Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Official Report 490KB pdf

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“Passengers’ View Scotland Annual Report 2008-09”

Thank you for the opportunity to talk to the committee, which we welcome. We hope to appear here more often in the future.

In the period covered by the annual report, which is nearly a year ago, our committee had just been through considerable disruption, partly because of the unfortunate illness of the previous convener, who thankfully recovered, and partly because of several changes of secretariat and the change of location from Dunfermline to Edinburgh. When we kicked off the year, the committee was effectively restarting its work after a rather bumpy first year. The objectives for the committee were first and foremost to establish an effective working structure and effective working relationships among the committee and our secretariat and to identify programmes that we could get on with, which are outlined on page 6 of the annual report.

Our organisation, which is made up of outsiders who give advice to the Scottish Parliament and Scottish ministers for a limited number of days per year, has to be precise and focused in what it does. Therefore, in order to understand the things that were going on in which we could play a part, we asked the secretariat and colleagues to maintain a horizon scan of all the activity that the Scottish Parliament was undertaking in the context of the national transport strategy. That was quite a big task, but the secretariat rose to the challenge and produced a very good report. We chose to comment on the delivery plan for the national transport strategy largely through membership of the stakeholder group on the strategy.

We produced a business plan framework for our committee’s work, which we can talk about in a minute. It was clear that we would not be successful if we did not have relationships with stakeholders, so we spent a fair amount of time establishing relationships with bodies such as yours, communicating with them, letting them know our purpose and seeking to be involved in their work where appropriate. Part of the plan was the proposed merger of PVS with the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland, which did not take place, for reasons that are well known here. We reviewed our work programme and took the decision to change our focus from the delivery of the national transport strategy to an output-driven approach that focused on two national indicators.

That conveys, in as brief a manner as possible, what we tried to do in that first year.

I will bring in my colleagues to answer that.

15:30

I ask Gary Lawson to talk about the stakeholder work, and I will pick up on the other issues.

Mr Lawson, you have indicated who you wrote to and who you tried to connect with. How successful was that? How much of a response did you get?

That is rail specific, and therefore is not in our remit and would appropriately be raised with Passenger Focus, which would welcome feedback on that and any rail issues and take it up with ScotRail. I will take that away from this meeting and, in a different place and context, raise it with ScotRail and follow it up with you.

On rail specifically, we are aware from Passenger Focus that this winter has raised a number of issues that do not normally surface in the national passenger survey and that it is following up those issues with First ScotRail. I would be particularly interested in hearing the details of your point, Rob, so that we can pass it on to Passenger Focus and it can pursue the issue.

Indeed.

The annual report does not appear to highlight any successes achieved by PVS during 2008-09, such as changes to Government policy or budget allocations following representations.

What work has PVS been involved in recently to ensure that passengers’ perspectives are taken into account as part of Scottish Government transport policy development, such as the current ferries review?

We have had a member on the ferries steering group, who has been trying to hold the group to account, sourcing research and prodding the group with interventions. He has been supported by our committee, that is, PVS. He has taken issues from other committee members and reported back to it. That is what we have been doing on ferries. Do you want to ask about other specific areas?

Yes, it is.

I call Cathy Peattie.

Yes. One of our members has sat on MACS since it has been up and running again, and we have had an observer from it. We observe each other and maintain close contact, and we are looking at carrying out some joint work with MACS in the year ahead. As far as Passenger Focus is concerned, we have had meetings with Robert Samson when appropriate, but more frequently we have corresponded in writing with Passenger Focus and other bodies.

We have done a lot of work on buses. When our committee first got off the ground, we felt that it would be sensible to make a recommendation to the Scottish ministers about the big bus companies adopting a voluntary bus passenger charter. We initiated a project strand and we have developed the charter in its draft form through our bus passengers platform sub-committee. The sub-committee’s recommendations will shortly come to the main committee, and we will present them to the minister.

