59. The Bill and its accompanying regulations allow for up to 20 school travel schemes to operate during the pilot period, up to 31 July 2011. The Committee supports the idea of pilot schemes. However, the Government's leisurely approach is an indulgence. As we have demonstrated, school transport is in crisis now and the effects of this crisis are felt by everyone who needs to travel at peak hours. The pilots should be limited to two years duration. In addition, the Government and local authorities should do all they can to ensure that the first pilots can be implemented as quickly as possible after Royal Assent. An experiment which does not end until 2011 is not addressing this problem with the urgency its needs. If the Bill is passed next year, we believe that a significant number of pilots should have been completed by 2008.

60. There is no detail about the types of pilots which will be possible. The draft Bill is extremely timid in the freedoms it gives to local authorities. On transport issues alone, it does little to address the restrictions of the Transport Act 1985, and it does not deal with the fact that the provisions about "walking distance" in the Education Act are outdated. Our colleagues on the Education Committee may well have similar concerns about educational matters. The Secretary of State told us that this lack of detail was intentional, and that the Government would need "to be very limited in the number of specifications we have in order to deregulate and allow local authorities in conjunction with their own communities to make the most balanced assessment of what is the need there."[99] However, there is a difference between creating a framework which allows Local Authorities to come forward with their own ideas, and leaving the nature of the experiments entirely to local authority initiative. Although there is some Government thinking about the nature of the pilots - for example, Mr Clarke told us he "would be surprised if we had any very small pilots"[100] - there is no sense that the Government itself has any coherent guiding principles for these experiments. We are disappointed that the Government has not provided for the pilot schemes to be far more radical. It is inappropriate to leave it entirely to local authorities to identify and bring forward possible models for new school transport arrangements. The Government should itself identify a range of problems it wishes to solve, and a range of possible solutions to test.

61. While the provisions relating to the pilot schemes themselves are timid, the draft Bill as a whole is audacious. It gives the Secretary of State power to roll out pilot schemes without any further legislation. Clause 3 of the draft Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to repeal the scheme provisions by affirmative order if they are not considered a success. As the Explanatory Notes make clear "if an order is not made the new provisions will continue after the pilot is completed and there would then be no limit on the number of participating LEAs". In effect, the Secretary of State for Education in England and the National Assembly in Wales would have power to determine the way in which school transport should be provided, without any further report on the success of schemes, or sanction by Parliament. This is not acceptable. There are serious practical questions to be asked. It is not clear whether local authorities will be free to choose to provide services in the way they do now if the pilots are continued after 2011, nor whether the aim is to have a restricted range of standards for provision throughout England or Wales, or to allow local authorities to run a wide variety of schemes. Although the Bill itself appears to leave local authorities the option of continuing under the current legislative framework, the Government would be able to indicate support for particular schemes and will presumably be able to support local authorities using such schemes. We hope the Education and Skills Committee will look further at this issue.

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