parliament. This is not acceptable. There are serious practical questions to be asked.''

The report of the Select Committee on Education and Skills on the Bill expressed the same concern: this matter will change the shape of the schemes.

Through amendment No. 38, pilot schemes will be brought to an end and will not roll on ad infinitum without any further consideration. If they are to be resuscitated, legislation needs to be brought forward to enable that to be done. Rather than give an unspecified date in the clause, we need to give a firm end date—1 August 2011.

The other issue, which is addressed in amendments Nos. 40 and 41, is the concern that the Select Committee on Education and Skills report expressed. It said:

''2011 seems a very long time to wait for a solution to be found to school transport that can be implemented nationwide. We therefore recommend that the Department looks into the possibility of running shorter pilot schemes or of evaluating currently existing initiatives to determine what works best.''

Amendments Nos. 40 and 41 will bring forward the period over which the pilots can be run—from effectively ending in 2013 to ending in 2011.

I am not sure that we need pilot schemes that last from their date of inception—which could be in 2005 or 2006—until 2013. That would give us six or seven years to pilot the schemes and find out their effects. We should be capable of evaluating those schemes in a much shorter period, so that we do not prolong a pilot that happens to have detrimental effects on any of a range of issues—such as school transport, school choice, congestion, charging families on low incomes—beyond the time needed for evaluation.

Allowing the schemes to last until 2013 makes the pilots too long; we should shorten the evaluation period so that it ends in 2011, and should enable some schemes to terminate as early as 2009. That will give the Department and scheme authorities ample time to put the schemes into practice, see what is happening and assess the evaluation.

In earlier debates, we referred to some of the criteria that could be used to assess the evaluation of schemes. Under an earlier amendment on scheme authorities, I suggested a series of measures, which are set out in amendment No. 52. The Government need to give local authorities guidance on the success criteria for the schemes.

Clearly, there will not be a straight yes or no answer on whether the schemes are effective; one cannot say that a scheme has worked just because it has reduced traffic congestion—if that is one's sole focus—when it has had a negative effect on other aspects of school provision in the area. That is why, in amendment No. 52, I set out a series of nine measures. That series is non-exhaustive, but it includes important issues on which we need to reflect when determining whether schemes have been successful, whether the pilot should continue and whether the scheme should be rolled out across the country, as is permissible under the Bill.

We have spoken a great deal about the impact on traffic congestion. One of the main purposes of the measures before us is to reduce such congestion, and clearly that is a factor that the Government should take into account when assessing pilot schemes and whether they should continue. There is also the issue of the proportion of children using different modes of travel. There was a great deal of debate on Second Reading about how many children cycled, walked, or used cars or buses to get to school. If we do not achieve a modal shift away from cars to other forms of transport, and if there is not a shift towards walking, the Bill will not have succeeded, because it provides an opportunity to tackle the issue of childhood obesity.

Our suggested subsection (2A)(c) refers to

''the effect of charging on car usage''.

There has already been debate in Committee on the tension between charging and its effect on car usage. We have cited the examples of rural constituencies; hon. Members have said that if people were charged too much they would use their cars. That is a valid concern. If charging drives up car usage, the Bill will have failed. The issue of the pilots' impact on low-income families was addressed this morning, so I shall not talk more about that, but clearly any decision to roll out the pilots to the rest of the country needs to reflect their impact on such families.

There are also complex issues in respect of children with special educational needs, which we debated on Tuesday. The Committee would agree, in one of its moments of consensus, that some of the most complex issues surrounding implementation have to do with the impact on children with special educational needs, who could attend a wide variety of institutions, including mainstream schools, special units attached to schools and special schools. Two thirds of the cost of school transport is incurred by children with special educational needs—who are, in a way, perhaps the most obvious and difficult target in terms of achieving cost reductions—so we need to consider the impact that any measures undertaken in pilots has had on meeting the needs of children with mobility issues, autism, sensory impairment and a range of needs that are currently covered.

The next issues to deal with are school activities and extended schools. Earlier this week I heard an example of the problems that parents face: a child who lived 20 minutes away from a school in Surrey was fine if he went there at the normal times—starting at 9 o'clock and leaving at 3.30—because the taxi ensured that he got there and back. However, if he stayed behind for after school activities, there was no LEA-provided transport available and his parents had to collect him, so his participation in after-school activities was rationed. Given the Government's focus on extended schools, if the take-up of after school activities or the use of extended schools is impaired because of the charging regime, or the nature of the transport arrangements, we should not continue pilot projects.

