Equal Opportunities Committee,

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Official Report 338KB pdf

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Disability Inquiry

The third item on the agenda is our disability inquiry. Today we are considering transport. I am pleased to welcome Sheila Fletcher of the Community Transport Association, Trevor Meadows of the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland, Trevor Docherty of the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland, and Frances Duffy of Transport Scotland. As we did with our first set of witnesses, we will move straight to the many questions that we have for you.

The committee notes that a great deal of guidance and codes of practice are freely available on how to make transport and related services accessible. However, we hear that there are still many problems for disabled people in accessing transport services. What do you suggest we do to speed up progress towards more inclusive transport services?

I will have a bash at answering that. To be honest, we need to change the thinking. As you said, an awful lot of work has gone on in transport for many years. Much of it began in 1981, which was the international year of the disabled person. There has been an enormous amount of work since then, but it has concentrated on technical aspects to do with physical access and barriers to the existing transport system. The work tends to be about how people get on a bus, for example, and there is a preoccupation with matters such as step heights. The work has not involved people standing back and considering a strategy.

What is needed for disabled people and what barriers to movement are there for them? What is the relevance of the existing transport system? We must think about why people use the transport system. In big city centres, for example, buses are routed for work, education and shopping. However, the majority of disabled people are elderly, so work and education are not relevant for them. They make different kinds of trips—an awful lot of social journeys and fragmentary trips. Walking distances for disabled people are short indeed; 50 per cent of them cannot walk more than about 60yd. What is the relevance of all that for transport? We do not have detailed evidence about the real nature of the problem. When we consider it, time and again we come back to the idea of having more flexible systems. However, even when those are in place, if disabled people have been immobile for a long time, it takes an awful lot of work with them to give them the confidence to go out and try things again.

We assume wrongly that all we need to do is to provide a technical fix for the existing system. In fact, we need to change how we think about passenger transport. To be succinct, what we need for people is what DHL does for parcels—if you understand what I mean. DHL does not just run 44 tonners on routes; it uses a network on which vehicles of different sizes are allocated on a best-value basis. We need something like that for people. We need a hierarchy of co-ordinated systems.

The funding needs sorting out too. There is a postcode lottery in Britain, and funding becomes available only when people in local authorities or the voluntary sector are pushed to get something done. There is no statutory duty to provide the services that are needed most and there is no evaluation of the benefits. There is a preoccupation with costs, but there is no appreciation or evaluation of the savings to health and social work services of keeping people mobile rather than having them immobile.

In a nutshell, we need an evidence-based strategy and we must realise that that is a huge job.

As you will know, we are engaged in an inquiry into the barriers facing disabled people. Whether we consider education, leisure or work, one of the main barriers that disabled people face is transport, because if they cannot get to where they need to go, they are housebound.

The Executive has just launched its consultation on the national transport strategy. Part of that involves considering questions of accessibility. To inform that, there is research, which is getting a bit more evidence about what exactly the barriers are. That will allow us to take an approach that considers not only physical barriers, such as the technical specifications of a bus or a train, but the nature of the barriers and how we can address the problem in future.

What needs to be done to improve accessibility, particularly for rural and island areas? We have been around the country and have heard from people in the islands and certain areas in cities that the transport issue is more acute in such places. Do you have views on what can be done to improve the situation?

I work specifically on the rural community transport initiative, which has been hugely successful throughout rural Scotland. Many of the schemes operate on the islands and in remote rural areas of the Highlands. The really successful projects are those that consider what the problems are and target the solution at those problems. Demand-responsive transport and flexibly routed services are the ideal solution, as is not always having a big vehicle, but having a small vehicle that can be flexible. Most people want to make short journeys; they do not want to make long journeys. They want to travel to the doctor's surgery, to the hospital or to get some shopping. Having small, local, flexibly routed services is the key to success.

Although there is a problem in the rural communities, we should not forget that the issues in the urban environment are just as difficult. In rural communities, we are able to overcome problems for everybody in the community. If there is a transport issue in a rural community, it usually involves the whole community, not just the people who have mobility problems. In urban environments, transport poverty is often worse for people who have mobility problems and is often difficult to detect. In a traditional rural community, everyone has a good knowledge of who is there and who is not; in an urban community, that is not always the case. Although there is a rural dimension to the issues of providing mobility, we should not forget that the issues can be worse in an urban environment, where they are less likely to be identified than in a rural community.

Absolutely. Transport is an issue right across the country, from the cities to the islands. The same problems are encountered but in a different way.

Regulations set out minimum requirements for accessible transport provision. Are there any mechanisms in place to encourage and reward those who exceed the minimum requirements and to share good practice?

Statutory requirements are already in place, and local authorities should undertake equality impact assessments of all their policies and functions, including disability services. All the services that local authorities provide should be equality impact assessed to ensure that the services are available to all people, whether they have mobility problems or whatever.

The question whether we can penalise or reward service providers is a difficult one. Where local authorities provide subsidised services, there is no reason why they cannot ensure that, when they put those services out to tender, the tenders are required to meet certain requirements. That would not be hard to do. The problem would arise in relation to commercial, non-tendered services, over which we have no control. Rewarding or penalising the companies that run those services would be difficult for us to do.

The other problem we face is that there is no mechanism for sharing good practice. We find out about good practice through word of mouth, individual contacts and organisations with which we all have contact. Also, one person's good practice might be somebody's poorest practice in another area. There are issues about where we put the goalposts and how we set a quality standard. In Dundee, we are trying to set some sort of quality standard, but we have not got there yet.

Do you have facilities or processes to enable you to discuss the quality of the services with the service users? People often say that people do not talk to them about the services that they use.

Yes. In Dundee, we have a mobility and access partnership, which is a forum in which we try to include all the local groups that want to discuss not only issues of transport, but issues of access and mobility. How successful that is depends on the input not only from local authority members, but from local organisations, which we hope will come along and take part in the discussion. There are some good organisations in Dundee that are willing to take part in the debate, but we are still unable to engage with other organisations that should be taking part in the discussion. I do not know how we can formalise the process, but we are attempting to follow it through.

The codes of practice and legislative requirements relate mainly to technical specifications and the introduction of accessible buses by certain dates. As Trevor Docherty said, the process can be influenced to some extent through tendering of services, but the local authority that I represent controls only about 10 per cent of the network in the area—90 per cent is commercial. That situation is common throughout Scotland. Local government has limited control. In one sense, if we set higher specs, we are penalised, as we need money to fund the higher tender that comes back. The other problem is on the technical side. Even if we insist in the tender that operators use accessible vehicles on routes, those vehicles are not accessible to everyone. There is no such animal as a fully accessible bus, train, aeroplane or ship.

In this area, one learns rapidly about the diversity of the disabled population. It is important to understand not just disabilities, but the barriers to movement that people face and which need to be removed from the system. There is no requirement in place for authorities to run the kind of services that are needed. They are not required to run door-to-door services, but time and again over 25 years the biggest need that has been identified has been for flexible, non-routed services. Where those exist, they are funded under discretionary powers. At present, because of the cutbacks in local authorities and the need for savings to be made, such services are very vulnerable. With the setting up of Transport Scotland, this is a critical time. The money to fund concessionary travel goes to the agency for the main national scheme, and a growth fund is associated with that. The fund that was left with local authorities for discretionary schemes has been pegged at last year's amount, plus inflation. That is the biggest pressure point. A huge area of growth is people who need to live in their community and do not have expectations, because they have been immobile for many years. Even under the present discretionary powers, there is not the finance for authorities to do what is needed most.

Good accessible transport is not just about access for disabled people; it can be about being accessible to people with shopping or people with prams. It should be about providing a service for everyone, rather than saying that we cannot afford to put on a good service for disabled people.

That is right. When we market a service or do research, it is best not to talk about disabled people. We must include them, but the majority of disabled people are over retirement age. About 50 per cent of them are over 75. Those people do not relate to the term "disabled", so if we connect only with groups of disabled people, we miss their input. We must work with elderly forums, Age Concern Scotland and Help the Aged. There are different dimensions to the problem.

I was interested to hear Trevor Meadows's comment about the need for statutory measures. I have had cause to meet representatives of First bus. You said that your local authority controls 10 per cent of the network, which means that 90 per cent of bus services are commercially run. The First executive in the Glasgow area said that a service was to be taken off because it was not making a profit. When I researched the issue, I was shocked to discover that there are no agreements, requirements, responsibilities or codes of conduct associated with running the service. What leverage do you have over First and the other commercial service providers?

None. We can give advice and produce documents. Some of us have campaigned in various roles for many years. However, there are no statutory requirements or codes of practice that cover that kind of thing.

