Member News
By Nicky Morgan MP - 10th January 2012
Nicky Morgan MP argues that decisions about school transport routes should be made by local authorities and elected local members – as long as they are made fairly and transparently.
If it is true that "all politics is local" then nowhere does that seem to be truer than in relation to the vexed issue of home to school transport.
My interest in the area of school transport policy arises as a result of a decision taken by Leicestershire County Council about the provision of a bus service to take pupils from the villages of Sileby and Mountsorrel to Humphrey Perkins School in Barrow upon Soar in my constituency.
And the real objection in my case arises from the view of the Council that the proposed walking route is safe and the strongly held view of almost everyone else that it is not.
My example of school transport being withdrawn or changed in Leicestershire is not an isolated example. The Campaign for Better Transport has revealed that 38 per cent of councils are reviewing or cutting transport to faith schools, 46 per cent were reviewing or cutting transport to schools other than faith schools and 51 per cent were reviewing or cutting post-16 transport.
I fully understand the need to make savings in light of the appalling economic legacy left to us by the previous government and the tough choices this means for our local authorities but there are some changes in services that have potentially devastating consequences. There can surely be no point in standing by whilst savings made by local authorities increase costs to the tax payer elsewhere due to possible hospital costs to an injured child, extra benefit payments because parent can't work and lost tax receipts as parents can't continue in their job or have to choose not to go back to work.
One of the problems with this sort of an issue is that decisions about the provision of home to school transport, the assessment of walking routes and the decisions on appeals made by affected families are all matters for local authorities. I firmly believe in localism and that decisions about school transport routes should be made by local authorities and elected local members – as long as they are made fairly and transparently.
However, national government sets out the legislative framework and national guidance within which local authorities and their elected members make decisions about matters such as the provision of home to school transport.
I call on the minister to consider whether the time has come for a clearer statutory test on the availability of walking routes, where the safety of travelling children sits within the necessary assessments and also to set out the government's view on how consultations and decisions on this difficult area are best handled.
Nicky Morganhas been Conservative MP for Loughborough since 2010 and is PPS to universities and science minister David Willetts.
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