Both parties have agreed that parents should be able to exercise wider school choice. We need to see what impact the measure has had on patterns of choice being exercised and on existing choices about attendance at faith schools. I refer to the parents'

philosophical preferences, although those do not relate simply to choosing a school that reflects the parents' values in terms of adherence, or otherwise, to a religion. Some parents choose to educate their children at single-sex schools, for philosophical and perhaps religious reasons. We want to consider the impact of the travel schemes on such educational choices, as well as finding out about the impact on children whose parents wish them to be educated in a Welsh language school.

These are probing amendments to flesh out some of the Government's thinking behind clause 3, particularly because it gives the Secretary of State some significant powers—which the Transport Committee said were ''audacious''—to change the architecture of school transport, beyond the limited number of pilots envisaged by the Government, to affect all LEAs and all parts of the country.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

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.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I welcome you back to the Chair, Mr. Conway. First I shall address amendments Nos. 38 to 41, then amendment No. 52.

Clause 3(1), which amendment No. 38 would change, gives the Secretary of State the flexibility to

end school travel schemes in England if they are unsuccessful or if, in the light of experience, a different approach is required. It does not require him to extend schemes, and if he did not do so by 1 August 2013, the piloting provisions would lapse and the schemes would become permanent. Together, amendments Nos. 38 and 39 would ensure that all schemes in England ended by 1 August 2011. Amendments Nos. 40 and 41 would mean that pilots in Wales would end between 1 August 2009 and 1 August 2011.

I fully understand that the hon. Members for Fareham and for Southport (Dr. Pugh) want to ensure that school travel schemes are properly evaluated and that the pace of change takes account of the wide range of concerns expressed in the House and elsewhere. The prospectus explains that LEAs with approved schemes will be required to produce an annual report containing a range of information for the Department or the National Assembly. Pilot authorities will have to have reliable systems for monitoring pupils' modes of travel to school and the impact on vulnerable groups, and will have to describe the economics of schemes.

The prospectus will also commit the DFES to commissioning an independent evaluation of English schemes, which will provide evidence for the decision on whether to extend the school travel scheme approach after 2011. We understand that the Welsh Assembly has similar plans. Those safeguards will ensure that the piloting approach will continue only if it is successful, and that there will be an appropriate mechanism for examining what aspects of schemes work well and what aspects need to be changed. Furthermore, they will avoid the disruption that could be caused by the amendments if authorities with popular and successful schemes were suddenly unable to continue with them.

I cannot support the amendments because they require us to have completed and evaluated the pilot projects by 2011, and to have put successor arrangements in place. That would not give pilots sufficient time to operate for a reasonable period, for a rigorous evaluation to be completed or for parliamentary time to be found for any successor arrangements. LEAs tell us that pilot schemes need to offer stability over several years so that parents and pupils in the wider community understand what transport arrangements there are likely to be for the duration of the time that the children will attend school. The guarantee that 2011 will be the earliest end-date is designed to give LEAs and their transport providers security; they will know that piloting arrangements could continue until that date at least. Both LEAs and transport providers asked for that during consultation.

Under our proposals, LEAs can let contracts of several years, which may be more economical than those of one year only. For example, longer-term contracts may allow transport providers to invest in higher-quality vehicles or schemes to train their drivers in working with school pupils; those are among the important issues that the Committee has already addressed. At this point, I cannot forecast exactly when local education authorities will be in a position

to start schemes. It is possible that a handful of authorities may be able to start new schemes in September 2006, but I anticipate that 2007 will be earliest practical date for most authorities.

I reiterate points raised by Members on both sides during our earlier deliberations: a process of consultation, debate and agreement by national authorities has to be gone through for each of the schemes. In the light of that, 2007 is a realistic date for the schemes to start. Some schemes could involve phased changes over several years. In such cases, the full benefits would probably not emerge for some time. Once the schemes are fully operational, we need to build in a period—say, six months—for a thorough evaluation and further time for investigating alternatives, which might need fresh legislation. Indeed, in his remarks on amendment No. 52, which I will come to in a moment, the hon. Member for Fareham set out clearly some of the areas that would have to be evaluated during that period. It is important to allow sufficient time for that to be the thorough evaluation that all Committee members would want.

