Contribution
My Lords, I will respond to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, on Clauses 18 and 19.
On Clause 18, there is currently no one single source of information for passengers about bus service registrations or similar information about services that operate outside traffic commissioner-administered areas. Information on local bus services is fragmented, and this clause seeks to improve this state of affairs. As such, it enables the Secretary of State to make regulations requiring franchising authorities to submit information about services operating in their areas. This information will be similar to that provided on the registration of a service with the traffic commissioner, and it will be provided to the Secretary of State.
Together with Clause 17, Clause 18 lays the groundwork for a new central database of registration information, bus open data and information about services operating outside traffic commissioner-administered areas. This will provide passengers with a single source of information about local services. It is important to clarify that this provision does not reinstate the requirement for franchised services to be registered with a traffic commissioner. Rather, it provides the power to require franchising authorities to provide information to the Secretary of State, thereby enabling its inclusion in the new central database.
In addition, Clause 18 broadens the categories of data that the Secretary of State may collect regarding local services and the vehicles used to operate them. This power extends to gathering information from franchising authorities concerning franchised services and allows the department to collect additional data aimed at improving transparency within the sector. It might be said that the clause would answer the earlier intervention from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about whether all buses actually conform to the PSVAR regulations and, therefore, it would be useful in that respect, too.
Crucially, Clause 18 also empowers the Secretary of State to collect data that will support the monitoring of local service operator performance and assist in the effective exercise of ministerial functions. That might include, for example, information relating to the costs associated with operating a service and the number of staff involved in its operation. I hope that explanation is sufficient to allow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, to withdraw his opposition to the inclusion of the clause.
On the noble Lord’s opposition to the inclusion of Clause 19, the clause works in tandem with Clause 18 to support greater public transparency, and thus accountability, over local bus services. While Clause 18, in part, provides for greater information collection going forward, Clause 19 ensures that equivalent historical information already held by the department can be published. The clause achieves this by amending the Statistics of Trade Act 1947 to insert two new sections to enable the publication of existing operator-level bus data. It also provides for the Secretary of State to give notice to industry prior to the publication of such data.
Section 9 of the Statistics of Trade Act requires the consent of individual undertakings before information identifying them can be published. The newly inserted Section 9B disapplies Section 9 of the 1947 Act in relation to information about relevant local services that has been collected under Section 1 of that Act from PSV operators’ licence holders, or their representatives. This disapplication applies during a qualifying period, beginning on 1 May 2015 and lasting until the day when this clause of the Bill comes into force. Disapplying the requirements in Section 9 will allow the department to publish operator-level information collected during the qualifying period, even in cases where consent cannot reasonably be obtained from the large number of individual operators concerned. That point is crucial. The requirement to obtain consent from each individual operator would result in inconsistent data provision. This, in turn, would mean some communities not having access to the same level of information about local bus services as others, or indeed equivalent information for all services within a single community.
The newly inserted Section 9C requires the Secretary of State to publish a notice specifying the information intended for publication at least 30 days in advance, and further details the locations where such notices must be published. These provisions will enable the timely and transparent publication of operator-level bus data, improving access to information while maintaining appropriate safeguards.
Although the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is of course right that in a commercial undertaking, this information might be considered commercially confidential, it is also essential for the local transport authority representing the users of these services to be able to access such information in order correctly to plan bus services in their areas, for the benefit of all the people who live there. That is the justification for this clause, so I hope he will accept it and withdraw his opposition to it.