Are there not even guidelines?

No. There is a big need for training. MACS has put out guidelines on minimum standards, but their effectiveness is dependent on who reads them and the initiatives that people take in response to them. Groups of disabled people and many users tell us consistently that, even where there is training, it does not carry through to subsequent behaviour. People receive training, but they continue to drive and behave in the same old way—they are not really signed up to it. Training is not always effective because it is not policed and not enforced. It is a huge problem. At present, there are no duties on people.

Transport Scotland is responsible for the operation of the rail network in Scotland. We talked earlier about regulation, standards and other ways of trying to move equality forward. Under the franchise, we have a commitment from First ScotRail to make its trains and stations accessible. We monitor that frequently through our service quality inspection regime, which involves going out and checking what it is like in the stations or to get on the trains. The SQUIRE operates in the west of Scotland and is spreading throughout Scotland this year. It gives us key information about how First ScotRail is performing its duty and fulfilling its commitment under the franchise. We regularly report back on that.

We also realise that staff attitudes and training for staff are important in rail transport. MACS has been working with First ScotRail on producing a training package and First ScotRail is investing considerably this year in ensuring that its staff—especially the front-facing staff, such as ticket collectors—are trained. The company is even considering training in sign language for phrases such as, "Which platform do you go to?"

There has been quite a lot of work on rail. I am afraid that I cannot refer to the bus companies, as that is not something for Transport Scotland.

Last year, Age Concern did a bit of work and found that only a quarter of the bus fleet in Scotland is accessible. The biggest problem with that is that, sometimes, there will be a mixture of accessible and inaccessible buses on the same route, so somebody will have an accessible bus on their outward journey, but not on the way back.

One of the biggest problems in all areas is the accessibility of coaches, which have a longer run-in to becoming fully accessible under the legislation. To date, the coach companies and designers seem to be focusing on lifts, rather than on level entry. They say that only 1 per cent of people in the United Kingdom are wheelchair users and so they ask why they should focus on level entry. However, 10 per cent of the population have a significant mobility problem and 30 per cent have one to a lesser extent. They will be less likely to want to use a lift because they might feel as though they are being singled out when they get on a coach, but no work is being done on that at the moment. That is a significant area in which we should push for coach access.

Frances Curran talked about the knowledge that people have, and coach access is an interesting area in which to examine that. Often, when people talk about the need to put a lift on a coach, they call it a wheelchair lift, as if wheelchairs went out all by themselves and there was no one sitting in them. It goes back to the basic ignorance of many people. When services have been lift equipped, and there has been proper training and the services have really penetrated the market, two out of every three people who use the lift have been standees—the people who need level access of some kind and cannot get up ramps. Ramps can be barriers to people, but there is a failure to understand such basic points in much of the industry.

Demand-responsive transport has been mentioned a couple of times. The Scottish Executive's DRT pilot programme was originally scheduled to finish in March this year. Will the witnesses expand on their views on the utility and impact of demand-responsive transport services?

For the past nine years, I have worked on quite a few demand-responsive transport projects. The pilot has not been my area of interest within the CTA, but I have watched what has happened with it. Such projects have been hugely successful; many of the rural community transport initiative projects have been demand-responsive, flexibly routed services. Such services need quite a lot of marketing to ensure that people know that they exist and do not feel that they are not for them. However, once people start using a demand-responsive service, they will use it more often.

I understand that the funding for the DRT pilot projects has been extended for another two years at the same level as before. It is a little bit sad that it has not been expanded. It is the same with the RCTI; we do not know where the funding will come from for it to continue. We currently have 106 projects, which require about £1.5 million a year. I would say that the initiative has been huge value for money. We have really used it to help people in rural areas.

The big area that has not been considered and that needs to be developed is peri-urban demand-responsive transport. There are four urban projects at the moment—Trevor Docherty will be able to tell you a bit more about the Dundee project, on which he works—but, at the moment, we can only assist communities with fewer than 10,000 people.

As Sheila Fletcher rightly says, I am involved with the Dundee project. When the demand-responsive transport initiative first came up with the urban community transport initiative, it was a very good idea. However, it was a hasty process and we had only a couple of weeks in which to put bids together to seek money.

Although the money is welcome, as it will help us to develop, each of the four schemes—in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh—is different in what it tries to do. The Edinburgh project develops existing provision, co-ordinates more community transport services and increases the number of services. The Glasgow project has managed to get the operators together and has done well. The Aberdeen project and, to some extent, the Dundee one did not focus on the outcomes that we wanted. We were looking more for outputs than outcomes.

Over the past couple of years of developing the project in Dundee, much of my work has been about changing people's attitudes as opposed to their awareness. In response to a previous question, Trevor Meadows mentioned that people have good awareness of disability issues, but people's attitudes to how we overcome problems of access for people with mobility problems have not changed much.

I have found that the scheme has been successful in getting people to start changing their attitudes to how we consider access to transport for people with mobility problems as well as for people who are socially excluded. People do not recognise that social inclusion involves many facets, not just people with disabilities, but people who are economically inactive or those who have racial or gender problems.

One of the big groups of people that we have identified as having problems travelling on public transport is young males aged between 18 and 25. We have identified some of the problems, but we will need a lot of money to overcome them. My bid for Dundee was for £0.5 million over the next couple of years. We will not be able even to approach developing services with £100,000. We need to focus the money more effectively and to draw down more money to make progress with the projects.

We need to work out where DRT fits in. People with mobility problems do not need access to a bus because they tell us, "I can't get on the bus." We do not want to be led down the wrong avenue. People want access to a range of activities and facilities.

Over the years, people in transport professions began to see transport as an end in itself rather than a means to an end and they lost the deep knowledge of the market. When one understands where people are, where they need to get to, that they cannot use their legs any more and that they cannot afford to run a car, it is obvious that they need a service that gets them from or through their door to a destination. They need to get to bingo, to the shops or to their friend's house for the afternoon to have a cup of tea—people need access to the whole range of human activities. Only DRT can provide that.

People have tried to go against DRT because they think that routed systems are cheaper. That is true, but they are not substitutable—it is a false economic argument. In economics, one can only compare direct substitutes and one cannot substitute routed services for flexible services.

Much work in the UK in the 1970s experimented with DRT, but it was not economical because it could never cover the costs from the fares box. In unit-cost terms, it is more expensive than a routed service and the subsidies could not be justified until 1981 when DRT was provided specifically for people with disabilities. There has still been no evaluation of the costs and benefits of that except in Oslo.

In Oslo, the DRT system is made up of a mixture of minibuses and taxis. It has been found that, without it, 15 per cent of the people who use it would have had to be institutionalised, because they would not have been able to go on living independently. The cost of institutionalising that 15 per cent more than covers the cost of the whole service.

By the mid 1980s, Sweden had spent 44 million Swedish krona on DRT in Stockholm alone. In the States, a different route was taken, largely because of the lead that angry Vietnam veterans gave. They sat in their wheelchairs with their carbines and said, "If you can get on that bus, I should be able to as well." Although a great deal of money was spent on making the mainstream system accessible, the vets and other people realised that they still could not get where they wanted to go. At the back-end of last year, we heard that an initial sum of $75 million would be put into DRT systems in New York. The pendulum has swung the other way.

As Trevor Docherty mentioned, the outcomes must be examined. We need to ask who is travelling and why they are travelling and, if people are not travelling, why that is the case. That information must be disaggregated. The industry does not carry out such work. The big revenue budget in Scotland that affects older and disabled people is the concessionary travel budget, on which £159 million will be spent next year. The number of trips that are made is all that is measured. Four per cent of people who are under retirement age are disabled. We know nothing about how people who are between the ages of 60 and 100 use concessionary travel; we do not know how often they use it, what they use it for or how far they go. No information is available. That approach could not be sold to Tesco or to any other company that is good at marketing. We must know much more about those people and develop a system that serves their needs. DRT is a key part of that system.

My next question was going to be about the concessionary bus travel scheme. How useful do you think it is? Trevor Meadows has probably given his answer, but other witnesses might have something to say.

The biggest problem is that the scheme is for registered bus services only. Users of services that are not registered—which are among the most flexibly routed services and which include most of the community transport projects—cannot access concessionary fares. That is a major problem.

There is a councillor on the Local Government and Transport Committee whom I know from wearing another hat. He comes from a rural area and he was saying, "Great. I can't ride on the pass because there isn't a bus in my area." Sheila Fletcher has mentioned the main network. In rural areas, the target is to have a bus service that is accessible within a distance of 1,000m, but that is in the context of walking distances. Fifty per cent of disabled people cannot walk more than 60m, and that distance should be halved, because if they miss the bus, they want to be able to get back home again. We should think about the psychology of the situation as well.