15:45

In developing the charter, we had a good relationship with the Confederation of Passenger Transport UK and with the big bus companies in understanding what they see as the issues for them. We also developed good relationships with the bus companies through the appeal complaints-handling process. Since our appointment, we have worked closely with the Scottish Government’s senior bus development adviser, Brian Juffs, who sits in on our meetings so that he can understand what we are doing and can inform us about what he is doing. At the start of the committee’s life, we met the Air Transport Users Council and Bus Users UK, which is represented on our bus passengers platform sub-committee by Gavin Booth. We have many links with other bodies and do not hesitate to contact them if we need some research or an opinion, or if we want to challenge them about what they are doing, as we did recently with Passenger Focus in terms of input to a consultation that the north east of Scotland transport partnership was carrying out.

The barriers that people with disabilities have in accessing public transport across the board are such that it is not until you have a disability that you have any idea of them. Likewise, mums with small children face barriers in accessing public transport. Are you having discussions with MACS, or perhaps doing joint work with it, on how to improve access for passengers with disabilities or, indeed, gather concerns from them?

Yes, you may.

The bus passengers platform deals with appeal complaints, not initial complaints. Of course, MSPs, MPs, councillors and others who are in a position of responsibility get many complaints, some of which are ad hoc and some written. It is the operator’s job to answer complaints in the first instance. However, if MSPs get large numbers of complaints that are not satisfactorily addressed by the bus companies, we want to hear about them. We want to understand what issues are being raised and which bus companies are at fault. We understand that it is part and parcel of an MSP’s job to take representations from the public, but if the same issues come up constantly and the bus companies repeatedly fail to deal with them, they should be referred to us so that we can take them up on behalf of MSPs’ constituents.

I also hear positive things about buses. How can you increase bus passengers’ awareness of the bus passengers platform? How do we know that people know how to complain or get information?

That is a good question, which I think you answered yourself. Clearly, we can do more with more. The fact that we are set up the way we are means that we have limited resources, which we try to make the best of. We have a good committee of members and a good secretariat, and the relationship is working smoothly. We have become very rigorous in maintaining contact with our sponsor division and keeping it well informed about what we are doing. We also ask it, as we ask this committee, to come to us with ideas about how we might add value where work has not been carried out. We do not want to duplicate any work; we want to look at cross-cutting themes, for example transport and health. Where in health is work going on that affects transport that is not being picked up and that we can perhaps do something clever with? We have to be focused, because we are a limited body with limited resources. However, if we focus our resources, we can bring insights that will be useful to you.

Okay. That is a reasonable approach for a witness.

I think that I will commend it to some of our other witnesses.

I have a final question. This committee is, like all the Parliament’s subject committees, currently looking ahead in budget terms. Whether on or off the record, various people will look at transport budgets to see what might be squeezed in the future. Has PVS looked yet at what might need to be added to its work programme to find out passengers’ views about changes that might be proposed for budgetary reasons rather than transport reasons, such as changes to the concessionary travel scheme?

No, we have not, but we are prepared to do the work as and when we are briefed to do so.

Thank you. I thank the witnesses for their time in answering questions. We look forward to continued discussion with you in the future about your work and other annual reports.

I suspend the meeting for five minutes for a short comfort break before the next panel of witnesses.

15:56 Meeting suspended.

16:00 On resuming—

I believe that the transport directorate’s research budget is in the order of £600,000. Passenger Focus, which Bill Ure mentioned, has a research budget of about £2 million per annum, for research on rail, bus, coach and tram, so it does a lot of research. There is also a lot of research in the transport directorate and other places that we tap into. We are in the process of producing two reports for ministers, which will be published shortly. In those, members will see that we have tapped into many sources of research, from the DFT through to the Scottish Government and a host of others in between.

Your work programme for the year on which you reported identified four priorities, but the annual report did not indicate what progress you made on achieving them. Mr Ure touched on the horizon scanning aspect, but what progress was made on the three other priorities, which were on national performance framework indicators, business planning and building links with stakeholders?

One specific piece of work that we did on stakeholder engagement during the re-initiation phase of our committee was to write to stakeholders throughout Scotland and across a range of industries and organisations, such as transport operators, local authorities and regional transport partnerships, to state our remit and purpose, to state how to get in touch and to say, “Here we are, and here’s how we can help you.”

