Up to £350m will be spent on modernising stations, installing new escalators, renewing track and refurbishing rolling stock. The remainder will pay for maintenance and running costs until 2019.

Nick said: “Today’s announcement safeguards the future of the Tyne and Wear Metro for a generation. The Metro is the envy of other cities and the Government’s commitment reflects the importance of the Metro to our region.

“The Government’s package of over £300m of capital investment will be focussed on what passengers want, transforming the Metro and renewing its world class status resulting in a better service, securing hundreds of jobs and delivering value for money to the tax payer.”

Nick said: “Both Newcastle and Durham Tees Valley are successful, privately run Airports. Nearly 25% of the private sector wealth generated in the region is located around the chemical and processing industry on Teesside. Durham Tees Valley provides an easily accessible transport link into the region for this global industry. The Tory proposal clearly illustrates their lack of commitment to increasing the economic prosperity of the North East.”

THE prospect of a high-speed rail link to the North East took a major step forward last night when a senior Government minister promised to meet train bosses and prepare a detailed business case.

Minister for the North East Nick Brown will work with the head of National Express East Coast to estimate the cost of a route from London to Newcastle.

Mr Brown, who is also Chief Whip, said: “I do not want us to miss what could be a very important aspect of the rail debate for us. I will talk to Susan Goldsmith first, then take that to regional agencies.

“We have to know what we can reasonably ask for, because I can’t go to the Department of Transport with a generalised wish list and a £1bn price tag.”

This is a big announcement for us. It is the result of a lot of hard work by the Director General and his staff at Nexus, supported by the five local authorities on Tyne and Wear and the region’s MPs. It shows what we can achieve when we stick together for the good of the region.

Nick Brown: It is a rare pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) in debate, as it is unusual for a Labour Member to speak immediately after another Labour Member. It is worth pausing to reflect on why that has happened. In fairness to the Conservative party, it is being consistent. Conservatives do not like bus travel, they are not wedded to public transport and they have not turned up for this debate. They are at least being consistent in not being present. However, the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) is the only Liberal Democrat who has attended this debate. When I think of all the “Fib Dem” “Focus” leaflets that have been shoved through my letter box—I am sure other Members have had the same experience—saying how much they care about where the bus stop is, the frequency of the bus service, how wrong it is that somebody else, either the Labour Government or the Labour-controlled passenger transport authority, has not done this, that or the other, I would have thought that their parliamentary representatives might have found time to have attended the debate.

Tobias Ellwood (Con): I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is not surprised
that a Member rises to respond to that comment. He is right that the debate is on an important issue, but let us look at the timetable for it. On what day is the debate taking place? This is the last day before recess and we are having a discussion about buses. Why was the subject of the debate not expanded? Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that we should have a wider debate—one that is not only on buses, but on transport? If that were the case, we would find that not only Opposition Members but Labour Members would be more inclined to join in the debate.

Nick Brown: I fully accept that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but I wish to observe that the conditions that pertain to today’s debate pertain for all Members equally. It is not easier for Labour Members to get to the House than Conservative Members—or easier even than Liberal Democrats. However, I shall follow your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and return to the subject of buses.

The case for public bus transport has never been stronger. The arguments for it have been well rehearsed in the House. Bus transport is liberating for those who do not have access to other means of transportation. It is socially inclusive for those on low incomes, including pensioners and those who do not receive a wage. The economic case for bus transportation in broadening the range of jobs that are available to people has an important part to play in the Government’s “making work pay” strategy. There is, and always has been, a strong case for bus transportation in terms of the impact that it has on relieving traffic congestion. Perhaps the most important argument in favour of bus transportation is the environmental case; a bus journey produces far less carbon dioxide per person than individual car travel for the same journey.

I want to pay tribute and give due credit to individual Government Departments for their recognition of the role of bus transportation in achieving their departmental objectives. For example, the Department for Work and Pensions has provided financial support for bus transportation defined specifically to link rural communities with larger neighbouring labour markets. Through its agencies, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and its predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, have supported rural bus schemes, including minibus schemes, to mitigate the isolation of those in rural communities who do not have access to their own transport. Some of those schemes have been highly imaginative, taking careful account of people’s preferred journey patterns. The Chancellor has provided funding for concessionary bus travel for older and disabled people in his last two Budget statements, and the latest proposal from the Department for Transport is to take forward the quality contract idea in the Transport Act 2000, which I think has so far found only one taker. So if there is merit in the idea—I think that there is—it needs revisiting.

