Equal Opportunities Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Official Report 413KB pdf

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Community Transport

For agenda item 3, I am delighted to welcome Gordon Muir from the Rural Development Trust, and Rachel Milne from Buchan Dial-a-Community Bus. Members should indicate when they want to ask questions and our witnesses should decide whether both or just one of you wish to respond to questions.

This is not a facetious question for Rachel Milne, though it might sound so initially. Who are the community?

We answer to the communities of Buchan and, nowadays, Aberdeenshire. We are community based, our directors and our board are all from the community and the community tell us what they want. Basically, the local people, the passengers who use our buses and the local towns and villages we answer to are the community, in our case.

Is the community involved in management and, if so, how is it drawn in?

The board of trustees and the directors are all from the community in one way or another. Originally, the local community councils and local councillors all had seats on the board. Since then it has grown organically to include volunteers. Each of our areas, for example our volunteer drivers, has a seat on the board, although they have to live and, if not work, commute to work from within the local communities to have a seat on the board.

Is there active engagement from the community? I ask because many people say that it is a great idea for the community to do something when what they mean is that it is a great idea for someone else to do it on their behalf.

We have discovered over the years that if the community is not engaged in what we are doing, it does not work. We are told very firmly at times by our clients, and by the communities in which they live, exactly what they want. We have experienced scenarios in which we have been told from above what the community has wanted and we have said, “All right, we’ll try it,” and it has failed dismally. When the community—the people on the ground—tell us what they want us to do for them, they engage and there is feedback. They want it, therefore they make it work. If they are told what they want, it does not work. We learned that very quickly.

Is there ever conflict? Does one community want one thing, while another community wants something else, or do people within a community sometimes want different things? I have been involved, as a local councillor, in issues such as where a bus stop should or should not be positioned, for instance.

There is always a discussion—quite robust at times—about what is needed, but especially in Buchan we find that they are very determined amazing people who are very self-sufficient. The clients and the communities discuss with us what is needed and, to be honest, we do as we are told. If they did not want it, there would be no point in us being there. If we cannot do it—sometimes it comes down to financial need—it is a case of saying, we would love to, but this is why we cannot, and they understand that. Most of the time there is discussion, but I would not say that there has ever been outright conflict.

I invite Gordon Muir from the Rural Development Trust to say briefly something about his group, then Stuart McMillan has a question for Rachel Milne.

We do community transport throughout South Lanarkshire. We have two depots: the main one is for rural work and most of the vehicles are based there, but we also have vehicles in the depot of one of our partners—the fire service in Cambuslang. We do a bit of urban work, but our work is mainly rural.

We do various other things: for example, we make fuel from waste cooking oil, we have a wind turbine that powers the garage, and we deliver in South Lanarkshire a LEADER programme that is not community transport-related. We try to do as much as possible.

We go about things in a slightly different way from Rachel Milne’s organisation. Our board is also made up of local community people, but we try to maintain a 50:50 split between businesspeople, or people with a business background, and people who have more of a community focus. We find that that works quite well. We tend to adopt a suck-it-and-see approach when the community tells us what it wants. People tell us that they want something and we stick it on, but very often what they have told us they want is not what they wanted, so we take it back off and change it into something else. I am a firm believer in trying things. Most of the time it works, but if it does not work, is it a big disaster? No. We just change it and try to meet the needs that way.

Rachel Milne said that her organisation does what the community tells it to do. Given that, is what you end up doing always sustainable and affordable?

Community transport is, by its very nature, not financially sustainable and affordable. If it were, the likes of Stagecoach and other bus operators would be doing it, or we would be doing it with a licence of our own. Community transport is transport for the most vulnerable people and so will never be sustainable. I am very firm about that: we would be in contravention of our section 19 permits if we were operating for profit.

Rachel Milne said that her service is for the community. What criteria do you apply and has there been significant uptake, given the recent hike in fuel prices?

Yes, there has been uptake, but it is not necessarily because of fuel prices, although I will come back to that.