An end date of 2011 would give insufficient time for a proper evaluation of schemes, particularly if they do not start until 2007. The draft Bill provides a two-year window, which will allow the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales to look at the results of piloting and make decisions as to whether the school travel scheme approach is successful. We think that that gives the right level of flexibility to take account of uncertainties as to when schemes will start operating and the way they are likely to be phased in. It is for that reason that we have provided an end date for repeal of 1 August 2013.

The amendments do not give sufficient time for school travel schemes to be up and running and to be evaluated and for alternatives, if they are needed, to be fully investigated. The time scale specified in the Bill strikes the right balance, and it will enable us to evaluate pilots thoroughly before making any decisions about future arrangements for school transport.

The hon. Members for Fareham and for Southport repeated the suggestion—I was going to say the charge—that we were taking audacious powers. It is worth reminding the Committee of a couple of points. Under the proposals, no local education authority will ever be put in a position where it has to adopt a different set of arrangements to that which they have under the existing legislation. That is because of the nature of this legislation; it is based on LEAs volunteering. No requirement is being placed on any LEA; a misunderstanding about that could have led to us being accused of being audacious.

In the light of this morning's discussion on amendment No. 61, tabled by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), we have agreed to look again at the issue of revocation in order to give greater flexibility and power to the LEAs. The challenge for those who seek, for perfectly understandable reasons, to tighten things up in

respect of parliamentary scrutiny, is that we could end up with a successful pilot having to come to an end because the powers do not exist for it to continue. That would be a realistic danger if these amendments were agreed to.

To add something to the discussion on the previous clause, if the piloting approach is successful and there is sufficient interest, we might be able quite quickly to have many more than 20 pilots. The current end dates of 2011 and 2013 would not hold up the further extension of schemes, provided that they crossed the various hurdles we have discussed, including getting both local support and then national approval and providing for very careful evaluation that this was a sensible course of action.

Amendment No. 52 proposes a non-exhaustive list of criteria which it is envisaged would be used by the Secretary of State and the Welsh Assembly to set performance measures. They would be used to measure the results of individual schemes, and to determine whether they should cease at the end of the pilot phase.

I agree that we need to set out clearly what we expect school travel schemes to achieve. The list contained in the amendment closely reflects the success criteria contained in paragraphs 8 to 10 of the draft prospectus. However, the amendment suggests that the relevant national authority should be obliged to adhere to detailed success criteria in primary legislation, rather than using the more flexible approach set out in the prospectus. That is not in keeping with the desire to make a thorough assessment of the outcomes of the schemes when we do not yet know the precise form that any of the schemes will take. They will run for several years, and we cannot precisely foresee whether unexpected events will affect progress and outcomes. Pre-determined rigid performance measures could themselves have consequences—albeit, perhaps, unintended ones.

There is a further difficulty with the amendment. It envisages that the Secretary of State or the Welsh Assembly will make decisions as to whether individual schemes will continue. However, clause 3 only provides powers for the Secretary of State to repeal the legislation, which would affect all the schemes together. There is no mechanism that would allow him to terminate individual schemes according to their individual performance against success criteria. I hope that the hon. Member for Fareham will think again about this amendment and the others, and will agree that scheme success criteria are best handled through the prospectus. I therefore ask him to withdraw amendment No. 38, and not to press his other amendments.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The Minister has provided little reassurance on the clause. I come away from this debate feeling more nervous than I did when I started, in the sense that the clause gives the Secretary of State free rein to decide what the success criteria are as and when he chooses. Those criteria reflect concerns raised in Committee. We need statutory protection to ensure that there are defined criteria that a Secretary of State will use, and that he will not, in six or seven years'

time, decide on a whim that a wholly different group of criteria should be used.

The Bill and the prospectus are clear about what we are trying to achieve, change and protect. I am worried that we will shift the goalposts in the next six or seven years. Yes, there will be new issues—that is why my list is non-exhaustive—but the purpose of the legislation is, in many respects, reflected in the criteria listed in amendment No. 52.

As to the timing, I understand that schemes need stability, as the Minister said. They need to take place over a period so that we can assess their effectiveness. He also said that it was important that schemes reflected the length of time that pupils remained in education. As schemes develop and progress over the years, parents will be making educational choices for their children based on the scheme currently in place, so there will never be a good time to terminate a pilot; there will always be someone who will have chosen a school based on the pilot scheme in place.

