MR GARTH GODDARD, MR GREG YATES AND MS JANET MILLS

3 MARCH 2004

  Q300 Clive Efford: It has just occurred to me that that may be a more direct way of measuring the impact outside of school because the congestion would probably be slightly once removed on major local networks.

  Mr Goddard: Certainly monitoring has its place, but I think we would hope to orientate ourselves towards action which is measured by the sort of hands-up surveys that Janet has talked about. If we can encourage more children to walk or cycle or bus to school, which is what our proposed action list is about, then at the end of the day the best way to capture that information is to go and ask the children how they are getting to school.

  Q301 Ian Lucas: Do you actively encourage children to walk and cycle to school? Do the schools do that?

  Ms Mills: Yes. In Cheshire we certainly do that through our School Travel Plans and through our Safer Routes to School programme. With children up to the age or 10 or 11 we are promoting walking and accompanied cycling, but after that age we encourage cycling and we do that through School Travel Plans, through our Road Safety programmes, through our junior Road Safety Officer programme and a number of different schemes. We encourage park and walk schemes. We ask the children who live a distance away to ask their parents not to park right outside the schools on the zigzag lines, to park a little bit away, and if they do that successfully they get a sticker and a pass book at the end of the day and a number of other incentives.

  Q302 Ian Lucas: Have you had any success in encouraging children to walk and cycle?

  Ms Mills: I think it is sporadic. When we have our campaigns going on, Walk to School Week, school walks on Tuesday, something else on Wednesday, they tend to be very successful, but it really is going to be a drip, drip process. Where the schools have been really going for it gung-ho they are having quite a marked improvement.

  Q303 Ian Lucas: So it depends very much on the commitment of the school?

  Ms Mills: Very much so and on the support of the local authorities to help them do it as well.

  Q304 Ian Lucas: Are parents involved in this? I speak as a parent of a 12-year old who is not aware of any pressure at all—apart from me—to get them to walk or cycle to school.

  Ms Mills: I think it gets very difficult with teenagers because they do tend to become a little bit more lazy once they have reached the teenage years. Certainly within the primary schools they should all be aware of Walk to School Week campaigns. It is difficult to run those campaigns within the secondary schools because they think that you are talking to them as far too young, but there should be campaigns about them getting on buses and using public transport at that stage.

  Q305 Mr Stevenson: We asked the Secretary of State about whether the pilots that the Government envisaged would have any targeting for reducing congestion, improving the environment and improving the school day. The County Council has a number of yellow buses dedicated to this process. Mr Goddard, you said that it would be almost impossible to measure congestion. Where you operate these dedicated yellow buses is it not possible to measure the effect they have had on the schools that they service in terms of congestion and car usage?

  Mr Goddard: I think you have to be very careful here because in Cheshire we acquired the yellow buses to replace contracts where prices were really going through the roof. In that sense, the yellow bus is just taking children who previously were on a commercial contract. It is not shifting children from car into public transport in that case. I know that yellow buses have been used in other places to do that, but we use ours for the statutory free children.

  Q306 Mr Stevenson: School transport has proved impossible to measure in any qualitative way the effect that school transport provision has on congestion in the local environments around that school.

  Mr Goddard: We do not measure it. I would suggest, if I may, that it is pretty self-evident. We all know that on school days the peak period is much more congested than in the school holidays. We want to get more children out of cars and on to other forms of transport. I do not think we need to worry too much about measuring the wider impact. Let us just do it!

  Chairman: We are very grateful to you all. Thank you very much indeed for coming. We shall take good note of all that you have told us as well as all that you have said to us.