Deputy Michael Higgins has been given permission to raise on the Adjournment the question of the manner in which the privatisation of school transport might affect employees in Bus Éireann. Deputy Higgins has 20 minutes.
Adjournment Debate. - School Transport Privatisation.
I am very grateful to you and the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity of raising this matter on the Adjournment.
On Thursday, 12 May, I sought, by way of supplementary question to my question, not of that day, to elicit information on the proposals of the Minister for Education on the implications for Bus Éireann and their staff of her decision to withdraw the contract for school transport from Bus Éireann on a pilot basis in Counties Clare, Laois, Sligo and Cavan. On that occasion the precise information I sought was not forthcoming and circumstances over which I had no control intervened to stop me getting the information I required. I would now, this evening, like to repeat my demand for an answer to some basic questions as to the implications of the Minister's decision in relation to the pilot schemes and her announced intention, if successful in the pilot schemes, to extend this privatisation of school transport on a national basis. There is some urgency attached to this matter in view of the fact that at the moment redundancy notices are, as I speak, being prepared for 93 drivers in the pilot areas and for perhaps as many as 42 other workers.
On 12 May 1988 Mr. L. Walsh, who enjoys the title of manager of human resources in Bus Éireann, sent a letter to the trade unionists who are involved in this part of Bus Éireann's activities. He said in the course of that letter that the company had since examined the matter further; that as explained at their meeting there was no prospect of redeployment for the school bus drivers in four counties where 93 drivers out of the company's total of 730 school bus drivers were employees; that consequently so as to comply with the requirements of the Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act it was now necessary for notices of dismissal due to redundancy to be issued to the 93 school bus drivers concerned; and that the notice would be issued by the local district manager to be effective from the last day on which the particular school service was required or expiry date of the prescribed notice, whichever was the later. That was the main paragraph in the letter from the manager of human resources of Bus Éireann to the different trade unionists who are involved in this part of Bus Éireann's activities. So we are dealing with the reality of approximately 135 notices.
Let me mention in passing that this is in direct contravention of assurances given in 1986 on the occasion of the breaking up of CIE into the three new companies which came from it. It is also in contravention of the spirit of the Programme for National Recovery which spoke of the avoidance of compulsory redundancies. It is stated in this letter, which I will have no difficulty in placing in the Library of the House, that Bus Éireann have said they cannot redeploy the people concerned. By the way, there is no economic saving for the Department of Education involved because, having established that these people are to be made redundant, the cost of the redundancies will be approximately £7 million, and I am being conservative in my estimate of that. If the scheme is extended nationally, the number of people who will be let go will be 1,118 at least. If one took 1985-86 figures this 1,118 would be made up of 739 part time drivers, 26 regular drivers, 6 executives, 16 senior clerical officers, 45 clerical officers, 9 shorthand typists, three typists, five temporary clerks, 53 inspectors, 19 maintenance supervisors, 5 shop clerks, 130 engineering craftsmen, 54 engineering operatives and 8 apprentices. There is little less than job destruction involved in this, because what is proposed by way of pilot scheme with the possibility of further extension is threatening the livelihood of the people who are involved.
I would say, and this is something I will come to in a moment, that there are issues that are raised by this that go beyond the issues of school transport themselves. For example, Bus Éireann's rural service is already being curtailed in a number of areas including the areas in the constituency which is represented by the Minister of State and myself. Only last week I got news of the people of Moyard in North Connemara having their service cut whereby on four days of the week they will have no service at all affecting people's ability to get to the clinics and to different services, and the people affected by that kind of cut in rural transport are people who are too poor, too old, too young to use their own private motor cars. Let us be in no doubt about that.
The removal of this business, the removal of the Department of Education contract from Bus Éireann, will have the effect of removing £18 million in revenue from Bus Éireann, should they lose this contract, will without doubt have to come back immediately and double the amount of the subvention requested if it is to continue to supply rural services. I will say something in a moment about the madness of all of this. Bus Éireann operate this provincial bus service in an integrated way with the school transport service using the same garage facilities, using the same service costs and so forth, and there may be a cost of up to £10 million in addition required by Bus Éireann if they are to lose that proportion of service costs which is now being carried by the school transportation scheme.
The Minister's proposals are not coming at a time when the cost to her Department for the service has risen in any remarkable fashion. The fact is that over the last three years the costs of the scheme have not risen appreciably. The school transport scheme, in 1985, carried 169,500 children to and from school daily in 855 special school buses owned by the Department of Education and driven mainly by part-time drivers together with approximately 1,610 privately operated vehicles of mainly small capacity.
