Contribution
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this incredibly important debate and on setting out this deeply concerning issue eloquently and passionately. It does not affect his constituency alone; as we have heard from right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, it is an issue right across the country, from Yorkshire right the way down to Kent and Sussex, and everywhere in between.
It feels a bit basic and obvious to say this, but it bears repeating: every child deserves to be able to get to school. There is a legal requirement to educate our children, and their ability to get there is a fairly basic right. They also deserve to get to school safely, efficiently and on time, yet the shocking stories that we have heard from around the country show just how hard that is for far too many children. The fact that the changes in Yorkshire mean that parents are being charged almost £900 for bus passes is, frankly, ridiculous.
Sadly, those stories are symptoms of wider failures by a number of Administrations to consider the needs of rural communities and SEND families. As a London MP and a born-and-bred London girl, both of whose children walk fewer than 10 minutes to get to their primary and secondary schools, I hesitate to talk about rural communities, but I hear from colleagues in my party and others about the real challenges of getting to school in rural communities. I have seen that when I have been on visits to Shropshire and talked to families and schoolteachers.
Under the last Conservative Government, bus services withered. Between 2015 and 2023, the number of local passenger journeys fell by a quarter—1 billion trips—and many routes were scrapped altogether. We have heard today about the Public Accounts Committee’s recent report on SEND home-to-school transport, which highlighted the ongoing decline of bus services, particularly in rural areas. It notes:
“Better local transport options…would reduce home to school transport costs”.
I will address the soaring costs that local authorities face when it comes to home-to-school transport, but I will first take a moment to focus on the fact that it is the most vulnerable in society who are impacted by poor transport provision. I find it somewhat surprising that the Department for Education seems to have little interest in what transport looks like for those who use it. As we have heard, it does not collect clear data about who receives home-to-school transport or whether it is reaching those in need.
As we have heard from Members from both sides of the House, children are being made to feel that their education does not matter because of where they live. They miss after-school clubs and activities and are made to walk on unsafe roads, often in the dark before school starts. As we have heard very clearly from some case studies today, parents are forced to sacrifice their time and income to drive their children to school, all because a computer said no—because of the rules that have been put in place by their local authorities. Grandparents or other extended family members are forced to go out of their way and step up when no one else is able to—although, as the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) pointed out, Cornwall to Kent seems rather extreme and pushing it somewhat.
There is, however, a larger underlying issue here. We have seen the costs of home-to-school transport soar alongside the need for SEND provision. While the Government have made the welcome move of committing to write off local authorities’ historic SEND deficits, that, sadly, does not extend to transport costs. My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I have been urging the Government to exempt SEND transport operators from the Government’s national insurance contribution increases to curb further cost increases.
I hope the Minister will address that issue in her response today and will set out what the DFE is doing to address it now. Pushing it into the reforms that we have seen announced, which we know are going to take years to implement, will be too slow to address this particular issue.
The cancellation of a number of planned special schools around the country does not help this situation. I strongly urge the Minister to revisit and reverse the cancellation of planned special schools. As I think my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) said, if the specialist provision was closer to home, we would not need to spend quite so much on home-to-school transport.