More specifically, as part of our work programme in the period of the annual report, we surveyed stakeholders to establish the effectiveness of passenger transport representation throughout Scotland in terms of whose job it is to represent passengers. That work involved engaging a similar set of stakeholders. We carried out a survey and pulled together the results. We communicated with stakeholders through a mixture of e-mails, letters, telephone conversations and meetings. That work on the survey involved engaging a group that was similar to the one that we engaged initially through the communication and re-initiation launch. We contacted about a couple of dozen organisations through that work.

That was in addition to a letter-writing campaign that was carried out previously and which involved close to 100 more organisations.

May I answer the other two questions? On the business plan framework, when the committee was set up it established four standing committees in addition to—or perhaps including—the bus passengers platform, which is the bus appeals body. We did not see the sense in a body like us having standing committees to deal with information, integration and so on. Instead, we switched to a start-and-finish, work group-type approach and applied that to doing some work on the two outcomes of reducing the proportion of driver journeys that are delayed due to traffic congestion and increasing the proportion of journeys to work that are made by public or active transport. We are working on a start-and-finish, project-group basis. We had hoped to get those two reports out by the end of the fiscal year that has just finished but, as with everything, you always uncover more. The draft reports are here and they will be going to the minister in the next two or three weeks, and the two project groups are standing down. We are now looking at the programme of work for the year ahead and talking to stakeholders about how we prioritise it.

It was very successful. From memory, I think that the response rate was about 85 per cent for the survey. Of the people we contacted, the majority responded.

That work not only gave us confidence that we were being taken seriously, given the response rate; it built bridges between us and other stakeholders. Apart from doing a single piece of work, we were able to identify specific contacts in those organisations, whether regional transport partnerships, transport operators or passenger representative bodies. Connections were made between the project team and individuals in those organisations, which we have been able to capitalise on in subsequent pieces of work through having more direct points of contact.

I am sorry for the poor English. As Gary Lawson said, we tried to understand who was representing passenger interests. We are an advisory body, not a representative body, but our remit clearly says that we must work with existing bodies. We needed to understand the map of representative bodies, who was doing what and how well they were doing it. That might be self-evident in some areas, such as rail, but it is less evident in bus and ferry. We did the little piece of analysis that Gary Lawson spoke about. We wrote to a range of bodies and got from them their views about how well passenger views were taken into consideration. That raised, in turn, a host of other issues that we were not expecting.

There will, in fact, be a third report coming out shortly. It will be a short paper to the minister giving our views on where there are gaps in representation and where those gaps might be filled. It will come as no surprise to say that there is a big gap in bus, coach and tram—now that we are getting tram. Clearly, there are also some issues around ferries. The Scottish internal air market and airports may be another area where there is need for better representation and understanding of what passengers are going through.

I might just stick with the issue of how passengers and travellers feel about their experience and ask a specific question about rail travel. I have raised this point with First ScotRail and other companies. It is to do with the heating on trains, especially on long journeys in our particularly cold winter. The heating systems often fail to work, or indeed fail to switch off when the weather is warm. I am told by ScotRail that it had problems in the past with the class 170 heating systems but that since it engaged an engineer from the manufacturer it has begun to close out the problems. However, that is not my experience.

I noticed that, in its survey, Passenger Focus looked at the upkeep and repair of trains, for which there was a large sample from ScotRail. The issue probably affects people who take longer journeys, who are a smaller proportion of the total that might be sampled.

Indeed it does not. That is the nature of slow-burn politics and the time that it takes to change policy and for us to have an influence. In the report, you will see a list of the consultations that we responded to. Many of them closed or had their findings taken forward after the end of the year. Furthermore, the work in the first year was focused as much internally as externally—getting the body going after what we could call a false start. We have built momentum since then and, as you will see in the next report, we have had some results.

I am particularly interested in the ferries review, because it will loom large in the next period, for both NorthLink and CalMac Ferries.