We provide transport for those who fulfil our criterion of being unable to use conventional transport. That includes everything from—I apologise for being sexist—a lady with a young child who is at home and whose husband is 35 or 40 miles away in Aberdeen with the car, so she cannot get her child to the doctor because there is no bus, to the elderly person who cannot use the bus service because of mental health problems or a physical disability. We can help with that. We also transport very elderly people who have cars but can only drive locally and cannot travel to Aberdeen.

We are finding, with an increasingly independent elderly population—with the policy of keeping people within the community—that our transport is being used more and more. That is not necessarily because people cannot pay fuel prices, but because they have no access to transport. Demand has increased but, unfortunately, our funding has not.

We deal with the entire community. We also have a commercial side that runs services with large buses. It was interesting to hear the previous person who sat in this seat—Anne MacLean—comment that she would like all buses to be low-floor buses, with access for disabled people, for buggies and so on. We operate a service for which the main vehicle is a low-floor bus, but if it has to come out of service for repair or whatever, the back-up vehicle is, unfortunately, not a low-floor bus and we notice a big difference in the income. We do not carry anybody with a wheelchair, but we notice a big difference in take on days when we use that vehicle. We probably see that more than the bigger companies do because we are small; we operate only one service and we know exactly when the changeover is taking place, but the difference is amazing. Financially, it makes sense to run the low-floor bus.

We make a lot of our own fuel from waste cooking oil; come April we will be hit by 20p per litre extra cost for our fuel because the differentiation in fuel duty on biodiesel that is made from waste cooking oil is being removed. That will be quite a big hit for us; it will cost about £10,000 a year, which we will have to find somewhere else. That is what it boils down to. We do not welcome it, and it does not look at this stage as though that situation will change.

I assume—this is aimed at both our witnesses—that your services run seven days a week. What is the pattern of hours? Also, do you notice a different pattern of usage at different times of the week?

We operate seven days a week from about 7 in the morning until about midnight. We work on demand; we do not run about the streets if no one wants the bus. Our busy period is predominantly from 8 to 4 Monday to Friday. We do a lot of work with schools and young people, and we tend to find that the older people whom we are carrying prefer to be out during the day. They do not necessarily want to be out at night—especially at this time of the year, when the weather is at its worst. They still have to get from their front doors to the road to get on to the bus, and a slippy path is not ideal for them. We have to find work for 15 workers, so we do not try to contain everything within those hours, but try to do as much as possible outwith them. Occasionally we will run out of buses on a Saturday during the summer when a lot of trips are on. Normally, however, we have enough to do everything.

One thing stands out for me that I had not previously considered. When I was based in a rural area, I always thought that the lack of a bus was the problem. However, when we moved to working in Cambuslang, we found that there was not really a lack of buses in the evenings. The problem was that people had a fear of getting to the bus stop, which is just as bad as the bus not being there. The committee might like to consider that. I do not know whether that has been brought up before. It struck a chord with me to realise that some older people and some young people do not particularly want to walk the half kilometre that is judged to be the suitable walking distance to a bus stop on a dark evening, or to get off a bus at 10 o’clock at night and have to walk home.

Our services are not as wide-ranging as Gordon Muir’s. We tend to work between 7.30 and 5.30 to 6 o’clock in the evening, five days a week. Our community hire group involves volunteers who drive community groups around during weekends. There are lots of church groups, trips and so on, but that work is predominantly done by volunteers. Shopping services, patient transport and youth groups tend to go out during the day, with the community youth groups going out in the early evening.

We are very busy between the hours of 8 and 4 purely because a lot of patient transport, day-care or social travel for elderly or disabled people is required then. We also see the fear of going out in the evenings among people over a certain age, and doctors and so on do not work evenings, so we are busy predominantly during the day.

We also have alternative patient transport, which covers everything from trips to health centres and hospitals to one-on-one shopping trips. Our driver for that resigned earlier in the year, so we took on two part-timers, which we have found makes better use of time and money. Everyone seems to want transport at the same time, so it is more useful for us to have two drivers on the go.

How much notice do you require from people who want to book transport? Are you generally able to fulfil requests?

Our shopping services are timetabled three months in advance. The clients all get a list of those timetables and they can book as they want. We prioritise people who have disabilities who cannot get out in any other way, so we make sure that the most vulnerable people get out as often as they can.

