Lord Whitty (Lab)

My Lords, I will make a couple of brief points. I apologise to the Committee that I am Boxing and Coxing with another meeting this afternoon and that I did not table my amendment for today’s Committee. Formally, I support Amendment 17 tabled by my noble friend Lord Woodley, but I will put it in a broader context. The amendment deals with the relationship between franchising companies and franchising authorities and the trade unions, which is vital, but, as I said at Second Reading, we need a provision for planning the workforce of bus services across Britain in the same way that we do in other industries. I say to the Minister and his colleagues that the Government are attempting major reorganisations of several industries—energy, railways, buses—yet in the proposed legislation, there is no clear commitment to forward workforce planning. I would have tabled an amendment to that effect, and I hope that the Government will come forward with that in any of the Bills that I refer to, but particularly this one. The workforce in buses has declined by 25% over recent years. With all due respect, it is a very skilled but elderly workforce. Not many new people are coming into it. We need a new forward system as part of this Bill and the processes it starts to ensure that there is an adequate workforce-planning dimension. Part of that involves the arrangements with the trade unions, which my noble friend Lord Woodley points out in Amendment 17, but it is broader than that and has to be national as well as local. I hope that before the Bill reaches its final stages it will have a clear strategic commitment to workforce planning for bus services.