In urban areas, the target distance is 400m, but that does not take account of where services go once people get on them. Someone might want to visit a friend a few terraces away, but the bus is routed into the town centre. We must examine the relevance of the system. We do not have sufficient information to enable us to assess the role of local, routed bus services or the rail service. How much of the answer can such services provide? We need to evaluate what proportion of the answer could be provided by a multimodal DRT system, which will be horrendously complex from the point of view of cost-effectiveness and logistics, and to consider the consequences of not establishing such a system. Would that mean that some people would not have equality and mobility?

We must gather the evidence to allow us to find out what we mean when we promise social inclusion. Research that the Executive has sponsored on improving public transport for disabled people, the results of which will come out next month, will show conclusively that the gap is widening and that the new initiative under which people can travel long distance for free is not affecting the rump of the problem, which is that some people are still prisoners in their homes and cannot get around their local communities.

It is not necessary to look abroad for big DRT systems; there are some in the UK. In the west midlands, for example, there is a system that allows 2 million disabled people a year to travel locally. However, user figures show that not enough bravery has been shown. The whole market has not been penetrated; it is certainly not the case that 20 per cent of the population has been registered, and the people who have been registered are probably getting only about two trips a month. What is equality? The national travel survey shows that mobile people can make between 15 and 20 trips a week. Should that not be an aspiration for everyone in society? We must level up the average. To do that, different systems must be eligible. It is not good enough just to give people a pass without considering the outcomes.

Trevor Meadows is quite right. As has been said, concessionary fares benefit only people who can access mainstream bus services. There is no money for us to increase access to transport for people who have mobility problems. The taxi card schemes that local authorities operate are non-statutory and we must find the money for them from our budgets.

Another issue is that, where people are entitled to a bus pass under the national concessionary scheme, some local authorities are refusing them access to the local non-statutory schemes such as the taxi card schemes. When the national concessionary scheme was introduced, Tavish Scott, the Minister for Transport and Telecommunications, made it clear that anyone who was entitled to a bus pass should not be discriminated against by being refused access to non-statutory schemes. Nevertheless, I understand that that is happening in some local authority areas. That needs to be rectified.

As Trevor Meadows says, the concessionary fares scheme will not mobilise the people who are not mobile at the moment. Although we should welcome the concessionary travel scheme for elderly people and those with mobility problems who are able to access it, we must recognise that a significant number of people are being discriminated against because they have a mobility problem.

The statistics from the survey of existing users show that almost 70 per cent of the trips that are made by pass holders on the main system are for shopping. That is atypical, as shopping usually accounts for only about 20 per cent of people's patterns of movement. That shows the limited relevance of the available routes in giving people equal access to a range of activities.

I was going to ask about the research that was commissioned by the Executive, which highlights what you say about it being not enough to make only certain modes of transport accessible. You have given me loads of answers to that question, but could you be more specific? You have mentioned taxi schemes. Are you talking about dial-a-bus schemes and that type of thing? Are you saying that not enough money is being allocated to local authorities to provide those services? You say that, even if the concessionary transport scheme was perfect for disabled people that would not be enough, as it is not enough to enable someone to make a journey on a bus: there are other issues to be addressed, such as affordability. Can you give us some ideas about how that could be addressed—for example, through the taxi card and dial-a-bus schemes?

The best analogy that I can give you is that of DHL, which has a centre for people to phone and a range of vehicles. It has semi-fixed routes and door-to-door services on minibuses in urban areas. The semi-fixed routes might go through rural areas, focusing on towns and getting people between communities.

As well as that, taxis are needed as part of the system so that, if just one person requested a trip within a town, a taxi could be sent rather than a bus. Buses could be used where there was going to be multiple occupancy. In rural areas, there are sometimes no taxis, so car schemes need to be developed and made available. If someone wanted to make a trip within a village, that would not require a minibus to be sent out; there would have to be a more local scheme. It would be a matter of trying to be responsible and controlling the costs.

The fact that such schemes are complicated to deliver is underestimated by industry and the professions. They have seen the voluntary sector provide such schemes in the past, and they have marginalised them as a small issue involving little buses and disabled people. It is a huge issue, and the scale of the problem is reinforced in the findings of the research that the Executive commissioned. I have a pre-publication copy of the report, in which the first recommendation is that

"A coherent and comprehensive strategy for achieving equality of mobility must be an integral part of a national, regional and local transport strategy rather than being a separate add-on."

The sheer scale of the problem needs to be recognised. We are talking about 22 per cent of the Scottish population who do not have the option of walking, driving a car—or even getting a bus in some areas. It is a huge undertaking to provide for them and, at present, that is being done on an ad hoc basis. That provision is also vulnerable, as the funding is not in place.

Taxi card schemes are great in the short term, but in the long term they need to be part of a DRT system. The problem with taxi card schemes is that they maximise expenditure, as there is no opportunity for ride sharing. In Stockholm, it was found that half a dozen people would go roughly from A to B, at the same time but using six taxis, whereas negotiation through a scheduling centre could have got all those people to ride share. The issue is how the system is assembled. That cannot be done overnight. The problem with DRT is that people think that it will solve all their problems on day 1, whereas such systems are like children—they grow up and gain capability the bigger and more sophisticated they get. Another problem is getting funding for DRT. We have funding for national travel, but secure funding is not in place for local travel, which means that the nuts and bolts of travel—the living trips—are still based on a postcode lottery.

I am a little concerned about giving money to local authorities, because there are good and bad authorities. In my experience, unless funding is ring fenced for specific measures, it can be sidelined into some other priority of the local authority. I am hugely concerned about the consultation meetings on the regional transport strategies, because equal opportunities issues have not come up in any of the meetings that I have attended. Equal opportunities projects should be written into the regional transport strategies. At present, there is not a lot of talk about that. Local authorities seem to think of the strategy as a means of getting a lot of money from the Government for road improvements and all the other things that they have done in the past through their strategies. The councils do not really consider the big issues of mobility and equal opportunities and I am not sure how we can get them to engage in that. Many of the people I work with go along to meetings to raise issues, but we cannot be sure that they will be written into the regional transport strategies when they are finalised.

The issues have been recorded here, though.

Sheila Fletcher mentioned that people have been involved in the consultation. Is the consultation with disabled people sufficient on issues such as accessibility? What you said is entirely different from other evidence that we have heard. Are disabled people involved enough?

There has not been enough involvement. I know that it is early days, because the strategies do not have to be finished until March next year, but one or two of the meetings that I have attended have been closed and by invitation only. People who use services, let alone people who have mobility problems, are not invited. We should remember that people who have mobility problems have extra difficulties getting to consultation meetings. They need specific transport to get to a meeting to make their views known. We need the issues to be addressed in all the regional transport strategies throughout Scotland.

Sheila Fletcher and Sandra White are right. Some mobility organisations and people with disabilities take part in the consultation process, but we must acknowledge that we have not identified or accessed an awful lot of people whom we need to access to find out their needs and requirements. As Trevor Meadows and I have discussed in the past, it is no use somebody saying, "There's £10 million; go and solve the problem," because the reality is that we do not know what the market is. One of the fears about transport projects for people with mobility problems is that once we start delivering them, we will discover that, all of a sudden, the target market is not 15 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent. That means that the system cannot meet the demand, which creates an environment in which people who have mobility problems feel even more isolated because they cannot access services. As well as finding out about people's needs and requirements, organisations need to find out who the people are who have the needs and what numbers are involved.

Many people in the profession who have scant knowledge of disability issues carry out almost tokenistic consultation with disabled people. I am sorry to have to say that, but people think that they can go to a dozen disabled people in their area or to one group of disabled people to get the complete picture. They cannot. They have to work a lot harder at it than that; they have to understand the barriers that prevent people articulating their views. However, as I said, we cannot think that all the academics and highly paid and long-serving professionals have missed the issues and that an 85-year-old lady with arthritis, cataracts, late-diagnosed diabetes and a heart problem will suddenly tell us how to rejig the whole system. She will tell you about her day-to-day problems and frustrations.