Our concern about the ferries review, which the committee may wish to follow up on, is the extent to which, through it, passenger representation will be improved and passenger views will be researched, understood and reflected in how well ferries are built and operated. We are concerned that that is an unknown area, despite our prompting on it.

You talked about a bus passengers charter, which is quite exciting. How will people with disabilities be able to feed into that? Will they be included in the passengers charter?

Our aim is to bring the draft charter to the minister’s attention as soon as possible. We have a meeting in a few weeks at which I hope that we will review it. Thereafter, our plan is to take it in draft to the minister to seek direction from him on whether he sees it as valuable and whether there is any aspect in particular that would need to be picked up. After that, we will recommend to the minister that the charter go out for consultation with a range of representative passengers and passenger bodies so that they have a say and some ownership of it. Clearly, it should also go out for a proper consultation with the bus companies before the minister does whatever he—it could be she by then, depending on the timescale—wishes to do to take it forward.

We have debated that issue. We could spend hundreds of thousands of pounds a year on raising bus passengers’ awareness of the bus passengers platform, but such awareness would decay almost instantly if people did not have a problem. That point affects all representative bodies. We have access to Scottish Government funds, but they are limited.

We decided to be as accessible as we can be when people have a problem. If someone who wishes to complain about a bus journey in Scotland does a web search, they should come up with our bus passengers platform. We have done a lot of work with bus companies, which is paying off, in that they now promote our name to passengers who have a grievance and say, “If we don’t satisfy you, go to this body.” That is a tremendous compliment to the work of the bus passengers platform sub-committee, which has brought about a sea change in a very sceptical bus company audience, so that a number of them are now prepared to promote our name to complainants. The companies see the value in our being involved in helping to sort out the complaints process. Another approach is to make you and others aware that we exist so that you can refer your constituents on to us when they have a problem, which I urge you to do. My secretary and her team will not thank me for saying that, but that is what we are here for.

You mentioned this in one of your earlier answers, but I want to take you back to the issue of how PVS is resourced. Is it resourced adequately to carry out its duties? If not, what additional resources does it require, keeping in mind the background of the tight financial settlement that we will all face over the coming years?

You do not want to go into that in more detail at this point. Is it work in progress?

We have not done anything on that yet, but we expect to be engaged by the sponsor division on that topic. Again, it is an issue of using resources wisely. We could do a lot of thinking about it on an option basis, but until we get a steer that would be a bit of a waste of resources. However, we are quite prepared to step up and put in place proposals for addressing any issue that the Parliament or the sponsor division cares to put in front of us.

Item 2 is evidence from Passengers’ View Scotland on its annual report for 2008-09. We will hear evidence from James King, convener, Gary Lawson, deputy convener, and Bill Ure, committee member, of Passengers’ View Scotland. Welcome to the committee. I apologise for starting this evidence session a little bit late. We are attempting to work to the clock today, but we failed slightly in the first evidence session. I remind members and witnesses to try to keep their questions and answers as short as they can, so that we can recover some of the time.

I ask the witnesses to begin by summarising the key objectives of Passengers’ View Scotland during the period of the annual report and saying whether they were met.

Thank you. Your organisation’s remit requires you to produce an annual report for Scottish ministers that highlights issues of concern to travellers. Am I right in saying that you have not highlighted any specific issues of concern in your report? If so, why did you not do so?

That is a good point. I want to make clear our line on this. The issues that are of concern to travellers, no matter the mode of travel, are well known and do not change very much. Whether the mode of travel is bus, rail or air, the issues are punctuality, reliability, frequency and value for money. Those are always the top four issues. If a mode of transport has gone through a period of poor performance, other issues start to arise, such as on-board service, quality of toilets, car parking and personal security. For every transport mode, there is a well-established list of passengers’ top priorities. As a body with a limited number of days to spend trying to provide added value, we chose not to parrot the existing well-known issues of concern to passengers. We chose instead to try to find the cross-cutting issues that are perhaps not picked up in other ways or other places and to make recommendations on them to ministers, so that we add value.

