Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. Before I got to the railway, I spent most of my adult life trying to encourage people who control bus services not to rely on the timetable but to adhere to a regular frequency. Of course, the truth is that in most urban areas, once you have lost time, the chances of ever regaining it are, frankly, pretty small, and they are even smaller with the increasing use of speed limits of 20 miles per hour. I take the noble Lord’s point but, in the end, this is about people either being required to drive unsafely or believing that they are required to do so. It is certainly possible, and I have seen it done to encourage people to attempt to make time up but, in my experience over the 50 years I have been driving buses—now and again, more recently—it is very difficult to do so. Let us go back to the safety aspect of this. Where the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is going rightly concerns finding a way for bus drivers to express that they are being either expected to drive unsafely or encouraged to do it. I take his point about that very clearly. As I said before, there are all these requirements on franchised authorities, which will report on safety because they are procuring the service. CIRAS is available, where people have chosen to join that third-party organisation, but, where they have not done so, it is about making the route to complaining clearer and more available. I very much hope that that answers the noble Lord’s points. I will leave it there.