Many years ago, social workers in Strathclyde told me that one of the things that they have to do with people who become disabled or immobile is get them to come to terms with their limitations. They tell them to forget about going out, going to the bingo and going to see their pals because that will just make them climb the walls with frustration. They depress expectations and get people to live with what is called a minimum-space concept, which gets them off tranquillisers and anti-depressants. I remember that one person who was asked, "Have you any unmet transport needs?" said, "Nay, lad. I don't go out any more." They are not going to say, "I want there to be a bus that I can book on the day before I want it and, when it arrives, I want a chap to knock on my door and not just poop his horn at the kerb. I want him to lend me his arm and help me to the bus, which I want to be configured so it is safe so that I won't be thrown to the floor when it starts off." They will not ask for that because they are stoic and because they have no idea that passenger transport can be like that. A lot of the conventional consultation that is undertaken has to be put in a wider context.

The issue is, again, to do with economics. People might say that they want a lot more to be spent on taxi card schemes or rail accessibility. However, you need to decide what part those elements will play in the final solution and how delivery should be configured if all those elements have to be subsidised.

The national transport strategy, which should be published later this year, will set some of the key outcomes that we would expect the regional transport strategies to pick up.

I take Trevor Meadows's point about the need to understand people's access needs. Transport Scotland has specific appraisal guidance for projects. We are taking the lead in how transport projects should be considered. The guidance makes it clear that people should consider not only the economic impact. There are five main objectives that each transport project should be measured against. Accessibility is a key part of that. We do work in that regard with the regional transport strategies and try to provide guidance to the local authorities to ensure that they are aware of how one can use the system. That allows the wider benefits of carrying out various transport projects to be brought into the debate and means that the focus is not solely on the primary cost-benefit analysis, which might not always be appropriate.

The key thing to do is to set out at the beginning of the process the main objective that you are trying to achieve. We ought to see that process improving with the work that is done on our national and regional transport strategies. That should ensure that we get a clear and shared view of the objectives and work through the process that will help us to come up with projects that will deliver those objectives.

Objectives are key. That has been exposed as a lack in the national concessionary travel scheme. What is it trying to achieve? Monitoring is always in line with your objectives—if your objectives are woolly, your monitoring will be woolly. We need to change that. What is being done in that regard is heartening.

In relation to the regional and national transport strategies, I hear a lot about accessibility mapping. We deliberately include the phrase "mobility and access" in the title of our committee because we want people to understand the difference between the two things. Often, the measurement of accessibility is simply a mapping exercise that says that people are within a certain distance of a facility—for example, a certain percentage of the population is within a certain number of metres of a shopping centre, leisure centre or so on. However, that does not mean that those people use those facilities. We need to look beyond the accessibility figures and determine whether people have the mobility that would enable them to access the facilities. Equality of opportunity is measured simply in terms of physical access. We have to understand the other barriers that we have been referring to—the psychological barriers, the lack of confidence, the lack of support, the lack of an incentive to build up muscle tone and go out into a dangerous environment and so on.

A classic example is how priority for winter gritting is always given to vehicle movements, not pedestrian movements, yet old people become prisoners as soon as there is ice on the pavement because they are terrified of falling. Engineers sometimes do not understand that ice on the pavement can mean death. More than 30 per cent of people who break a femur are dead within nine months. Those who fall tell others about it and the fear builds up in that population. Some simple things could be addressed, such as intervention levels on pavements. Pavements are not fixed until there is a centimetre's difference in height between slabs. The fact that that can kill some of the people we are talking about is not understood. There is a big difference between accessibility mapping and whether people end up with affected mobility.

I remind colleagues to keep the questions as short as possible and the witnesses to keep their answers as short as possible. We have loads more questions to ask and I am concerned that we will overrun considerably.

My question is about the various deadlines for vehicle accessibility. Many people have told us that 2020 is far too long to wait. There are various other deadlines but there does not seem to be any joined-up thinking. We will be left with gaps between vehicles being ready. What are your views on that? What can we do to fill those gaps? You have answered most of that already.

Part V of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which has recently become law, ensures that access to services is provided. We do not necessarily need low-floor buses to do that. As Trevor Meadows said, we tend to focus on vehicles and not services. It is about making services accessible, part of which is about ensuring that suitable transport is in place. One of the interesting emerging issues concerns accessible taxis. The Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee has been doing a lot of work on the technical aspects of access to buses, planes, trains and automobiles. You name it, DPTAC has done a lot of work on it, but one area that it has tended to shy away from is taxis. Some manufacturers put too much emphasis on the hackney cab—the side-entrance taxi. People who are involved in transport recognise that it is hardly inclusive to have someone in a wheelchair facing backwards in a taxi, because when the driver asks where they are going the person has to try to turn round to see where they are. DPTAC is trying to make those types of vehicle more accessible.

We need to ensure that there is a mix of vehicles out there that is able to provide the service. Although technical and engineering access is important, what would speed up the process is to focus on ensuring that the services are accessible and that there are suitable transport options for people to use those services. That is how we can perhaps circumnavigate the problem about whether it should be 2014 or 2020 or whether a vehicle should be accessible. As has been said, even if a vehicle is accessible at the moment, it is not required to be, and the vehicle you go out in might not be the one that you return in. There are issues about confidence and access to services; I think that we should focus on access to services.

Without trying to depress expectations any further, the committee is hearing loud and clear what you are saying. I have some specific questions on what we have at the moment, even though it is limited. Our evidence, and research commissioned by the Executive, has highlighted that the attitudes of transport staff can cause additional problems for disabled people and can impact on their confidence to travel. In your view, what should be done to improve staff attitudes towards disabled people? You mentioned training.

You are right. We have been quite successful in getting across not only to transport operators but in all services, such as people working in shops, the importance of being aware of what disability is and of all the issues surrounding disability, so that everyone understands what a wheelchair is and what a ramp is for and so on. However, what we are not as successful at is changing people's attitudes.

One of my big bugbears relates to something I am trying to do in Dundee, which is to raise the quality standard of people who provide transport services. However, to do that I will not focus on disability awareness. All the bus drivers who work for the two local bus companies in Dundee are trained in disability awareness, but that does not help when the bus turns up at the kerb and the driver says, "Oh, I don't know how to work the ramp." That is the reality of what happens out there, just as there are taxi drivers who drive past somebody who happens to be in a wheelchair. Everyone here knows that those things happen, so we need to change people's attitudes to disability and get them to understand that the needs of people with mobility problems are the same as anybody else's needs. Our attitudes have to change if we are to be able to deal with that, so I think that we need to focus more on people's attitudes than on awareness. Although awareness and technical skills are important, we will not improve services if we do not change attitudes.

Do you have suggestions for how to do that?

At the moment, all taxi drivers in Dundee have to go through disability awareness training in order to obtain a licence. That training is provided by a local disability organisation and is effective because it does experiential stuff. I do not know how good or how bad that is. For some people, throwing them in the back of a minibus and driving them round a corner at 60mph while they are strapped in a wheelchair can be quite effective in slowing drivers down, as Trevor Meadows knows. However, I am not so sure how successful such training is when it comes to encouraging transport providers to encourage disabled people to use their transport services. I am trying to work with that local organisation to see whether we can develop some sort of attitude training along with the disability awareness training. It is difficult. Although we are quite successful at ensuring that everyone goes through the training in order to tick the boxes, we are not as good at quality control and assessing how effective the training is; that is where the work needs to be done. We must be able to ensure that training is effective and leads to improved services for people with mobility problems.

I refer you to the Official Report of last week's committee meeting, at which we considered that issue in some detail and had a good discussion about how training could be made more effective.

The Scottish Executive's research in 2004 identified that fewer than half of all local authorities operated a taxi concession scheme, and it characterised the situation as one of inconsistency and some disenchantment, particularly as there are many areas of Scotland where the taxi may be the only form of public transport that is viable. Are you aware of any improvement in the situation over the past two years? No? Okay.

One of the big problems in rural areas is that there may not be a taxi, only a private hire car. I know from my experience with Highland Council that local authorities are frightened of trying to implement legislation requiring wheelchair-accessible vehicles, because they think that the hackney-type vehicles will change over to private hire, over which they will have no control and which will not be accessible. They are hugely concerned about that and are trying to find ways of dealing with it. Many rural local authorities do not have a taxi card scheme. Aberdeenshire Council is probably the biggest rural area that has one, and Dumfries and Galloway Council has one, but I cannot think of any other rural areas that have a taxi card scheme, probably because there are not huge numbers of taxis out there to get involved in such a scheme.

We talked about that last week, when it was suggested that half the local authorities had such a scheme. It would be good to have an annex in our report listing those that do.

You talked about new developments in technology. Are there any other challenges that you would like to draw to our attention? One example is making transport services accessible to larger, motorised wheelchairs.

