Lord Moylan (Con)

With the Minister’s permission, I do not think that we are disagreeing and, therefore, I do not think that what he just said about timetables is quite the answer to my point. It may be my fault for expressing it in the way I did. I am sure that I talked about adhering to the timetable—I will look back at it—but he has cast it differently. He said that reliability—that is, the frequency between buses arriving—is what operators seek to maintain, but that is precisely what can lead to the sort of pressure on drivers where a controller says, “Hurry up because the gap between you and the bus ahead has got too large”. That is really what I was talking about and what I meant to express, although I used the language of timetabling. The key question that the Minister will need to address is to what extent does the contract reward that behaviour? To what extent is reliability rewarded in the contract? In many cases, companies and people behave according to financial incentives. If your narrow margins as a bus operator or a franchise depend on maintaining certain levels of reliability and certain gaps between buses along the service, that is what you will be pushing your staff to do. It comes back to this question of what the contract says and what it rewards.