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'Contemptible' charge in Commons clash over NBC targets
Page 39
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from our Parliamentary correspondent
• Government and Opposition spokesmen on transport clashed sharply over the financial targets of the National Bus Company in the Commons last week.
Speaking during a debate on transport in the North West, Mr. Michael Heseltine said that the people of that area served by Ribble and Crosville were now having to subsidize the losses on the London Country Bus Services.
-That is the sort of cross-subsidization that goes on. It is a cowardly and contemptible decision of the Ministry taken purely for political reasons because there is a general election in the offing.
-It is an example of the way in which politicians, mesmerized by the need to earn votes, are prepared to desert any sort of theoretical arguments about how to run the
transport industry properly. The NorthWest will suffer as a consequence".
Mr. Bob Brown, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, said Mr. Heseltine was speaking with tongue in cheek. It was simply not true that the people of Merseyside and Manchester would have to pay for the losses made in London.
The financial target of the NBC was agreed with the company, and was broadly comparable with the former profits of the companies calculated collectively, said Mr. Brown. In other words the target was agreed after taking into account all the losses of the London bus services. The target was less because of these losses, and this sum was not being carried on the backs of the other companies.
Before the Transport (London) Act the taxpayers of the nation generally had for many years carried the losses of London Transport, went on Mr. Brown. This Act placed the responsibility for the transport services of London on the shoulders of the people who lived in the area, where it should have been for generations.
Mr. Heseltine recalled that about three years' ago it had cost the taxpayer £47m to acquire the privately owned bus shares in British Electric Traction, to nationalize them and put them into the NBC. The immediate effect was that companies like Ribble and Crosville, which had served the local area in the North-West extremely well, now found themselves in a totally impossible financial position.
They had been given a directive which one could only describe as totally impractical and financially reckless. It would face the NBC, within the foreseeable future, with bankruptcy in exactly the same way as the other nationalized transport industry had been placed.