Access is a problem that the industry has talked to MACS about. It is complicated. There is a range of people who need transport, all with different needs. I know of someone who could not sit and needed to stand, because of a frozen spine, and there are people who have to use travelling beds. There are others with prone-position wheelchairs with oxygen cylinders, and there has been a huge increase in the market for scooters. Some of us have been battling away for years saying, "Stop talking about making things wheelchair accessible." That is one of the things that the industry has in its head, rather than understanding the needs of a range of people. It can actually be a lot harder for some people to board a vehicle if they are not in a wheelchair. If people who are picked up in a door-to-door service are in a wheelchair, the chairs can be out and up in no time. It is frail people who insist on walking with a zimmer frame who are the most immobile. It is amazing how a wheelchair increases people's mobility.

It is a big challenge to describe how accessible a service is and errors have been made. For example, operators have described services as accessible or fully accessible, but that has not been the case for a person doing a long-distance journey. I accept that such journeys are not done every day, but when they occur they can be dangerous because a person is a long way from home and cannot easily get back. There are cases when people have gone on long-distance routes on which they need to interchange and use two services, and they have got halfway down the route and found that they could not get on the second service because there were different door widths to get through and so on.

Operators have different policies; for example, some will not carry people with light scooters. Taxi operators will not take people with light scooters because they say that the scooters damage the carpets. However, more disabled people will use light scooters and that trend must be recognised. Matters like that must be taken on board and we must work out the mix of vehicles that can be allocated. A big technical challenge is to describe levels of access adequately; doing that will help raise awareness and change attitudes. It seems that in many engineers' minds, accessibility has been reduced to how we get a frame on wheels into a box on wheels—it is not about people at all. Understanding all the different mobility problems that there are for accessing a vehicle could help with some of the awareness changing. The other technical challenge is how on earth we bring all this together. How do we build a DRT system? It involves systems engineering rather than mechanical engineering and it is difficult to do. A project involving a transport working group is coming to Scotland through the efficient government project, which will initially consider putting together non-emergency ambulance transport and social work transport, which are examples of DRT systems.

Why do we have different systems? In my local authority area, there are about eight different types of DRT system, including social work and non-emergency ambulance transport. There is no co-ordination and they have separate control centres and different eligibility criteria. It will be a huge task to bring together different systems and bridge the cultures of social work departments, transportation services, education departments with special needs education and ambulance authorities so that there is one sensible system that makes the most of the money in the pot.

Members should be aware that DPTAC sets technical specifications. All its specifications for transporting people in wheelchairs are based on a standard wheelchair. I think that there are between 4,500 and 5,000 different types of wheelchair, so the question is what a standard wheelchair is. As Trevor Meadows rightly said, that issue must be addressed. He has been involved in this area a lot longer than I have—as you can see by his grey hair—and he will tell you that there is nobody we cannot transport. If we have the right type of vehicle and restraint, we can transport anybody. There is no barrier; it is just about ensuring that we have a mix of vehicles out there to do the transporting.

I would like to provide an update on rail issues in respect of the points that you raised. First ScotRail has done tests on the use of light scooters. They are suitable for use on all train units, but there are issues around booking in advance and longer journeys. One of the matters that we are considering is support at stations. There are about 340 rail stations in Scotland, but few of them are completely accessible for people to move from one part of the station to another. We must consider the longer-term improvement of stations. However, there is a service whereby if someone is going to an unmanned station, they can book in advance to ensure that they get support to help them move from one part of the station to another or to another form of transport.

That service must be booked 24 hours in advance, so I recognise that it is obviously not the most accessible way of arranging things. The service is primarily to support people making longer journeys on the rail system rather than short commuter journeys. We are assessing the service and have consulted our colleagues in the Department for Transport on how we can improve the service by, for example, using text messaging or e-mail to confirm someone's booking. That is an on-going consultation and we expect an update and guidance later this year.

I want to ask about timetabling and information. We have heard evidence that timetabling can have a particular impact on disabled people—reduced services after 6 pm, for example, can have a particular impact on them—and we have repeatedly been told about the difficulties that people experience when they try to find information in a suitable format. What needs to be done to improve timetabling and the provision of information?

All those issues are embedded in the concept of developing a demand-responsive system. Currently, timetables are greatly under the control of the commercial operators, which must do what they think is commercially viable. People who have come to meetings that I have held have been frustrated and have berated operators, but operators will say, "If a service doesn't make a 23 per cent profit, that's it. We won't run it. That's not my responsibility."

It is a long time since 1985, when deregulation was introduced, but many people still think that all bus services are regulated. If an operator does not see a profit, it will not run the service. A service will be taken off at weekends or after 6 o'clock in the evening, for example, because there is no market for it and the operator will not make a profit from it and will not cross-subsidise it.

The only solution is to introduce services that are funded by the public purse, which takes us back to how to run such services efficiently. I know of subsidised services in rural areas for which the unit cost has been more than £60 per trip. I am not talking about DRT—I am talking about routed, big bus, Stagecoach-type services. DRT is not always the most expensive way of solving the problem, but it lets people say when they want to travel. Is it radical and strange to respond to, rather than determine, demand?

The problem is that people think that providing information simply involves making leaflets available. There have been crass examples of such thinking: I remember a bus operator's leaflets being available only in the bus station. The issue is how to contact people and how to get them out. Many specialist skills to do with print sizes and reading ages are involved. Many things are not easy to understand and a lot of information can be crammed in. People must use the minimum number of words and think about what they are trying to get someone to do. If a person—a stranger—is trying to give someone the confidence to phone them for the first time, things should be kept very simple. Many older disabled people do not like making such calls. Having big blocks of white paper around print is okay—information does not need to be packed out. The issue is how to get information to people.

Even when simplicity is achieved, people will need someone they trust to sit down and explain things to them. They will be much more receptive to information from those they know, such as social workers, care workers and people from elderly forums, who will sit down with them, than they will be when a stranger gives them information.

People can have a psychological blackout when they receive information from someone unfamiliar. Someone may say, "It's very easy. You phone this number, tell them who you are, that you want to go from A to B tomorrow and the time when you want to travel. Have you got that?" The person will nod their head and say, "Yeah." Two minutes later, they will say, "So what do I do?" The process takes time.

People who are virtually housebound or who go out only to a social work day centre are not used to radical changes in their concepts about what they can do and where they can go. Marketing should therefore be very sensitive—it should not be the same for such a market. Specialist techniques are required.

There are two issues. Marlyn Glen mentioned reduced services after 6 o'clock. Let us be clear: everybody will be affected by reduced services, not only people with mobility problems.

In Dundee, we have taken the view that real-time information should be used to improve people's access to information because a paper timetable will be no good if a bus is not running. Real-time information can assist in the process, but we must ensure that people can access real-time information in formats that are available to them. We have made information available on the internet and we will shortly make it available on mobile phones. Such an approach might help younger people and many elderly people who surf the net. We are attempting to ensure that information is live, as doing so will address some safety issues: a person will not stand waiting at a bus stop for 20 minutes if they know that a bus is due at 6 o'clock but will not come until 20 past 6.

As Trevor Meadows said, we have to ensure that the information is relevant and accessible to the people who require it. Technology has to be used to address that. Having information on the internet and at bus stops and sending it to mobile phones is fine, but we have to ensure that people can access it and thereby benefit from the technology, which, in the main, is not that expensive to produce.

There are services for people with severe hearing problems who use BSL that can be booked by text, but I have had meetings with people in Kirkcaldy who were confused by the texts that they were getting because the people who texted them back did not realise that their first language is BSL, not English. An understanding of such issues has to be embedded in the information system and in everything we do.

I want to raise two issues. One relates to the frequency of services, which is not just an issue for disabled people. In the franchise agreement with First ScotRail, we set out a service-level commitment on the frequency of services. We will work continually with First ScotRail to see whether there are opportunities for improving the frequency of any service. However, as Trevor Meadows said, the business case for additional services has to be made. At the beginning of each new franchise, we set out what services we are looking for.

Secondly, Transport Scotland has just taken over sponsorship of Traveline Scotland, which is tasked with trying to ensure that we have up-to-date, accurate information about all travel services within Scotland and from Scotland to major points in the rest of the UK. That has developed around call-centre and internet technology. It will be exciting to see what we can do with mobile phones and personal texting, which we want to develop the use of. Traveline Scotland is about to review its policy and operations, so we will see further developments later this year.

Will the real-time systems that you are setting up in Dundee be integrated with Traveline, so that it gets access to real-time information to feed back to the customer?

The website dundeetravelinfo.com features a link to travelinescotland.com. I do not know how we are going to integrate the real-time system with travelinescotland.com. I am not involved in that, but Fran Duffy might know more about it. There are real-time information systems in parts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. I suggest that the ideal thing would be to link the systems.