Having said all that, the question that the House ought to be considering is why the use of buses outside London has been in sharp decline since bus deregulation in the 1980s. Bus use in Tyne and Wear has declined by 48 per cent. in the past 20 years, and part of the explanation might be found in the level of expenditure on transport. Public spending on transport in London stands at £631 per head. The equivalent figure for the four English regions of the north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside, the north-west and the west midlands is £239 per head. That is a substantial difference. Deregulation of the bus industry outside London has not brought the benefits claimed for it, and it seems that the application of competition policy in this area has turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help.

With declining passenger numbers, bus companies are slow in investing and short-termist in their decision making, and there has been little innovation from the private sector. Now that the private sector bus market has settled down following initial deregulation, there has been a marked tendency toward the establishment of effective private sector monopolies area by area. That is exacerbated by the fact that the cost of entry into the market for new competition is high, so it is rarely attempted. Whatever this is, it is not competition policy. Bus companies are also not slow in coming forward to demand public subsidies for every social element of the service that they provide—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) made very effectively. The most obvious example is concessionary travel. Bus companies seek to reclaim from public authorities the full cost of pensioners’ and older people’s travel. If a real private market were operating, surely all bus companies would introduce concessionary travel arrangements of their own. However, because the state is paying, those private companies want to charge full fare.

Paul Rowen (LD): I am pleased that the right hon. Gentleman has moved on to concessionary fares. What is his view of the Government’s revenue support grant settlement for Tyne and Wear, which resulted in massive cuts in bus services and an increase in concessionary fares? Does he think that the Government got it right?

Nick Brown: It will come as no surprise whatsoever to the hon. Gentleman to learn that I will have quite a lot to say about that issue later. Indeed, I have asked questions of the Minister about it, met various Ministers to discuss it, had an Adjournment debate on it and introduced a ten-minute Bill in an attempt to remedy the problem. So it is not as if I have been silent on the matter, and nor will I be silent this time. I should add one cautionary note, however. The difficult situation in which Tyne and Wear finds itself is not the responsibility of the Ministers opening and responding to today’s debate. Indeed, the previous Secretary of State for Transport went out of his way to be as helpful as he could to Tyne and Wear; the blame lies elsewhere.

Julian Brazier: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time. On his substantive point, he has made an intricate, detailed and effective attack on the way in which the subsidy is being applied. Surely that bears out the point made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson), who said that one does not have to disagree with the level of subsidy in order to argue that it is none the less being extremely ineffectively applied.

Nick Brown: The hon. Gentleman—I hope that I do not do him any harm in saying this—is absolutely right. An appropriate sum of money was allocated to the policy; it is the way in which it has been distributed to individual authorities that has given rise to the problem. Some authorities were given too much money and were reluctant to give it back. That is understandable, but the area that I represent was not given enough money. It says that it needs more, and it does, as I shall point out.

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman will also agree with me about the dangers before privatisation. Unresponsive, complacent, inflexible and inefficient public monopolies are no more acceptable than their under-funded private sector equivalents. Many of my hon. Friends have said that they do not want to go back to the situation of the early 1980s. I endorse that sentiment and I shall propose a better way forward.

The issue is important for the whole country, and especially for English conurbations outside London. It is especially important to the community in Tyne and Wear that I represent, partly because car ownership is substantially lower than the national average and partly because the usage of public transport is substantially higher than the national average. It is those facts that, as well as underpinning the importance of public transport, have got us into the budgetary difficulty that the PTA, Nexus, faces. For those who do not know the area, Nexus covers the five metropolitan district authorities in Tyne and Wear. The funding arrangements for the Government-inspired concessionary travel scheme have left the authority with a shortfall of £5.4 million.

I have raised the issue in an Adjournment debate and in a ten-minute Bill. The Tyne and Wear MPs have had meetings with Ministers and even with the Prime Minister to try to resolve the issue, but it remains unresolved. It is completely unacceptable that the injustice has remained unresolved for 18 months.

Nexus has tried to deal with the problem by drawing down its reserves to bridge the funding gap. That might be a reasonable short-term strategy, but it can only do it once. The reserves cannot be drawn down again, so some other means will have to be found to meet the budget shortfall. That inevitably means cuts in services and the withdrawal of other concessions that do not have the statutory underpinning of the arrangements for pensioners and persons with disabilities. That is desperately unfair—and even more so because the pressure to cut other arrangements is not being put on other passenger transport authorities. In any event, such pressure is contrary to the public interest.

I wish to conclude my short contribution to today’s debate by suggesting a way forward. The debate about city regions offers in its analysis some very important points on economic development and public transport, although it is unwise to draw more general conclusions about political structures from it. What is needed is a combination of the ideas proposed by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport for taking forward the quality contract proposals, which have much merit, combined with an empowering of passenger transport authorities.

