It’s in everyone’s interests for the Bus Services Bill to be signed off quickly, before parliament’s time is taken up by Brexit
The Bus Services Bill returns to the House of Lords on 26 April for the Lords’ Consideration of Commons Amendments – which should be the final stage in the long and protracted parliamentary history of this Bill.
As I’ve said before, I can’t believe that their Lordships would be so unwise as to seek to amend the Bill again and cause it to be “ping-ponged” back to the Commons. If I’m right, Royal Assent should follow very soon after 26 April.
That’s not the end of the matter, as various regulations have to be brought into effect too in order to implement the Bill, and these have yet to be laid. The sooner this is done, the better, in my view. We need to bring this protracted debate to a close.
If the Bill did, for whatever reason, fail to get Royal Assent in this parliamentary session it is in any event perfectly possible for the government to pass a “carry over” motion to continue with the Bill in the next session, and complete whatever stages need to be completed.
But this is such a theoretical scenario, and one that is almost certainly not going to happen, that I barely need to mention it.
10-15 more Bills
But I mention it nonetheless because in the next two parliamentary sessions there is going to be almost no time for ordinary domestic legislation. Almost all parliamentary time will have to be devoted to Brexit legislation.
In addition to the Great Repeal Bill, it is estimated that there will need to be between 10 and 15 separate additional Bills, quite apart from a vast number of statutory instruments to put effect to changes to UK law to make the legislative landscape operable.
Parliament will, I’m sure, demand that there is plenty of time set aside for it to properly scrutinise all of this, and in some detail. Spare parliamentary time for non-Brexit legislation will be at a premium and reserved, I’m sure, for the most urgent policy issues.
Bus policy hardly demands that label, so getting the Bus Services Bill into law before the end of this session, and pushing ahead very quickly in the next session with the related statutory instruments is, in my view, in everybody’s interests. At least then we will have legislative certainty.
Bun fight ahead?
Anyway, pretty soon now Greater Manchester will be able to press ahead with its franchising plans.
Despite my personal misgivings about this, I will be interested to see which operators throw their hat into the ring. Clearly the incumbent operators will, as I assume will the other “big five”.
But I wonder if any of the medium-sized and smaller operators will dip their toes in the water, if only to get some experience of the franchise bidding process. Look out too for Abellio, which is only interested in operating in a regulated market, and other European operators such as Transdev. This could be quite a bun fight.