Real-time information is more for immediate demand. If someone is travelling from Glasgow to Dundee, their main concern is to find out what time the buses are, as opposed to knowing that the bus is five minutes late when they are in Glasgow waiting to get to Dundee. The issue is what sort of information somebody requires and at what point they require it. There is a need to ensure that all types of information are linked. The only thing we need to watch is that there is not information overload, and that people get only the information they require.

We are talking about the information necessary to plan journeys rather than about someone standing at a bus stop wondering whether a bus will come along in the next five minutes, but I take your point about integration. I do not know the answer to your question and I will look into the matter.

We had a number of questions for each organisation, but we are really short of time, so we intend to write to you to seek further clarification. Unless there is anything that you have not told us that you think we need to know, I thank you for your evidence, which was interesting. I will suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

Meeting suspended.

On resuming—

I am pleased to give a warm welcome to Stanley Flett from the Aberdeen Accessible Transport Group, Andy Aitken from the Annandale Transport Initiative, Niall Smith from Caithness Rural Transport, Jan Goodall from the Dundee Accessible Transport Action Group, and John Chick from Teviot Wheels. I am sorry that you had to wait so long, but we had lots of good information and, once we start to hear good answers, we want to ask more and more questions.

We have a lot to get through, so I will start the questions. How are individual initiatives typically funded? What, if any, difficulties does the availability of funding regimes present?

I do not know how projects are typically funded; I can speak only about Dundee. We have community regeneration funding to run a friendly bus shopping scheme for people in sheltered housing. That funding is short term, which is always a problem.

We are funded by the RCTI to about 60 per cent of our requirement. The process is simple in that we rely on one funder, so the paperwork is not onerous, but we are vulnerable because if the political climate and funding regime changed we would have to look for totally new funding.

In Caithness, we have a dial-a-ride scheme with two buses, two paid drivers and a co-ordinator. The scheme, which has been in place for six or seven years, has been funded throughout by the rural transport initiative to about 60 per cent. About 15 per cent of our income comes from the local enterprise company, about 15 per cent comes from fares and about 8 per cent is from the local council.

We receive a grant from the Scottish Executive, but the majority of our funding comes from Scottish Borders Council's social car scheme.

In Aberdeen, we have a dial-a-ride bus scheme. The moneys come from the Scottish Executive but are administered by Aberdeen City Council. The bus is run by Stagecoach Bluebird. We have a bit of difficulty with that, which I will go into later.

Does the funding application process present a burden for your organisations and, if so, what could be done to improve the situation?

It presents a burden to an extent, although I am sure that the matter depends on the structure of each organisation. The bulk of our funding work is done by our three paid members of staff, although our volunteer staff, especially the directors, have a great deal of input. It is always at the back of our minds that we must look to future funding to sustain the service. There is always a worry that the funding could disappear at any time for one reason or another. The funding process is a burden to the extent that it takes up thinking time that could otherwise be devoted to providing services.

Most of our fundraising has been done through the rural transport initiative. Every two or three years, there is a big push to get the money in. The biggest difficulty is with getting capital for new vehicles, which needs a lot more effort and causes more difficulty. In the past, we have applied for capital support from the rural transport initiative for a new vehicle and been told to wait another year, which left us with major problems with the existing vehicle.

On funding, we do not know what is wanted from us. There is a call for community bus schemes that are run by accessible transport organisations such as ours. I am the only person in Teviot Wheels who is paid—everybody else works voluntarily. We keep hearing rumours that funding will die unless we start running a minibus to allow rural communities to go shopping, but we are governed by the rules of our local council and we cannot carry those people.

Dundee Accessible Transport Action Group has tried to get a local dial-a-ride scheme off the ground. We have done a lot of work on that and have employed consultants to develop a feasible project; however, the lottery has turned us down twice. That reflects a general lack of understanding that transport is a means to an end and that it is transport that allows people to do things. That does not seem to be generally appreciated.

Is the current provision of dial-a-ride services sufficient to meet the needs of disabled people in your communities? If not, what more needs to be done?

We do not have any dial-a-ride scheme in Dundee. I know of only two in Scotland—Handicabs and Dial-a-Journey—that are truly demand responsive.

Disabled people need to do what other people are able to do. That means a whole range of activities, not just shopping. The lack of transport for visits to primary care is one of my personal hobby-horses. Traditionally, transport has been available to take people to hospital and to hospital clinics, but not to primary care. However, health services are now being pushed out of hospital into primary care, and some people may need to spend money on taxis to get to health appointments of all sorts, whether for chiropody, physiotherapy, or whatever. That makes a big hole in somebody's budget if they are on a benefit income.

One of the most important words in all the demand-responsive transport schemes is independence. Independence is important to us all. People with disabilities have equal rights to move around and, as has been said, visit somebody even two streets away—something that they may not have done for many years. In my humble opinion, demand-responsive transport creates independence.

In Aberdeen, the transport scheme is being relaunched, but a lot of unhappiness has been caused because we are now told that we have funding for "another half a bus". I am not sure which half of the bus we are going to get. I do not have a copy of that letter in front of me—some of you may not realise, but I am a registered blind person and I do not read. So, we have funding for "another half a bus". I am not sure whether we are getting the driver or the other half of the bus, but that is unsatisfactory.

A glossy leaflet was produced for the relaunch, which had a map on the back of it that illustrated where the bus would be on a specific day. Then, the scheme was thrown city-wide without anybody being told. The whole situation has been rather sad. When the scheme was first launched, there was a great deal of happiness among many people with disability who felt that, at last, we had something. Sadly, the scheme is not working properly. The last thing on earth that we want, though, is the scheme to be taken away, as that would be a disaster.

We do not run any demand-responsive transport, but there is a dial-a-ride scheme in Dumfries and Galloway. It appears that, in many cases, the demand part of it is only the pick-up; where the person goes is not demand responsive, but is dictated by where the bus is going. It is not, therefore, truly demand responsive in the sense of taking somebody from where they are to where they want to go. That is another issue that needs to be addressed.

Our service is completely demand responsive, but it is very limited; we can pay the drivers only from 9 am to 5 pm. We have two vehicles—one is based in Thurso and one in Wick. In the main, the journeys that we undertake involve taking people into those two centres to access services of a variety of sorts. Outwith the hours of 9 am to 5 pm, we rely on a pool of volunteers. Given that they are not reliably available, we may, or we may not, be able to provide a service. Also, if a vehicle has a problem with maintenance or repair and is off the road, there is no service. Some disabled people have their own modified transport and drivers, but for anyone else we are probably the only service in our area.

Through the initiative at the edge, we heard that people in south-east Caithness want transport to get them from their local area into a local centre such as Dunbeath, where they can access services. We are currently piloting such a service using an old modified vehicle and six volunteer drivers who have just been minibus driver awareness scheme—MIDAS—trained. We are running the pilot with money from the local enterprise company, the local council and the initiative at the edge. We will see whether the demand justifies doing more to ensure that a sustainable service of that sort is made available to people in the area and whether the type of service that we are trying to offer works. At the moment, there is no support for people in the rural parts of Caithness who want to make short journeys.

What we really need is some sort of equal footing around the country. Jan Goodall has just said that people in her area do not get funding to travel to primary health care appointments. Our situation is exactly the opposite: Teviot Wheels can take someone to a chiropody or physiotherapy clinic and get social car scheme funding and yet we cannot take someone to see their hospital consultant. I know that personally, as I had to use the service up until about three years ago. We do not get funding to take people to main or general hospital appointments. If someone wants to use our services for that purpose, they have to pay the full cost. They will also not get that funding if they live in a suburban area. The town of Hawick is classed as such an area and a lady there who is a wheelchair user and who needs to see a consultant at the Borders general hospital has to pay for those journeys—the social car scheme does not pick up the bill.

I have a question for Mr Smith. Are your vehicles accessible for people who use motorised scooters—is there room also for the scooter?

Probably not. In fact, some of the wider wheelchairs are now a bit of a problem—getting them on the vehicle is a bit of a squeeze. One of our drivers has raised the issue only in the past couple of weeks.

That is a limitation on your services.

The demand for accessible transport services is expected to rise over time. Does the pace of progress in the provision of those services suggest that we will be able to meet future demand in a coherent and integrated manner?

No.

Right. I did not think that you would say yes.

The question of demand is interesting. Trevor Meadows made it clear that people who believe that they cannot get out do not demand to get out. We have also heard that people cannot demand a service that does not exist. The population of older people who need demand-responsive transport services is likely to rise, but a rise in demand will depend on how the services are publicised and marketed—if they are provided—their reliability and on whether people believe in and trust them.

