Alex Mayer

Coaches can be booked to get people anywhere they want to go. They are also important for growth, a defining mission for Governments of all stripes. The coach industry brings £17 billion to the UK economy. When I pitched this debate to the Backbench Business Committee, I compared coaches to the fishing industry, which brings about £1 billion, saying that coaches should feature in as many debates as fish in this place. Coaches are easy to deploy. There is no need to spend years building railway tracks, for example. Despite all that, coaches remain under-appreciated. Why is that? Surveys show that about a third of respondents think coaches are uncomfortable, outdated and infrequent. That is an outdated view; today’s coaches are comfortable and modern, and often take passengers precisely where they want to go. I think one of the reasons for that view is that they are family businesses and do not necessarily employ public relations folk to talk to us here and get the messages across that they need to. I also think it is down to us. MPs and journalists do not often use coaches in the way that we use trains. There is a good statistic that says that 97% of people have never heard a politician talk about coaches. I hope they are all tuning in today so that we can right that wrong.