The annual report does not make it clear how PVS goes about establishing the views of bus, rail and ferry passengers. Will you outline how you do that?

Given the constitution of Passengers’ View and the number of days that it meets, we cannot be an effective representative body of users of various modes of public transport. In the rail industry, Passenger Focus has a pretty substantial organisation with a considerable number of full-time employees. That number has grown substantially recently, because the organisation has picked up responsibility for bus passengers in England. Given our time and money resource, it would be foolish to try to replicate that.

The horizon scan that James King mentioned showed that there is stacks of information out there. It is incredible what has been surveyed. However, the issue is finding that information and joining it up. We considered that it would be a more fruitful use of our time to find out what information exists. We do not need to reinvent the wheel or find out passengers’ views, because they have already expressed them, possibly about six times in other surveys. That is what we are concentrating on.

Given the issue of resources and time, we have developed relations with Passenger Focus, which as I said has taken over responsibility for the bus business in England. Bus is the major method of public transport and there are many generic issues, rather than local or geographic issues, that concern bus passengers. We are establishing a working relationship with Passenger Focus so that we can take its information on problems and issues for users of bus services and apply it to Scotland. In other words, we do not think that we should reinvent the wheel or replicate other work.

I say for a third time that, given the resource and the money, we have to be smart in the use of our assets. Trying to be a representative body would not be a smart use of assets.

I am going to read something from the annual report:

“A pulse check survey of passenger representation across all modes of public transport was started during the year by a Gap Analysis sub-committee”.

That is not going to win the plain English award. Can you explain what it means and what you hope to achieve by carrying out that survey?

Thank you—and the issue is not just to do with last winter. We have not had any heat waves, but ScotRail’s trains still cannot have their heaters switched off.

Especially the 158s.

I could ask quite a few questions about that, but that gives us a hint—time is pressing.

The annual report does not mention how you have worked with other representative bodies—sorry, I think that that is Cathy Peattie’s question.

I will just repeat my colleague’s question. The annual report does not mention how you have worked together with other representative bodies, such as Passenger Focus or the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland. Can you outline how you have worked with those organisations to further passenger interests?

I am glad that you asked that question, because there is always a focus on people’s visible difficulties, but there are many invisible difficulties. However, one thing is true: any improvement that is made to public transport to help people with disabilities of whatever kind improves public transport for everybody. At the point when we were potentially going to merge with MACS, we held off getting involved in that area until we had some expertise on board. However, through the work that we have done since the annual report came out, and with MACS getting up to speed, we now see an opportunity to sit down with MACS very shortly to be clear about who is doing what to bring about improvements that have not already been identified by Transport Scotland, the Scottish Government or whoever, in order to bring insights that we would otherwise not see.

That consultation will be very interesting, convener.

I was very surprised to read that the bus passengers platform received only 220 complaints—I think that I have heard almost as many as that in my constituency in the past year—in the financial year 2008-09, during which there were 515 million bus journeys. Why do you think so few complaints were received? I will pass mine on soon.

You referred in previous answers to many of the key issues that have been raised by bus, rail and ferry passengers, and by committee members. As we are near the end of this evidence session, I offer you the opportunity to raise any other issues involving passengers’ concerns that we have not discussed yet and which you think the committee should be aware of.

Passengers’ basic concerns are pretty common to all. Bus transport issues are becoming better known as Passenger Focus does more work in England. In shadow form, it has spent a lot of money over the past year carrying out research in about a third of the metropolitan and rural areas of England. It has built up a tremendous wealth of research that we hope to tap into very shortly. However, the area in which we think that more needs to be done is ferry transport. The little dipstick survey that we initiated last year, and which we will expand on this year, is designed to try to flesh out what that more needs to be.

It is work in progress, because we are an evidence-based body. We have taken a policy decision to be evidence based and not anecdotal. If any of us uses an anecdote, they pay a pound into the Railway Children charity box in the middle of the table. That is the kind of approach that we take. Unless we have the evidence, we will not bring up an issue with the committee.

So it is on the radar, but you have not begun any work on it yet.