I took great heart from the Minister’s comments on the issue. I shall await the details of the proposals, but it sounds as if they are on the right lines. I strongly believe that passenger transport authorities should be able to make strategic alliances across their existing boundaries with neighbouring communities. They should be led, as they are now, by elected local representatives. However, I am not taken with the idea that they should comprise the leaders of the district authorities in the area. Council leaders are very busy people: a mixture of other councillors, in proportion to party representation in the area, would be able to specialise in transport matters, and make that their main contribution to local public service.

The PTAs need to have the power to assert specific bus routes. They do not have it at present, but instead must allow routes to be chosen by the bus companies. They should be able to impose bus-only lanes and make arrangements with the police for their enforcement. They should be able to assert the frequency of service on specific routes, and they need to be adequately funded so that they can support innovative public transport projects.

A strong case can be made for funding short or environmentally friendly journeys, such as school bus journeys in urban areas that might replace the car trips that parents make when taking their children to school. That idea has much to commend it on environmental and congestion-reduction grounds, but the obvious objection is that parents pay for their journeys by car to school, whereas the public purse would end up paying for the bus. Nevertheless, the time has come for such ideas, and the PTAs should be able to innovate in that way.

If bus travel is to make the contribution that many Ministers want it to make, we have to believe in it and create enthusiastic public authorities to champion it. The new proposals from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will have their greatest impact if local PTAs are empowered to act as strong advocates for them.

I beg to move,”That leave be given to bring in a Bill to enable passenger transport authorities in certain metropolitan districts in England to regulate passenger transport operations; and for connected purposes.”

The Bill is intended to strengthen passenger transport authorities—PTAs—and passenger transport executives—PTEs—in metropolitan England outside London. The reason for doing that is to encourage greater use of public transport and to enable PTAs and PTEs to be more innovative with public transport schemes in their own areas. Essentially, my proposal is to gain for the rest of metropolitan England what London already has.

My Bill has three elements: a strengthened regulatory role for PTAs and PTEs; the explicit ability to enter into partnership agreements with neighbouring areas, most obviously covering travel-to-work areas that cross county boundaries; and the ability of those strengthened PTAs to receive grant aid directly from central Government. In Tyne and Wear, that would have the great advantage of eliminating the funding shortfall for the pensioners concessionary bus travel scheme.

My Bill is unashamedly pro-public transport. It favours the citizen and the broader public interest over narrower commercial interests. All the traditional arguments in favour of public transport still stand: the impact of public transport on congestion, public transport as a liberating instrument of social inclusion, and public transport as a support for the labour market and economic activity more generally. Those arguments are well known and understood and are in themselves pretty persuasive, but it is surely the case for public transport as energy-efficient and environmentally friendly that should compel us to renew our efforts in this area. The strengthened PTAs proposed in my Bill would have control over the strategic highway network in their area. They would be able to control bus lanes and bus priority carriageways and assert the routes used for bus travel, so that the public interest could be asserted over the bus operator’s commercial interest.

Let me give an example of why this is necessary. The No. 22 bus operated by Stagecoach in my constituency is supposed to go down Shields road. It always used to go down Shields road, local people want it to go down Shields road, and the bus stops are on Shields road. However, the bus is now diverted into a residential area—Valentia avenue and Iolanthe crescent. Some 800 local residents have signed a petition requesting it to be returned to its former route. I have tried to get the bus route put back to how it was, as have the PTA, the local council, and local residents in direct meetings with the operator, but the answer remains no. That is not for any public service reason but for the operating convenience of the bus company, which has rerouted the bus past its depot so that it can change drivers. And people complain about provider capture in public services!

The operator behaves in that way because there is no-one to insist that it should not. My Bill would remedy that. Powerful stand-alone transport authorities would be able to invest in the public transport network and their own capital programmes. Of course they would have to be audited and held to account for the money that they were spending, but at least they would be able to get on with it.

Bus deregulation has not led to a growth in bus travel outside London. Since deregulation, fares have increased by 86 per cent. in PTA areas and bus use has halved. Bus use in Tyne and Wear has declined by 48 per cent. in the past 20 years. Bus operators’ response to declining use is to cut services, reduce costs, raise fares and seek public subsidies. As the bus service weakens, people look for alternatives—most obviously, the private motor car. Nor has deregulation brought new, exciting, innovative bus operators into the market. Market entry costs are high, and existing operators are pretty well placed to see off any new competition. In London, buses are carrying more passengers than at any time since the 1960s, whereas in the rest of metropolitan England the movement is in the opposite direction. That is neither sustainable nor desirable. As a remedy, I commend the Bill to the House.