The pace of progress is not adequate. We are beginning to dip our toes in the water, but we are being slow.

In 1999, the disability rights task force noted:

"For disabled people to be able to travel, and to travel with confidence, all aspects of the ‘transport chain' must be accessible."

That confidence will, of course, also depend on safety, affordability and reliability. How far are we from that goal and to what extent are demand-responsive services providing a reliable link in the transport chain?

The service that Teviot Wheels offers is mainly a demand-responsive service: somebody phones and asks whether we can take them from A to B and bring them back. Disabled people are, however, being discriminated against: they have to pay a percentage of the cost of the journey, whereas—although the bus service is not demand-responsive—the man next door can catch a bus to the same place and, if he is a pensioner or if he is slightly disabled like me, get a free journey. We are discriminating against the poor person in the wheelchair. That is one of my gripes. I am sorry, but it really annoys me.

That is all right. You are allowed to express your gripes. We want to hear them, so do not apologise.

The answer to the broad question that Mr McGrigor raised at the beginning is that the pace of progress is nothing like fast enough. We have heard a lot this morning about concerns over what demand, disability and access mean. They each seem to be put into individual silos, so there is no joined-up thinking about what is being accessed. Access is not access to transport; it is access to services, facilities and so on. Transport enables that access but, at the moment, the pace of progress is too slow.

Not so long ago, I attended a conference in London on railways for all. We were addressed by a gentleman in a wheelchair—a very able gentleman—who put a particular scenario to us. He said that we had to ensure that the traveller—especially a person in a wheelchair—is thoroughly comfortable, satisfied and confident that he or she will reach their journey's end and then get back safely. He told us about one particular person who had not slept for about four days because he was going to travel from Glasgow to London—how long he slept while he was in London was never told us. If the backing of the transport industry—be it rail, road, air or whatever—was in place, and would-be travellers were given confidence, that would be a move forwards.

At the conference, people told us that they had a budget of £370 million to make railway stations accessible and step-free. Making some stations step-free would not be possible, but new lifts were being put in. That is working in some places, but not in others. I will doubtless hear more about such issues tomorrow, when I will be in London again for the quarterly meeting of Great North Eastern Railway's disability advisory group. I can certainly forward information from that meeting to the committee.

The budget figure I mentioned is being put towards access for all and railways for all. We cannot forget people in wheelchairs, the walking disabled, and people with visual or hearing impairments, because they are all deserving cases for recognition. They are certainly being catered for in that particular project.

Will you say a bit more about the impact that you think the concessionary bus scheme will have on your own schemes?

It is not having any effect on our schemes because most of the people who use my organisation cannot use the concessionary bus passes. They cannot get their wheelchairs on and off the buses and cannot get to the bus stops.

Are there people who would have used your scheme because it was marginally cheaper than paying a bus fare but who will now take the bus?

No. We are limited in the type of people we can carry. Unless people wanted to pay 40p a mile—which is more expensive than the bus—they would not have wanted to use us in the first place. We look after people in wheelchairs and people who cannot get to the bus stops.

If concessionary travel passes could be used on non-scheduled community transport services, that would have a huge impact. It would be a funding stream in itself and would make things more equal for people who, at present, cannot use a bus pass because they cannot get to a bus.

That is probably a general view.

Yes.

To what extent is there sufficient consultation with disabled people in order to develop appropriate solutions to accessibility issues?

Consultation by whom? We consult the people in our area as much as we can. Through our local community care forum we have good connections with all sorts of user support groups, and we have annual meetings to which users of our service come along to tell us what they think. We also consult them through telephone surveys and by distributing written questionnaires. Basically, there is on-going consultation with the people who use our scheme and, through other support groups, with people who do not. Some of the support groups throw up certain needs that we just cannot meet; for example, they may want vehicles that can take four wheelchairs at a time. However, I am not sure what consultation is carried out with disabled people by any other transport provider.

We mainly consult our users. They ask us to do something for them and, invariably, we do. We always check that they are getting value for money and that they are happy with the service.

That probably applies to most of the community transport organisations. We consult our users broadly, but we are also aware that there are many people in the community who do not have the opportunity to express their views on what they need and want simply because they are confined to their homes. Communication with those people is difficult, in many cases, and the publicity does not seem to reach them.

In some cases, there is a degree of scepticism about the value of that consultation, which is sad. In the past, "consultation" has been said to have taken place, but no action has resulted, so people are a bit dubious about whether the consultation is really of value to them. We have to overcome that hurdle before we can be sure that we know what they want.

That is an interesting comment about consultation. I imagine that the consultation also brings extra demands on finances, yet the picture that is emerging from this evidence is of services that are run on a shoestring.

The Scottish Executive ran a demand-responsive transport pilot programme, which was scheduled to finish in March. Were you involved with that pilot programme and are you aware of any of its outcomes?

Are you talking about the urban initiative? I am not sure what you are referring to.

Yes, the urban initiative.

Stan Flett and I have both been involved in that. The urban community transport initiative has allowed the friendly bus scheme—for which we have community regeneration money for regeneration areas—to be extended to cover the whole city. For us, the main thing is that the money has funded a post in Dundee City Council for a community transport officer—Trevor Docherty, who is here this morning. That is real progress for us.

When we started campaigning in 1992, people in the council had barely heard of dial-a-ride schemes and did not recognise the problem. People were expected to accept that they were housebound. Gradually, over years of campaigning, the situation has changed and attitudes in the council are changing, although departments are still very possessive of their own transport arrangements. Trevor Docherty is doing a lot and is making waves, so I think that, over time, we will move to a system in Dundee that is more integrated and offers greater value for money. Trevor's post has been invaluable.

In spite of what I have said about the dial-a-bus service in Aberdeen, I hope that it will rise—not from the ashes, because it has not gone down so far and there is certainly great hope for it. Indeed, the more publicity we can give it and the more we can educate the people who would use it, the better. As has been said, things do not happen overnight. Word of mouth is an important way of advertising. People who have had the great pleasure of getting from their own front doorsteps to wherever tell their friends, who then get to use the service.

The only problem is that, as I have said before, if we are given half a bus, I would be worried if the engine was not there.

The wheels might be handy as well, Stanley.

Yes, provided that the tyres are not flat.

We have been consulting for a while now and the consultees have told us that the 2020 deadline for the accessibility of transport vehicles is far too long to wait—if Stanley Flett has only half a vehicle, he will probably have to wait even longer. What are the witnesses' views on the various deadlines for accessibility for different modes of transport and what challenges do we face in dealing with the gaps in the meantime—the back end of the bus in Stanley's case?

The vast majority of our passengers will be dead long before the deadline. In the meantime, we will have to find other ways of providing services, which are welcome but are run on a shoestring.

I have a problem with taxis. The deadline is far too far ahead. At one time, we were told that all taxis would have to be wheelchair accessible by that deadline, which is not what disabled people need. Some people need that, but some people cannot use the London cab-type taxi. I understand that there are moves to alter that requirement. I hope that it will not come to pass because it will mean many problems for many people if it does.

The Scottish Accessible Transport Alliance, of which I am the chair—which is why I have so many grey hairs—has petitioned for accessible and affordable taxis. We want 50 per cent compliance, not 100 per cent. In the north-east, 100 per cent compliance is causing all sorts of problems at the moment because people were supposed to be buying vehicles that were fully accessible for wheelchair users—there was all sorts of nonsense about that. The fact is that many disabled people cannot get into high vehicles because they cannot lift their feet. There are now vehicles with hydraulic seats, for example, but using them is difficult and quite scary for some people, who would far more happily use a saloon car than a high vehicle. Therefore, 100 per cent compliance is out the window.

What specific challenges does your location—rural, urban or suburban—pose for transport services?

The area in which we operate is pretty well wholly rural. The density of population is about 60 people per square mile, compared with the average of 160 people. That raises difficulties other than those associated with the provision of services for people with disabilities. Rural isolation has an effect on young parents with families, who have only one car that is away all day because the husband is the breadwinner, and on young people who cannot access any of the leisure facilities in the main towns because there are no mainstream bus services, and so on. The challenge is much wider than the challenge of providing services for people with disability; it is about rural isolation, as well.

I am sure that the urban operators will have other issues, but our rural location provides us with many problems. Sports groups and youth groups want buses in the evening, as will groups of old-age pensioners who want to go to the theatre. There is conflicting demand for the vehicles, which is sometimes difficult to meet.

In Aberdeen, about 95 per cent of services are covered by low-floor buses, although we still have some old double-deckers that some people find difficult to use. On the railways, through the North East of Scotland Transport Partnership, we have a cross-rail service from Stonehaven to Inverurie that is proving to be quite useful at certain times of day.

