Three ideas to help rural bus services
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from our Parliamentary correspondent A MORE IMAGINATIVE approach by Traffic Commissioners . .. the merging of postal and bus services ... local minibus services ... some or all of these ideas are to be put forward by the Government when it announces its plans to improve rural bus services.
A kind of promise that this would be done came from Mr Neil Carmichael, Under-Secretary DoE, in the Commons last week.
Mr Stephen Hastings (Tory, Mid Bedfordshire), had put forward these three suggestions. Mr Carmichael replied that it was hoped to make a statement about improving rural bus services "as soon as possible" and some of the ideas mentioned by Mr Hastings were among those he hoped to be putting forward.
Mr Roderick MacFarquhar (Labour, Belper) said some parents were sending their children an hour late to school so that they could get concessionary fares. He urged Mr Car michael to examine the possibility of enabling local bus companies to give concessions for all children going to school in rural areas.
The question was fairly well laid down in the Education Acts, replied Mr Carmichael, and children should not have any difficulty in getting concessionary fares if they lived a certain distance from the school.
Tory Transport spokesman Mr Marcus Fox claimed that if Mr Carmichael had adopted what the Conservatives had proposed in their 1973 Road Traffic Bill, particularly the clauses which liberalized bus licensing, the tragic problem of rural areas would be well on the way to being solved.
Mr Carmichael said that although the problem varied from one part of the country to another, getting a solution which would be generally applicable was not as easy as specifying the difficulty.