My Lords, it may be convenient if I inform the House that we have a number of sight-impaired visitors with us in the Gallery. To increase the inclusivity of their experience, it may be convenient for noble Lords to identify themselves when they speak. To that end, I am Lord Holmes, a Conservative. As with all moves of an inclusive nature, everybody benefits. I am sure that a number of Members are now going, “Ah, so that’s Lord Holmes”.
It is a pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who has been and continues to be a role model for millions, not just in the UK but around the world. He was a first-class Secretary of State and a man who has transport in his bones, right back to the excellent bus subsidy scheme that he introduced when he was running Sheffield.
I want to speak to Amendments 36 and 38, which are in my name. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for co-signing them. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, regrets not being able to be with us for these discussions, but she was insistent that I made her support clear. She gave me a lot of evidence from her personal experience and what others had relayed to her about floating bus stops. I also thank all the organisations which have been campaigning on this matter since the inception of floating bus stops.
Perhaps it would also be to the convenience of your Lordships if I gave a brief description of what floating bus stops are. In essence, you take a bus stop and move it some way into the carriageway, at a distance from the pavement and with a cycle lane running behind it. Similarly, there are bus stop bypasses—another design. In many ways, it is the name “bus stop bypass” which gives us the greatest clue as to how these parts of our public realm came into being. For most of us, we are not bypassing the bus stop at all; we are simply barred from accessing the bus stop.
I have described floating bus stops and bus stop bypasses, but what are they in reality for blind people, wheelchair users or parents with pushchairs—any of us who do not want to take our life in our hands crossing a live cycle lane? So-called floating bus stops are dangerous, discriminatory and a disaster for inclusive design. They are dangerous by design, prima facie discriminatory by design and disastrous for inclusion by design. They are built to fail and bound to fail. Why? They are an overly simplistic solution to a relatively—I emphasise relatively—complex issue. They could have never solved the issues because they were not predicated on being inclusive by design and ignored the concept of “nothing about us without us”. They say nothing about accessibility.
On my Amendments 36 and 38, perhaps I should first say what these amendments are not. They are not anti-cycling. I am pro-cycling—pro-cycling for all those who can. But I am no more pro-cycling than I am pro-pedestrian, pro-bus passenger or pro-parent with pushchair—in short, I am pro-inclusion.
If we have a continuation of these so-called floating bus stops, we will have a continuation of a lack of public transport in this country. We will have transport for some of the people some of the time. Much more concerningly, we will have transport for some of the public none of the time.
My amendments are predicated on principles that are the keys to finding inclusive and sustainable solutions to these issues. First, it should be possible for a bus to pull up for passengers to alight and egress to the kerbside. For “kerbside”, read “edge of the carriageway”. On country roads, where there are no kerbs and the bus pulls up to the verge, so be it. All that principle says is that the bus does not pull up mid-carriageway, leaving passengers stranded on an island with a carriageway on one side, a cycle lane on the other and the safety of the pavement some way beyond that. The first principle is for buses to pull up for passengers to alight and egress to the kerbside. Secondly, no one should have to cross a live cycle lane to access that bus service.
On what should happen to potential future floating bus stop sites, we already have thousands of these laid out across the country and clearly that issue needs to be addressed. With the Government already accepting that there is an issue with these designs, surely it would make sense to have a prohibition on all new proposed, potential and pending so-called floating bus stops. Call it a prohibition, a pause or a moratorium—whichever you prefer—but it would seem sensible to take that time to not have any more of these sites laid out before we have come to a conclusion about how to make them inclusive, accessible and sustainable.
I also suggest a prohibition on any DfT funding going towards floating bus stops in their current design. How can it be that taxpayers’ money is used to lay out infrastructure and overlay that is accessible and usable for only part of our communities? It is incredibly difficult to make uninclusive buildings inclusive—things that were put up decades and centuries before anybody even considered issues around inclusion. That is difficult but doable. What is perhaps even more frustrating is where you have sites in the public realm, such as bus stops, that were for decades accessible, inclusive, safe and able to be used independently, then for want of a planning change made inaccessible and excluding for such large swathes of our population. I suggest a prohibition on new sites and a prohibition on any government funding going to such sites.
On retrofitting, it is clear that we have an issue with all the thousands of floating bus stop sites currently in existence. They have to be fitted back to the situation they were in before they were turned into floating bus stops. Alternatively, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out, there are potential solutions that are worth exploring. It is desperately disappointing that we have got to this stage with no such exploration and no such interest in those solutions coming from this Government and previous Governments.
So I suggest prohibition, retrofitting and then rewriting the LTN 1/20—the note that sets out this cycling infra- structure. Perhaps again we get a key as to why we find ourselves in this situation when we look at LTN 1/20. At the beginning of the note, it sets out its key principles —the aims. There are around eight or nine principles in that document governing these pieces of infrastructure —that is the front page. Not one of those principles talks about inclusion. It is instructive as to how we find ourselves in this situation.
The Government talk about growth—quite—but how can they enable economic growth, social inclusion and psychological well-being when huge swathes of the population are not even able to get to the shops, the restaurants, the café or the cinema because they cannot get aboard the bus? The Government talk about getting more disabled people into work—quite—but how will that work when we are not even able to board the bus to get to the interview?
I appreciate all the discussions I have had with my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and his efforts in this pursuit. I will be very interested in and listen carefully to what the Minister has to say. Certainly, one of the most important amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, Amendment 35A, will stand irrespective of what happens with my amendments, as will a number of the others—and that is all to the good. But if we want to ensure that public transport is inclusive by design, accessible by all and worthy of its name, Amendments 36 and 38 would enable that. That is what those amendments are all about, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s response.