The low-floor bus is a godsend to a lot of people with walking disabilities. I was at the launch of the first low-floor bus way back in the 1990s, when I was a member of DPTAC. We were chasing around Hounslow in one of these things and it was quite scary—I do not think that the driver knew too much about where he was going. The low-floor bus is certainly a great blessing to older people and to younger people with buggies and young children, too. They are classed as people who are disabled if they have messages and a buggy with a young child in it, as they are restricted—that is probably the right way to put it.

In Dundee, we have a large problem of deprivation, with people who are on low incomes and have little access to private cars. Some bus services finish at 7 in the evening; some do not run on Sundays; and some run only infrequently on Sundays. It is a matter of promoting social inclusion and combating poverty. Like fuel, transport can be a poverty issue in terms of the proportion of people's income that needs to be spent if they are to go out and about. I am talking not just about people with disabilities, but about young people, in particular, who might want to go somewhere in the early evening. If the bus service stops running after they have got there, they have to take a taxi home or walk, which is not always safe or practical.

Caithness is a pretty sparsely populated area in which people have to travel long distances to access many services. Most of the bus services stop at about half past 5 at night and I do not think that we have any buses in the county that have low-access platforms, so the buses are not accessible to disabled people. Additionally, many people live at the end of long, rough tracks and it is difficult for them to access any form of transport. Many couples retire into the area. If the partner who drives the car dies, the other is left isolated, with no personal transport and often not knowing anyone in the community, so they have no access to support.

Because of the distances and the scattered nature of the population, the costs are high in delivering any sort of service in Caithness. Even if an operator charges a low rate per mile, the cost will often be many pounds for a single journey, and there will be a massive amount of dead mileage when the operator is not carrying anyone but still has to operate the vehicle. When driver time and all the other costs are taken into account, there are very high costs involved in delivering a service to a very low number of people. In the context of competitive bidding for funding, that may not look so attractive.

Evidence that we have taken and Executive-commissioned research have both highlighted that the attitudes of transport staff can cause problems for disabled people and impact on their confidence to travel. What should be done to improve staff attitudes towards disabled people?

We are talking about an extremely serious matter, on which a deaf, dumb and partially blind gentleman made an inquiry to me just the other day. Nowadays someone who holds a pass—both he and I hold one—must tell the bus driver where they are going. I tried to get hold of George Mair and although I did not manage to speak to him, I told someone in his office that I would chase him up on the issue. We must get round the problem. Buses in Aberdeen now have scanners—if First in Aberdeen, where it is based, cannot have them, who can? The fact that passengers must say where they are going threw the gentleman totally. We are examining the issue.

Throughout the country, attitudes of drivers can be inappropriate, although some drivers are helpful and nice and have a human side. The same might not be true of someone who is running 20 minutes late, who is being asked by control where he is and who has a massive queue of passengers at the bus stop. There are many different scenarios. We are human beings. The bus companies must provide training; most of them do, but I am not certain that their staff can stick to it and be human at the same time.

There is a big problem to do with attitudes, partly because of the range of disabilities that people have, which is difficult to understand. Another problem is the turnover of transport staff; the bus companies must go on and on training staff. We must think about society's general attitude to disability and, in that regard, primary schools would be the best place to start. If society's general attitude were improved such that people accepted and made allowance for people's disabilities, that would improve the transport situation.

I do not know whether members have heard of the thistle card scheme, whereby people would show a little plastic card the size of a credit card to indicate to transport staff that they had special needs. That scheme seems to have died a death, although I think that the transport strategy consultation document that has just come out says that there is a plan to relaunch it. I hope that much more energy will be put in this time and that the scheme will not fade again.

I think that thistle cards are still used in some areas, but not across the board.

The drivers are the people who need training; or rather, they need to be pointed in the right direction. I will give an example. There is a 77-year-old gentleman in our village who is very contrary. He has to go to the doctor's every morning to get an injection. He goes by bus because the bus stop is only 50yd from his house. On the way back, he likes to call in at the local pub for a pint. He has two walking sticks, so most of the drivers will drop him off, but some drivers say, "That's more than my job's worth," and drop him off at the bus stop, which is 200yd down the road, even though that involves going past his house. Individual drivers make their own decisions, in spite of the fact that buses on rural routes are supposed to stop whenever a passenger asks them to.

In our service, part of what we look for when we recruit is the display of appropriate attitudes. On top of that, people receive training and the message is constantly reinforced. We do random checks by contacting service users to find out whether they are happy with the attitudes of drivers and the co-ordinator. When situations arise, they usually involve a passenger going to the co-ordinator because the vehicle has not been able to turn up at the time for which it was booked as a result of delays with pick-ups and drop-offs, or because someone cannot get a service when they need it. Attitude is dealt with in recruitment and training and is reinforced with the co-ordinator.

We talked earlier about buses and trains not turning up on time. If a bus or train is delayed or cancelled, which leaves people waiting, does that put extra pressure on your services? I know that some services do not run after 6 o'clock anyway.

The people who use our service tend not to be able to use other transport services, so it is rare for someone to want to tie in our service with other services. The situation that you describe would not really have an impact on our service. Cancellations of our service, which unfortunately happen from time to time, would obviously affect our users.

So timetabling issues would not affect your services.

They would not affect them significantly.

Would it make a difference to your service if there were no bus services after 5 o'clock in the evening or on Sundays?

We use volunteers at the weekend and after certain hours, so we are sometimes able to provide services then. If our service is not available, there is no service.

A significant amount of our work is taking community groups to meetings, sporting events or into town. The fact that there are no bus services after 5 or 6 pm means that there is a greater demand for our services, but that demand is not generally from individuals.

Our service is basically a dial-a-ride service for people who want to go somewhere. The majority of our registered users have their own registered driver, but we have to find volunteer drivers for the ones who do not. It is difficult to get a volunteer driver who is prepared to go and pick up a disabled lady at 6 o'clock at night, drive her down to Newcastle to a pop concert and then bring her back at 2 in the morning. That is where we are finding problems. I have been a volunteer driver and some of the journeys that I have had to do have meant that I have been away over weekends, which is not good for drivers' family life.

You run a specialised service. In our consultations, people have told us time and again that it is difficult to access information. How could the provision of information for disabled people be improved? Do you have specialised ways of providing information on the services that you offer?

We have formed a forum in the Borders, which is called Borders community transport together, which involves me, three sister organisations, the Women's Royal Voluntary Service, the British Red Cross, the Scottish Ambulance Service and Scottish Borders Council. In June, we will publish a leaflet showing what services are available, which will be distributed through health centres and with the newsletters of voluntary organisations in the Borders. Word will get around that way. The forum has been successful; we have managed to achieve quite a bit together.

As far as scheduled bus services are concerned, when a timetable change takes place, it might be publicised once in the local paper, after which there is no further communication about it. Timetables are available from the bus station or local shops or post offices, but how do people get there? There is definitely a need for better communication.

Everybody who uses our service must be a registered member of the Annandale Transport Initiative. We communicate to our members through direct mail. Many people do not like direct mail coming from unknown sources, so we are in a catch-22 situation. Local radio is another way of communicating effectively. Even when low-floor buses are put on to routes, there is little publicity about that, so people do not know that the service is available.

We advertise our service in several ways. Our co-ordinator goes to local groups, such as the Scottish Women's Rural Institutes, to talk about our service. We publish leaflets about the availability of the service and have information in surgeries. In medical centres in the big towns, we use the scrolling information on the television. We also use the local community website. We put information in the Caithness community care forum's newsletter, of which there are about 2,000 copies, which go to people who receive care in the community. There is a wide range of ways of getting out information.

It is difficult to get hold of information on ordinary services. For instance, in trying to find out when I could get a train from Inverness to Edinburgh for this meeting, I discovered that my old computer could not open the PDF file that was the only way of getting the train timetable from the internet. I had to guess when I had to leave my house in the morning to get from Caithness to Inverness to get the train. Getting information is difficult.

Stagecoach Bluebird, which operates in the Aberdeen area, was approached by an access panel because some of the members wanted large-print bus timetables. At first, the company held its breath, because printing large-print timetables for every bus service in the area would mean cutting down more trees. However, a pilot scheme is being considered through which people will be able to get a large-print timetable of services from where they live into the centre of Aberdeen and back again. Goodness only knows whether the scheme will branch out, but the issue is being considered. I look forward to finding out what the take-up will be.

I thank the witnesses for their evidence, which was helpful.

Meeting continued in private until 12:59.