We can have a shorter time period without losing the stability that the Minister wants for the pilots. To say that a pilot needs to be in place for as long as six years slightly undermines the Minister's argument, given that a child in a normal, 11-to-16 secondary school will be there for five years. We can have shorter schemes. We need to bear in mind the difficulty of practical implementation of the schemes, which we have discussed in the past four sittings. Although that difficulty might suggest that we should have longer for pilots, it also means that we should perhaps have shorter times so that we can evaluate the consequences of difficult, complex schemes on the choices that parents make.

I am not at all happy with the Minister's assurances, but perhaps we will tackle the issue on stand part. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

The clause does not give sufficient protection to parents and the institutions to which they send their children. We need a far more robust clause to protect people, because this is the only opportunity that we will have to introduce, through primary legislation, the safeguards that we want for children who travel to school. If we simply say that, in future, the matter will be down to regulations, and that it will be up to the Secretary of State to roll out measures, we will be letting down people who, in a few years' time, as a consequence of one of the pilots, believe that there should be more statutory protection for, say, children with special educational needs.

There should be a more generous income test in terms of applying charges, and there should be statutory protection for children who live in rural areas beyond what is provided in the Bill. Simply allowing the clause to go through today, and allowing the Secretary of State to determine what is appropriate

in future, is not adequate if we are trying to protect the interests of our children.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

It is worth saying—and it is probably appropriate to do so now—that there were a number of courses of action that the Government could have taken in addressing the issue. One of them, and probably the easiest path, would have been to ignore some of the concerns expressed by local government on a cross-party basis, and to leave the legislation in place with all the anomalies described in Committee and on Second Reading. A second option would have been to have gone full steam ahead with a scheme that would apply in all parts of the country. The approach that we have taken, which is deregulatory, and enables authorities to volunteer to have pilot schemes and enables us to learn the lessons from those schemes, is the best way of taking matters forward.

Clause 3 gives appropriate powers of repeal, but does not give an absolute guarantee that something will be repealed regardless of whether its provisions turn out to be successful against a set of criteria. There is not a great deal of difference between the different parties represented in the Committee about what the success criteria will be.

The clause contains powers to repeal the school travel scheme provisions in the event that the approach is unsuccessful. The legislation would be removed from the statute book and school transport would return to the current arrangements. The clause is drafted in a way that allows the Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales to make separate arrangements. It specifies that the piloting provisions may not be terminated until 1 August 2011 at the earliest. That allows LEAs to put in place pilot school travel schemes that can last for several years.

I take the point made by the hon. Member for Fareham that we could be talking about quite a long period of time. A number of LEAs have said to us that they may wish to phase in new arrangements—for example, they might want to examine some of the issues that arise when pupils are changing schools from primary to secondary school. It may take several years for the full impact of a set of local changes to have effect and, therefore, that bit longer for us to be able to evaluate that. For the reasons that I set out in earlier remarks on the amendments, we have got the timing about right. The sorts of timings that have been suggested as alternatives would not give us sufficient opportunity to evaluate very fully. On that basis, I recommend that the clause stand part of the Bill.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

The Committee divided: Ayes 8, Noes 5.

Clause 4 - Power to exclude scheme services from registration requirements

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

I take this opportunity to ask the Under-Secretary of State for Transport a few questions about clause 4, because the explanatory notes are succinct about the Government's intentions. They say nothing about how the Government plan to use the powers that they are seeking in the clause.

We know that section 6 of the Transport Act 1985 is an important section. I remember serving on the Standing Committee that considered that piece of legislation. The Government say that they wish to take the power to disapply that provision. There should be some explanation about why they want to do that and the circumstances in which they intend to do it. Most importantly, we should ensure that there is proper consultation before they do it. None of that is currently provided for in the Bill.

What is the purpose of the power to exclude? Section 6 includes important safeguards. Important issues of competition could arise if a school bus service could stop at registered bus stops and collect fare-paying passengers. Important issues are protected by section 6. That is to ensure that there is stability of service, so that it cannot be put on one month and taken off the next week, and that vehicles that are used in the service should be of a particular quality. We know also that, if public service vehicles operate an ordinary bus service and are registered under section 6, they are entitled to the fuel duty rebate. That is a big issue and arguably one of the reasons why much of school transport is not economic. One way in which it could be made more economic would be to give it access to the fuel duty rebate that is available to public services.

