Lord Moylan (Con)

Well, that is a very serious rebuke on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Goddard. I nearly wilted and decided to curtail my speech as a result of that intervention, but I have found the strength to continue. I remind the noble Lord that there is no question of time being spun out here. We are in day three of a four-day Committee, and we are very likely to finish the Committee today. We are going at rapid speed, and any suggestion that any member of this Committee has been using the time to spin out the debate is preposterous and is denied by the facts, so I will return to what I was saying. This was the purpose of the traffic commissioners; they were set up for that purpose. So we come to 1985. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, considers 1985 an historical date or one that is part of the modern and contemporary world; for me, it is fairly contemporary, but I would not want to comment on the noble Lord’s age or experience of these matters. Of course, in 1985, all those functions in relation to buses were taken away from the traffic commissioners. By then—this is important—they had acquired functions in relation to the freight industry, as well as certain safety functions on top of that, so there was a reason for continuing the traffic commissioners then. The noble Lord, Lord Goddard, will have noted, in his careful scrutiny of my amendment, as will have other noble Lords, that it refers only to the bus functions of the traffic commissioners. There is nothing here that would abolish them entirely. That is a pity, in my view, but I was advised by the Public Bill Office that an attempt to abolish them entirely would be outside the scope of the Bill. The commissioners survived 1985, although there was really very little need for them. The Government are returning to a sort of 1920s view of how buses should be run in the Bill before us, but not giving the same functions back to the traffic commissioners. The decisions about where the routes should run, who should have a special licence and what the fares should be will in effect fall to the local transport authority, not the traffic commissioners, but they are to continue. Their functions include enforcement on safety matters, yet their budget for that is derisory and, effectively, there is very little enforcement. A lot of that work is done, in relation to freight at least, by the DVSA and not by the traffic commissioners. Generally, it would be a good time to have a bit of a clear out of the bureaucracy that encrusts our modern society. I would like to see the traffic commissioners go entirely and what functions they have transferred to the Department for Transport, but the proposal today, for scope reasons, as I said, is slightly more modest. I do not expect the Minister to accept it, but it is a proposal that those of us here in Committee with a slightly more revolutionary spirit—I am sorry that does not include the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, or maybe it does; we shall hear when he comes to speak—should embrace to see some real change, at last, at the seat of government.