We ask people to book our patient transport as far in advance as they can, because the more notice we have, the more likely it is that we can fit them in, purely because that service is oversubscribed. We have two part-time bus drivers and buses, and a fleet of volunteer car drivers, but we still cannot keep up.

15:15

Normally our customers book a week in advance, apart from when they are using the local service, in which case they just jump on the bus as it comes along. However, we also accommodate people who give us five minutes’ notice and phone to say that they forgot to book—that is the most popular reason—and those who ask us to take them to a community event because someone else has let them down. Our service is based purely on demand. Every vehicle that we run is satellite tracked, so we know exactly where it is at any point in time. If somebody phones up and wants a bus, we can pinpoint exactly whether a bus is five minutes or half an hour away from them and whether it is available for what they want. At the end of the year, we judge ourselves only on the number of people we have carried. It is to our advantage to ensure that those who want a service get it. We also bring in buses from other operators in order to provide cover.

When you are oversubscribed and you cannot accommodate people, do you recommend alternatives or do you give those people priority for future bookings?

That never occurs: I cannot think of a time when we have turned anyone away. We just do not do it. We always take on the job, to the extent that we would get a bus from Cambuslang to Lanark to do a five-minute job, even although that sounds absolutely stupid. We would do it regularly if we needed to accommodate a group. It is most important that we accommodate the user’s need. We lose money on that but, at the end of the day, the money is not important. What is important is that people get the services that they need when they need them.

I would just say that I am slightly jealous of Gordon.

Just slightly?

I am very jealous. We have to let people down because we physically cannot take them or cannot afford to take them. It is the most heartbreaking thing in the world to say no to someone who is almost crying on the other end of the phone because they cannot get to their hospital or doctor appointment. I have seen people get off the phone and put their head in their hands and I have had to put my arms around them. For a voluntary organisation, it is the worst thing in the world to say no to someone in that position.

I want to ask a bit more about the technology that you are using and how much it contributes to your business. I remember about 20 years ago watching a programme on television—it was before we had mobile phones—about Canada, where the big problem was that people could not go out and stand at bus stops because they would freeze. They had interactive televisions through which they would book their buses, but 20 years later we do not seem to have moved on much in Scotland. It is still a case of “exact fare please” at Buchanan Street bus station for the bus to Wishaw. How are you using technology?

I am certainly not a technophobe; I like everything to be done electronically. I do not like using paper at all. As you can see, as I did not come with any, and all the information is in my head or stored on my phone.

We do everything electronically; all our bookings and maintenance systems are electronic. Tracking of vehicles is electronic. We do not do the intelligent-destination-type work that you are talking about for the bus stops, purely because the bus stops in our area are not geared up for that, so there would be no point in our having it at the moment. I like to think that it will come in the future.

I do not think that we could run the way we do without technology. We have no administration staff for a start. When I switch my phone back on there will be messages on it from people looking for quotes. I will have given them quotes by the time I get back home and will then enter the bookings. I try to do everything—or as much as possible—by computer.

The maintenance system, which is important for ensuring that our standards are right, is approved by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency and is therefore compliant with the Department for Transport’s requirements. It tells us when a vehicle needs a service. The tracking system tells us the vehicle mileage at any point in time, so we know if a vehicle has done more mileage than another. We do not see the vehicles that are based in Cambuslang, but we can pick up faults remotely, so we know when to bring them in and get them repaired. That system is extremely important to us—we could not do what we do without it.

How does recruitment, training and retention of volunteers work?

We could probably do with more volunteers.

We are very lucky with our volunteers. Press articles go out, in which we ask for volunteers. People come past the office and put their head in the door. In addition, we work closely with the local emergency services and people who retire from those services often come to us. If I see a local cop who I think is not doing anything else, I will sweet-talk him into doing some voluntary work for us. When it comes to recruitment, it is extremely important that we get the right people.

We train to as high a standard as we can and we go as far as we can down the road of the minibus driver awareness scheme and passenger assistant training.

On retention, at least two, if not more, of our volunteers have been with us longer than I have; next year, I will have been with the organisation for 12 years. Once I get my hooks into someone, they do not get away. There is a natural turnover of staff and volunteers as people retire, move on or move house, but we have been extremely lucky.