Will the Minister explain the Government's intentions, as well as the interaction between the access to the fuel duty rebate and any derogation from the powers under section 6 that they have in mind? Why is the provision limited only to school travel scheme pilots, not all school transport? If the Under-Secretary of State for Transport is to respond to this debate, I hope that she will do so in the radical way that I would expect of someone who served on Wandsworth council, albeit as an opposition Labour councillor. Three members of the Committee have had the privilege of serving on Wandsworth council: the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) and me.

It is part of that council's tradition that its members should be forward-looking and radical in their approach. In that spirit, will the hon. Lady think about something that was mentioned at a conference last week or the week before at which we both had the privilege of speaking. It was asked whether something could be done to enable drivers to make a small charge for passengers in car-sharing arrangements. That

could have a radical impact on the school run. At present, anyone who is entitled to free transport, especially taxi transport, exercises that right and the cost falls four square on the council.

Let us suppose that the person next door takes his child to school in the car. For a modest sum, he might be willing to take the pupil from next door in the car, too, thereby reducing the congestion on the roads and ensuring that better use is made of the fuel that is used in the school run. If the Government are in the business of taking powers to modify the Transport Act 1985, which is what clause 4 will do, why are they not thinking radically about facilitating or promoting car sharing and enabling drivers to make a modest charge when they consider that appropriate?

The school run sharing in which we, as a family, have been involved depends on reciprocity, on the basis that one family does the school run for one week while another family will do the next week, and so on. It is a little like baby-sitting circles. In today's modern society, however, many families do not have the ability to take their children to school using their cars. It is all give on one side, and all take on the other. If there were the ability to make a modest charge, fairness and an incentive could be introduced to make people share the journey to school more than they do at present. When one stands at the school gate, it is amazing how many children arrive on their own in a car that is driven by a single adult. Surely we can do better than that. If we are in the business of school transport pilots, cannot we think radically in the great Wandsworth tradition and extend them in the way in which I have suggested?

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

There is no problem about car sharing. The existing law allows it, as long as it is not about profit or being run as a business. There is no reason why neighbours cannot share a car. In the radical tradition of Wandsworth, that could have been done many years ago.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

At the conference the hon. Lady and I had a chance to respond to the point, but neither of us was able to explain to the questioner why there are many constraints on people being able to charge someone to have a child or somebody else in their car as a passenger. There are insurance and other legal constraints on doing that. People can share, but are not able under the law to give the space in their car in return for a fee.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

Normal car sharing is allowed for a fee that helps compensate its owner for depreciation and wear and tear. There may be other issues, but I will write to the hon. Gentleman about children in cars, in terms of protection and so on, and I am sure that we can clear up the matter. I understand that car sharing is allowed under current legislation, and many local authorities are introducing innovative schemes involving car sharing and lanes for cars with more than one occupant. That is already on the cards and is part of our bids to ensure that we reduce congestion as much as possible.

Peter Atkinson (Conservative, Hexham)

May I press the Minister a little bit further? One suggestion made in rural Northumberland, where people travel

considerable distances to school, was that the education authority should give some money to a parent to provide a daily service using a car, but it prompted an enormous amount of complications because a profit motive was being introduced into the deal and apparently it was not possible to proceed. However, that would be a good solution, too.

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

Clearly, profit is the issue. There are relevant situations. For example, volunteers drive patients to hospital, and such arrangements exist perfectly adequately. However, we will consider the matter raised by the hon. Member for Christchurch and ensure that the Committee is fully informed well before consideration on Report.

The hon. Member for Christchurch referred to the fuel duty rebate, but I am informed that the Bill will have no impact on that. The clause proposes that school transport schemes should not have to be registered. Hon. Members will understand that the registration of local bus services outside London is a form of consumer protection and that operators have to run advertised services. A service contracted by the LEA is an arrangement between the LEA and pupils and although some paying passengers might use the service, the advice we were given was that where pupils pay to use the bus—as in the vacant seat scheme—it would bring school transport under the need to register.

We do not believe that it is appropriate for a school bus service that is not generally available to the public to be registered. Registration requires 56 days' notice of any change in the service, route or timetable. That is clearly desirable for services that are open to the public and timetabled, but it can be overly restrictive for dedicated school transport. For example, one pupil who is usually picked up from a farm may no longer need to be collected because they have left the school. It would be crazy to make a detour not to collect that pupil and have to give 56 days notice of that change of route.