In regard to what CIE will be losing, let us take the main points of the argument. They will be losing £18 million in revenue. If the scheme is extended nationally the job losses will be 1,118 with associated redundancy costs of about £7 million. In addition to that, revenue of £2.4 million earned on all CIE schedules services will be placed at risk. I have spoken already about the threat to the very nature of Bus Éireann itself. The fact is the implications for the road passenger services are disturbing because there will be a loss from a scheduled service revenue of about £1.7 million. Additional costs of £4 million will arise from the loss of the benefit of sharing costs of school transport. This will lead to the elimination of a wide range of services and the further loss of many jobs if the necessary actual support is not forthcoming and I do not see any indication that there will be a rush to provide Bus Éireann with additional finance if this contract which is so necessary for its future existence, is removed. As Bus Éireann is weakened by the removal of the school transport contract those other private bus operators who last year took £3 million by creaming the best, most dense and heavily travelled routes, will be absolutely delighted as they prepared to move into the vacuum of a weakened Bus Éireann. What is happening is all the more scandalous in that the scheme established in 1967 has been acknowledged by inspectors in the Minister's Department as being one that met their requirements in terms of safety and that it has been updated over the years. Approximately £2 million had been spent on increasing and developing facilities and about £200,000 on improving the computer facilities so as to eliminate delays which all elected representatives are familiar with, in the issue of tickets and so forth.
There are serious implications for CIE and the devolution of the administration of the scheme would undoubtedly lead to a weakening in the existing accountability, consistency and uniformity of application achieved by CIE and so essential over the years to the transportation scheme. In relation to accountability, the Minister has not yet said what the terms of the contracts or the tenders will be. She said that CIE will be free like everybody else, to tender for this work. This makes absolutely no sense so far as the fleet is owned by the Department of Education. A point I will develop in a moment is the question of where the buses will come from. The cost of fleet replacement is at the base of this scheme. The Minister has come up with a totally cracked figure regarding the cost.
Most of the private bus operators who are waiting in the wings buy secondhand buses in Britain costing in the region of £8,000 to £10,000. There is nothing to stop the Department of Education doing the same and painting them yellow or green or having shamrocks on them, depending on what the Minister likes. For purely ideological reasons she is hellbent on destroying a State company, a company in respect of which there is a breach of trust of the honour of this House because in 1986 the workers involved were told on the occasion of the passing of legislation affecting the old CIE that their jobs would not be in danger. This is now the destruction of their jobs by stealth.
CIE have, over the years not only spent the money to which I referred but have developed modern techniques for maximising efficiency such as the computerised system which I have already mentioned and which has already been applied in the primary school transport scheme. If you move away from such a centralised scheme onto the kind of devolved and decentralised type of transport officer arrangements which the Minister suggests, it is difficult to see how use could be made of that facility upon which we have spent nearly £250,000. There is a matter of wasting the expenditure that has already been made.
The lack of capital provision for school buses would lead to a position where the vast majority of school children — in the conceivable future — will be carried by private operators. PAMBO, the organisation claiming to represent many private operators, have made many unrealistic demands over the years, all with the objective of increasing the remuneration of contractors to the maximum extent possible and thereby increasing the cost of the scheme. In the new situation, PAMBO's hand would be strengthened considerably in pursuing such demands. Although there is no indication, because they would have to carry some of the socially necessary parts of the transport system, that they would automatically bid for those. The tender systems will make it possible for those who are already creaming the system to apply for the better parts and no doubt people will turn around for the suitable State duck to take the rest.
It must be recognised also that practically all suitably located buses in the private sector are already engaged in school transport and, therefore, to cater for the additional work would involve the acquisition of vehicles from outside the State. The effect of the Minister's proposal is to say to them: "I will not buy the buses from anywhere, you buy the buses from England and operate them privately". Obviously, the costs involved in extending or replacing their fleet will have to be reflected in the charge for services which will ultimately be borne by the Department of Education. I find it very difficult to understand why the Minister is going ahead with this proposal, a proposal which, in a diluted form, had come before the Cabinet in 1986 and was blocked by the Labour Ministers after a meeting attended by the CIE group of trade unions and the Parliamentary Labour Party. At that time two pilot schemes were proposed but they were blocked, abandoned. There had been an embryonic version of this proposal floating around in Fianna Fáil for about ten years. That proposal was for one pilot scheme. The implications of these proposals for workers who began work in CIE are little less than catastrophic. The control of the scheme will be weakened by the fragmentation of administrative responsibilities.
In summary these are the questions I want the Minister to answer. How does he justify the forced redundancies involved within the context of the Programme for National Recovery? How does he justify the proposed forced redundancies in the pilot schemes? One of the people who is chairing the group of bus drivers affected is a near neighbour of the Minister. If he wants to contact him he will have no difficulty whatsoever as the man lives in Gort and he will be able to tell the Minister the effect of these proposals on his members. I doubt if he will tell him that he welcomes these proposals. Where precisely is there any economic saving for the State? If there is no economic saving for the State what answer is there to the suggestion that these proposals are being put forward for purely ideological reasons? What indications are there that PAMBO will provide the fleet? What is so wonderful about PAMBO buying English buses and blocking the State from providing them?
Perhaps the Minister of State would ask his senior Minister why she has refused to meet the CIE group of trade unions who wanted to discuss with her the destruction of their jobs. They have written to her repeatedly asking for an opportunity to discuss the impact of these proposals. She has refused to meet them. She had not scheduled a single meeting with any of the unions involved in the old CIE and who are involved in Bus Éireann. She had hoped to slide up to the end of this session of the Dáil and when the redundancy notices had been issued and would be coming into effect on 1 September the men would be gone, would be in different places, and in the autumn she could say that she would extend the scheme nationally.