The big issue that we face with volunteers at the moment is disclosure and the change in the disclosure laws. Many of our drivers cannot now be checked under the enhanced disclosure procedure—or whatever its new title is—because they do not work one to one with clients. That is a real worry for us, because it is extremely important that we ensure that the volunteers who come in are cleared to the highest level, for their safety and for that of our clients. I have not quite worked out how we will fix that yet.

We have a lot of volunteers, all of whom we train to the MiDAS standard—we have a MiDAS trainer in-house, as I am sure Rachel Milne does. In the main, our workers are part-time. I am a firm believer that if it is a job that should be paid, we will pay someone to do it. We do not replace paid employees with volunteers. We have a bit of both—we have volunteers and we have paid employees, both full-time and part-time.

If an employee wants it, we will provide full passenger-carrying vehicle training so that they can be a bus driver, as we have a few vehicles that require that licence anyway. All the drivers are MiDAS trained, which is a step beyond what is required by law. We do not provide passenger assistant training, because we do not, typically, do that type of work. It would only be groups that would require that service, and the groups that come to us tend to come with their own staff or volunteers who look after their client group.

I have a tiny technical question. Are your business or operating models different? Rachel Milne referred to section 19 restrictions which, if I understood her correctly, mean that her organisation cannot operate at a profit. Is the same true of your organisation, Gordon, or do you operate under a different model?

No, we operate under section 19 as well, and we also have a commercial subsidiary, which runs the larger vehicles. We do that because it enables us to take on any job that the community wants done. We never need to turn a job away, as we can use one company or the other. The important thing for us is that the need is served. Under sections 19 and 22 of the Transport Act 1985, we could not run the larger vehicles that we run for private hire work—to take WRI members on a trip, for example. We could not do that under our charitable side, but we can do it under the commercial side. The charges are not really different, so it is all a bit pointless. We would rather be one organisation but, at the moment, the licensing regime does not allow that. It means a bit of extra administration and having to look after two sets of books. The commercial side is 100 per cent owned by the charitable side and profits are gift-aided back so there is no issue in that respect. Nevertheless, it is an awkward situation that we would rather be without—and would be without if the legislation allowed us to sort things out properly.

Rachel, would Gordon Muir’s approach not be an option for you?

Actually, it is what we do. I should probably have explained myself better—I came into this meeting with my community transport head on.

Like Gordon Muir, we have two companies: the community transport charity, which runs the section 19 permits and is a not-for-profit concern; and a commercial social enterprise organisation, which runs the private hire licences and carries out commercial work such as school runs, wedding parties and so on. Again, as Gordon Muir said, this is a legislation issue and, for ease, I tend to keep both things completely apart. In that respect, our business models are pretty much the same.

I am sorry to push the point, convener, but I am a bit curious about this. I got the impression from Gordon Muir that he was in the very fortunate position of not having to turn people away; they get in touch and he does what they ask. However, that is not an option for Rachel Milne, who described the genuinely distressing situation faced by her colleagues of not being able to meet demand.

Gordon Muir can explain his side of things but, in general, everyone involved in community transport is trying to meet huge demand with a small infrastructure and a small amount of funding. The situation for community transport is worsening across Scotland. Demand is increasing at a time when funding is being cut and we are less able to provide services.

With fares and hires, our commercial social enterprise organisation provides 44 per cent of our income; the other 56 per cent is made up of council grants. As I said earlier, if the operation were sustainable, we would be a fully commercial company. I would not be sitting here representing community transport because Stagecoach would be providing the service. We rely on that core funding and our ability to provide is decreasing as funding decreases. I do not know about Gordon Muir’s business, but it seems to be slightly bigger.

He seems to be able to magic up a bus from nowhere.

I know—I want the magic wand that he seems to be able to wave.

In the past, we have contracted out to the private sector work that we have felt unable to do ourselves. We use our funding not just to buy and run a bus but to supply a service and it is up to us to come up with the most efficient way of doing so. At the moment, we have 10 vehicles; if we needed 11, say, twice a year, we would not buy another one. Instead, we would hire one to cover that need. That is a perfectly legitimate use of any funding that we get.