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

We should bear in mind the Minister's remarks on a previous group of amendments about the need for stability in schemes, because people base their school choices on existing modes of transport and available routes. Is there not a risk that if we do what she has outlined children who have decided to go to school X on the basis that it is on a bus route provided by the local authority could be disadvantaged because no notice had been given of a change in route?

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

We do not believe that this sort of service should require 56 days' notice, although parents will clearly have to be given notice.

It was asked why the Department for Transport has not considered the generality of the situation, rather than just the school travel schemes. The Department is preparing proposals by means of a regulatory reform order that will make this a change for school bus services in general rather than travel schemes alone. In the meantime, this clause is related only to school travel schemes, not to all school travel.

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

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?

Charlotte Atkins (Labour, Staffordshire Moorlands)

As I understand it, the eligibility for fuel duty rebate is not related to the need to register. It is related to carrying the general public. The only services that we are proposing to exclude are the ones not used by the general public, and they have never been eligible. The premise on which that radical solution is proposed does not hold.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 5 and 6 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 7 - Short title, commencement and extent

Christopher Chope (Conservative, Christchurch)

Why is this to be called the School Transport Act 2005 rather than the School Transport Pilots Act 2005?

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

That is not a question that has arisen during the consultation or the pre-legislative scrutiny, but it is one on which I can reflect. Brevity was perhaps in our minds when we were coming up with a title for the Bill, and, therefore, for the Act.

Roger Casale (Labour, Wimbledon)

Is it anything to do with the fact that we are intending to take the children to school by bus and by minicab—in the case of those with special educational needs—rather than by helicopter or by plane?

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

That is an ingenious answer. I am sorry that I did not think of it. Pilots could be taken to have another meaning.

Huw Edwards (Labour, Monmouth)

I am going to agree with the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope); it could be called the School Transport Pilot Areas Act 2005. That would give people a better understanding of what it really is.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

I now have two alternative suggestions. My preference is to maintain the brevity of the current description of the Bill and, therefore, the likely description of the Act.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 7 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Derek Conway (Conservative, Old Bexley and Sidcup)

Before I propose the Question, on behalf of my fellow Chairman and myself, I want to thank Committee members on the way in which they have conducted a frank and informative debate. On behalf of the Committee, I thank those who enabled us to go through the proceedings, particularly the staff of the Serjeant at Arms and the Official Report, the Clerks and police officers, for ensuring that all went well.

Stephen Twigg (Labour, Enfield, Southgate)

On a point of order, Mr. Conway. On behalf of Committee members from all parties, I thank you and Mr. O'Brien for your characteristically excellent chairmanship of our proceedings. We have had a very good Committee stage, in which the various

issues in the Bill have been fully explored. There are a number of issues to which we will return on Report. The excellent chairmanship of the Committee has enabled us to examine these matters in a frank and constructive manner.{**bch**}

Mark Hoban (Conservative, Fareham)

Further to that point of order, Mr. Conway. May I echo the thanks that the Minister gave to you and to your co-Chairman, Mr. O'Brien. We have progressed at a fairly quick pace thanks to your guidance and chairmanship, and that of Mr. O'Brien. As the Minister said, we have aired a number of important issues. While the Bill may be described by the Select Committee on Transport as ''timid'', I know that many people beyond this Room will pay particular interest to some of the issues that we have debated. They hope, as well as we do, that such issues are returned to on Report.

John Pugh (Liberal Democrat, Southport)

Further to that point of order, Mr. Conway. May I thank you and Mr. O'Brien for your efficient and discreet chairmanship. I thank the Minister for having been charming throughout, for not being especially evasive and for using the scrutiny process to good effect.

I also congratulate the hon. Member for Fareham on his debut as an Opposition chief spokesman. His amendments were pointed and worth while, and his contributions were succinct and to the point. They engineered good debate. I also thank many other hon. Members who have made valuable and informed contributions and who did not choose the occasion to get on with their personal mail. That is very good. My sole disappointment is that many excellent amendments that I had prepared will now have to wait for Report and Third Reading. I am sure that that disappointment is widely felt, but we have to disband now.

Bill to be reported, without amendment.

Committee rose at twenty-six minutes to Four o'clock.