Contribution
Coaches have the potential to bring people to all kinds of tourist destinations and to fantastic seaside areas. We should appreciate them for that.
Within the Department for Transport, there are specific teams for bus and for rail, but not a specific coach team. Might the Minister be willing to comment on that? On that theme, one issue facing the coach sector is that it gets lumped together with other sectors, most noticeably bus, but also HGV.
Having waxed lyrical about coaches, I come to my next question: what is a coach? That might seem a bit odd at this stage, because I think we all instinctively and intuitively know what a coach is: the passengers climb up into it, there is a space for luggage underneath, they sit—there are probably seatbelts—and the coach takes them a reasonable distance. However, in law it is a bit more of a muddle. When granting an operator’s licence for a coach, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency mixes coaches and buses together, so coaches cannot be specifically counted. When it comes to accessibility rules, the Department for Transport says a coach is something that passengers sit down in and there are no standing passengers. A coach can even become a bus as it is driving along—it can start being regulated as a coach, but if it picks up and drops off passengers with a 15-mile gap between them, it becomes a bus for that bit of the route, before magically turning into a coach again. When I have asked parliamentary questions on this subject, Ministers cannot reliably tell me how many coaches there are. I do not think it should be down to enthusiasts to be counting them.
As well as not being able to count coaches, we cannot count coach drivers. It is the same issue: the standard occupational classification data used by the Office for National Statistics puts bus and coach drivers together. When I was looking at that dataset, I did the same thing as I did with Hansard and did a keyword search to find out where coach drivers appeared. They were indeed in with bus drivers. Then I looked again at sports coaches, which have their own subcategories of cricket coaches, football coaches, and the like. Why can we not do the same for coach drivers? If we had better data, we would ultimately be making better policy.
While we are on the subject of drivers, we need more of them. There are 5,000 to 10,000 vacancies in the sector at the moment and about a quarter of coach drivers are over the age of 60, so it is a challenge that is likely to get worse. What we need is a plan to get young drivers straight from school into the driver’s seat. Back in 2024, there was a consultation on one of the issues for young drivers. The mileage that young drivers do is limited by law at the moment. For example, if a young driver started off from 10 Downing Street and drove north to No. 10 North, they would only get as far as about Milton Keynes before they had to stop. The Minister has said before that he is looking at the results of that consultation and assessing proposals. Might he be able to give us a timeline for when we might hear more about that? While the Minister is at it, could he also talk to his colleagues in the Department for Education? Yesterday, I received a letter from a Minister about skills bootcamps, but although HGV drivers can use the good funding available in skills bootcamps, coach drivers cannot.
Lumping things together also happens on the path to net zero. Coaches are lumped in with HGVs, rather than buses, although the requirements can be quite different. If an HGV driver stops at a motorway service station, they park, plug in, and away they go, but a coach driver has 50-odd passengers to deal with, all of whom need to be got safely off the coach and into the motorway service station to buy some overpriced sandwiches, so the requirements are very different. A zero emission HGV and coach infrastructure strategy is due soon. Can the Minister assure me that adequate attention will be given to the specific challenges for coaches?
In a recent pilot programme to install charging infrastructure, which was shared between trucks, HGVs and coaches, it turned out that less than 3% of the funding went to the coach sector. Coaches have also been excluded from the van and truck zero emission grants because they are not vans or trucks, and from ZEBRA—the zero emission bus regional areas scheme—because they are not buses.
In dealing with issues around net zero, we need more support for the industry, which is hard to decarbonise, because coaches by their nature go to lots of places and do not necessarily have predictable routes. At the moment, 75% of operators say that they do not plan to buy net zero vehicles. Will the Minister commit to a long-term road map so that the coach industry knows where it is going? Has the low-carbon fuel strategy, which was consulted on back in 2022—some in the industry are still awaiting the outcomes—been lost in the mists of time? Should we be waiting for something else, or will we get some results from it?
Fuel costs are one of the issues that many in the industry are talking about. Because of Trump’s ill-thought-out war in Iran, diesel prices have absolutely rocketed—they are up 46% since February—and that is having a real impact on operators up and down the country. I am sure we will hear some examples of that after I have finished speaking. I know the Minister cannot comment on what is likely to be in the Budget, but would he be willing to talk to some of his Treasury colleagues ahead of the announcement to make the case for the coach industry?