I do not know how Rachel Milne works, but we might be in a slightly better position because we have our own mechanics and garage and do all our maintenance in-house. Unless a repair requires a computer and the vehicle needs to go back to the main dealer, we can usually turn a breakdown around and get the vehicle back on the road later the same day. We could not work without that ability because, if we had to book that vehicle into a garage, we would probably need another two, which would not be financially viable for us. We try to do as much as possible in-house. We have some computer systems that will interrogate the vehicles, but some stuff has to go to the main dealer. We seldom have a vehicle off the road for more than 24 hours. Because of that, we do maintenance for other community transport operators, too.

15:30

You mentioned that you sometimes contract out to the private sector. Local authorities often have a lot of vehicles, which are not in use 24/7. Do you have partnership arrangements with local authorities for access to their vehicles and drivers?

We certainly do not have access to any of the council’s vehicles or drivers. We work closely with the local authority, but it tends to relate to education and enterprise resources, in the context of developing the organisation or negotiating contracts with the authority. Enough said, probably.

Does Rachel Milne want to come in on that point?

I suggest that under no circumstances would any local authority allow us to use its vehicles. Local authorities are quite protective of their resources.

I think that there is a good reason for that. I am being a bit sarcastic, because the majority of school vehicles are parked and stationary most of the day. Therein lies the problem. Local authorities have large fleets, and some sort of pooling system and more collaborative work across authorities, across services within authorities and with the third sector are exactly what is required. If we genuinely have the public interest at heart, it seems ridiculous that a vehicle might well be sitting in a playground somewhere that Mr Muir could utilise while his vehicle is being serviced. My rant is over.

May I comment on what you said?

I would love you to do so.

As I said, we work closely with the local authority and we have a good relationship with officers and elected members—

You just do not get a shot of their buses.

We have never asked for a shot of their buses—let me put it that way. I do not necessarily think that they would not give us one if we were really stuck; they probably would. We have never raised the issue.

There is a sea change in how things are being done, certainly in South Lanarkshire. Gone are the days when we turned up at the day centre to find 10 buses parked up, so that we could not move for buses, which sat there from 10 o’clock in the morning until 2 o’clock or 3 o’clock in the afternoon, just on the off-chance that someone might need to make a trip. Such things are changing rapidly in South Lanarkshire.

In rural areas, we find that, if a school or another public body or community organisation goes to the council for funding, the council tends to refer them to the likes of us, saying, “You’d be far better working with someone like the Rural Development Trust, because you will have access to not just one vehicle, which you probably won’t use much anyway, but three or four vehicles when you need them all on one day, which will be used in other ways on days when you would not use them.”

By its nature, a school bus is lightly used. We maintain a vehicle—it is not ours, thank goodness—that did zero miles over an entire year. It did not carry a single passenger, and it was funded by the public sector. It was not a council vehicle; it belonged to a third sector organisation, but that is not unusual.

We have been offered three-year-old vehicles that had never moved. They had to be scrapped. We could not take them on, because it would have been uneconomical to bring them back to a standard at which we could use them on the public roads.

We need to get away from the idea that every establishment needs a bus. We need a pool. Would the arrangement that we have been talking about apply in reverse? Would a community transport vehicle be available to the local authority?

We do a lot of work for the local authority. Most of our income comes from work for the local authority in some way or another. We work for the local authority’s fleet services. The local authority would certainly use us—that is not an issue. We would treat the local authority like any other customer.

The councils have used our buses. We have not asked too often for a loan of one of the councils’ buses, probably because we know what the answer would be and I do not believe in banging my head against a brick wall. I totally agree with John Finnie on shared services. However, I speak for many of my community transport colleagues across Scotland when I say that shared services and partnership work tend to mean that we are told what to do or what we are allowed to do. There is not an open, frank and real partnership discussion about what we can do for each other. I would describe the councils’ approach as paternalistic.

That does not sound like partnership, really.

I suppose that it is from the councils’ point of view but, from our point of view, there is scope for improvement in many ways. That goes across the board, from procurement right through to the end product. I must say in defence of Aberdeen City Council and Aberdeenshire Council that they have brilliant public transport units. Like Gordon Muir’s organisation, we work closely with the councils, but it is under their rules.

Can you make use of public sector procurement arrangements?

Our social enterprise has school contracts and our charity runs three contracts for Aberdeen City Council for social work, under section 19, which means that it is not for profit. On procurement, it is difficult to get the third sector’s needs understood. For instance, Aberdeenshire Council is currently putting its social work taxi coverage out for procurement—

Sorry to interrupt, but I was not asking how you go through the procurement process; I was asking whether you can buy buses more cheaply using public sector procurement.

Oh, I see. No, we cannot.

Why not?

That is a good question.

I always have one good question at some point.

We should be able to do that, although the buses are probably the least of the issues. The biggest saving would be made on fuel. We asked for that facility, but it was not possible at that point. However, we hope that such a facility will come on stream in future. We buy small volumes of fuel compared with the amount that a local authority buys. I estimate that it costs us 15p a litre more, excluding VAT, than local authorities or public sector organisations generally pay.

So there is scope for measures on procurement and shared services.

I think so. Our experience is slightly different from Rachel Milne’s. We had her experience about five years ago, not long after we were set up, when we found it difficult to deal with Strathclyde Passenger Transport—which is now Strathclyde partnership for transport—and South Lanarkshire Council, which are the two public sector bodies that we work with. Through working with them and trying not to work against them, we have ended up with a good working relationship. They now understand our needs and are far more responsive.

Procurement is a big issue. School contracts are nearly always for one run in the morning and one in the afternoon and that is it. However, two and a half years ago, we started two pilot school contracts with South Lanarkshire Council. Those include the school run in the morning and afternoon and community work during the day, which in essence involves filling in for bus services that do not exist in areas where a bus service would never be realistic. The school gets the use of the vehicles for a certain number of days every year. That was built into the school contract price to allow the schools to do trips and so on. The community then gets the use of the vehicles with volunteers in the evenings and at weekends. The pilot has just been reviewed. It has been highly successful and we are hopeful that, when the new tenders come out, another contract or two will be tendered in the same way. If we can prove that the approach works in more than only two schools—two schools is a bit light for us to say that it was a great success—it could be rolled out much more widely. It costs the public purse nothing extra and it fixes the community transport operator’s income for three or four years, which is worth an awful lot.

Would you be able to share that information with the committee? It would be helpful.

I will need to check that out, but I would be more than happy to come back to the convener on that.

Does Rachel Milne want to make any points on that discussion?

Can I come and live in Gordon Muir’s world?

Me too.

Given that Gordon Muir is talking about success, perhaps he should take the model to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities as an exemplar and say, “Community transport could look like this throughout Scotland. We have done it, we do it and we will continue to do it.” Could he pursue that?

I do not doubt that we could do something like that. The idea of doing the pilot for three years was to prove that it worked. It took a couple of years to do that, but I see no reason why we cannot spread the good word.

You seem to have considered what works well. As there are problems in various other parts of the country, every local authority should be looking at good practice—exemplary practice, in your case.

I am delighted to spread it. The idea behind what we set up in 2004 was to make better use of resources—whether public sector spend, vehicles or staff—and provide more services for the same money. We try to use what must be spent on school transport to provide more. School transport spend is not discretionary and will never go away, because we have to get kids to school. In rural areas, where children live on farms, it is not realistic to think that we will ever do away with school transport, but we have to be a bit smarter and make more of the money that we spend in the first place.

Our success did not happen overnight, but I am not the kind of person who gives up easily. I have a board behind me that is highly supportive of everything that the organisation is trying to do.

I am sure that people in Banff and Buchan would be delighted with that approach.

I have already asked Gordon Muir to give me details of the school contract, because I would like to consider it as a template. However, I will sound a slight warning note, which takes us back to an earlier discussion: every community has its own different needs and one solution does not fix all. Aviemore, Badenoch and Strathspey have car schemes because that is what works in those areas. We have a mixture of buses and community car schemes. Community transport is, by its nature, community based. One size does not fix all. Each council and school also has its own set of needs and desires. The template is cracking, and I would like to consider it myself, but it would need to come with a slight health warning.

Should the committee be aware of any particular issues for new groups that are setting up or groups that are sustaining community transport? I am thinking of challenges or ways of making things easier for communities. I take Rachel Milne’s point that an approach works most effectively when it comes from the community rather than being imposed on it.

15:45

I have two main soapbox items. One huge disadvantage to community transport is the concessionary fares scheme. Our clients cannot get access to the national scheme, which makes our services very difficult to run as we have to charge a fare. Aberdeenshire Council gives us access to concessions on one of our services, but that operates at the council’s discretion, and it could pull the scheme at any time. That would mean that my clients, who are the most disadvantaged and cannot use public transport—on which they could use their pretty, shiny bus pass—would have to pay for services from us. To me, that is a complete inequality. It is wrong, and it is a major problem for us.

The second issue is funding. We are all aware that councils are struggling, but to cut community transport budgets right now, when local bus services are already being cut, means that our services are suffering. When we do not get access to concessions to help the situation, our services are vastly underfunded and we cannot continue. At present, community transport services throughout the country either cannot be set up or are actively having to close, which is a major problem.

I definitely echo Rachel Milne’s comments about the concessionary fares scheme. It really is a bugbear. We are fortunate in that we also get some funding from the public sector to support what we do. However, I am a firm believer that organisations should be paid for the people they carry or the trips that they make; they should not get paid just for being there. I do not include Rachel Milne’s organisation in this, but there are organisations that get paid not for what they deliver but just to be there. That is totally wrong. I think that we are getting rid of many of those organisations, but some are still particularly poor in that regard.

On the funding side of things, I think that plenty of money is being spent on transport; we just need to be a wee bit smarter about how we spend it. A lot is still being wasted in some areas. In our area, school times have been changed so that two schools can be served by one bus, which makes sense, but there is still a long way to go. There are still too many vehicles that do two hours’ work for 190 days a year in the public sector and nothing else. I come from the private sector and I know it well; you can make your money doing school contracts and nothing else. That did not sit well with me at the time, and that is why I am not doing it any more. We need to get away from that.

Under section 19, community transport operators cannot run services for profit. We must be a bit more innovative in how we do things. It is obviously important that people remain within the law, but we need to influence how things might be changed to suit a different market. We should not necessarily compete with Stagecoach and First. They do not want us to, and we should not be doing so anyway, but some community transport operators think that they are there to compete with bus companies. In fact, they should be filling in the gaps that the bus companies will never touch. Realistically, the regional transport partnerships cannot fund every missing bus in Scotland—that is not feasible. Some areas will never have enough people to warrant a 50-seater bus driving down their road every hour or every day.

I see that no members want to come in at this point. Would Gordon Muir or Rachel Milne like to highlight anything for us before we draw this item to a close?

Thank you for listening to us today. You have heard two different viewpoints. It has been interesting to hear Gordon Muir’s opinion.

Bearing in mind that this is the Equal Opportunities Committee, I point out that community transport is for people who fall through the net of conventional transport and they are the people who are suffering from the most damning of inequalities. If the committee can help on concessionary fares and sustaining community transport, that would make my year and I would really appreciate it.

All that I ask is that you keep your eye on public sector procurement rules and suchlike and ensure that the public sector works with the third sector a bit more to come up with solutions. I do not expect someone in a local authority or in another public sector body to say, “No, that can’t be done.” I expect them to say, “It can’t be done in that way, but it can be done in a different way.” I ask the committee to look at different ways of delivering what we need to be delivered. Public sector money is not limitless, so we need to be a bit smarter with it.

I thank both Gordon Muir and Rachel Milne for representing their community transport organisations at the committee and shedding a lot of light on the issues that we have asked about. I hope that we will be able to take those issues forward within the scope of any inquiry that we consider holding. Thank you for travelling to give evidence—I do not know whether you travelled in your own groups’ buses—and for sharing your thoughts with us.

As the committee has agreed to take items 4 and 5 in private, we will now move into private session. I thank the official report, broadcasting and security staff and observers in the public gallery.

15:52 Meeting continued in private until 16:41.