The Minister has said she will use CEOs, that she will extend their functions in relation to transport. The Local Government and Public Services Union are against her proposals and have instructed their staff involved not to co-operate in their implementation. The TUI have done likewise. All the CIE trade unions are against these proposals. Where is the public demand for them?
There is something that is most important to me, irrespective of what I have said tonight. There is need for improvement, particularly in the transport arrangements for carrying the handicapped to their different schools. This is a matter which has been neglected for many years. I am aware of people being collected in their homes in Tallaght at about 6.45 a.m. and arriving out in Dundrum at 9.05 a.m. I am aware of cerebral palsy children who are unsteady being placed on the inside of other children with nobody establishing insurance responsibility for carrying them. Drivers cannot include it in their cover. The owners of the buses refuse to be responsible. The Minister, who owns the bus, refuses to be responsible. Is she telling me that when she has taken a semi-State company out of the business of carrying people for the Department of Education and broken it down around all these different private operators, she will have addressed or improved that issue of safety?
These proposals are a monstrous attack on working people and their lives. More than those relying on and entitled to free transport are involved. In Dublin city those under 16 are entitled to a 60 per cent reduction in fares and those over 16 to a 50 per cent reduction. The same is true of the country areas. It was worth last year £1 million by way of subsidy in rural areas and £3 million in Dublin. Is she or her Minister of State telling me that the private operators will want to give £3 million in subsidy for children's tickets in Dublin or £1 million in the rural areas? It is a disgrace and a sad day when a Fianna Fáil Minister would want to wreck jobs in CIE and deprive the public of a good and accountable service which has served us well since 1967.
I would like to thank Deputy Higgins for his very forceful contribution to this debate. At the outset I would like to clarify what is intended in relation to the question of changes in the operation of the school transport service in the school year 1988-89.
I should say that the Department of Education have a responsibility to ensure the satisfactory delivery of transport services to approximately 160,000 primary and post-primary pupils throughout the length and breadth of the country. We also have the responsibility to ensure that the State gets the best possible value for the money it expends on the provision of this service. This is particularly so in the current economic circumstances where all services have to be rigorously examined for cost-effectiveness and because of the major expense of the scheme itself — approximately £36 million in the current year. Concern has been expressed over many years and from many quarters at this level of expenditure and I consider it our responsibility to explore all possible means of reducing the drain on our financial resources while continuing to provide a satisfactory level of service to our children.
As the Deputy is aware, the day-to-day operation of the school transport scheme is carried out by Bus Éireann as an agent for the Minister for Education. This function has been discharged efficiently by the company since the inception of the scheme in 1968. In the intervening 20 years, generations of children have benefited by the scheme, many of whom would otherwise have had extreme difficulty in attending school on a regular basis. Great care is exercised in all aspects of the operation and the expertise and good work of the company is worthy of our appreciation.
Nonetheless, it is essential, as I have said, to explore all possible means of reducing expenditure and as part of the ongoing review of the operation of the scheme, the Government have had under consideration the possibility of introducing a system based on local arrangements. To enable further consideration of this possibility we have decided to introduce, in respect of the school year 1988-89, pilot projects with regard to devolved administration of the primary and post-primary transport operation in Counties Cavan, Sligo, Laois and Clare.
Ths basis on which the devolved arrangements will operate has been given full consideration and it has been decided that the administration of the projects should be undertaken by the chief executive officers of the respective vocational education committees. Under this arrangement, all matters pertaining to the organisation and day-to-day operation of the schemes will transfer from Bus Éireann to the CEO who wil act as director of the project and will consult with a local committee which will be representative of primary and post-primary schools in the area.
The organisational and operational responsibility of the directors will include the determination of pupils' entitlement and the allocation of bus routes. All routes will be put out to tender and it will be open to Bus Éireann to tender in the normal way. The projects will be closely monitored and the question of a general application of these or similar arrangements will be considered in the light of experience of these projects.
With regard to the consequences of these projects for Bus Éireann and Bus Éireann staff, I would have to say that I am not unmindful of the difficulties as outlined by Deputy Higgins which may ensue.
With regard to the position of Bus Éireann school transport employees in the counties concerned, that will, of course, in the first instance be a matter for the company. My primary concern must be to ensure a satisfactory school transport service at the lowest possible cost to the State. As matters stand the Department are a major customer of Bus Éireann and will continue as such for the coming school year. In introducing the pilot projects we are, in effect, testing another model for the transport service and I consider that we are perfectly justified in doing this for reasons already given. This will undoubtedly have some effect on Bus Éireann but I must emphasise that with the open tendering arrangement the opportunity will exist for the company to secure substantial business as a contractor in the project areas. In general, however, it will be a matter for the company to adjust to changed circumstances, something which is an intrinsic part of everyday commercial activity.
I would like to take the opportunity to correct the impression that we are engaged on a drastic and sweeping scheme of privatisation. Indeed, I might mention that a very substantial part of school transport activities is currently carried out by private contractors. Approximately 50 per cent of the total service is now being provided by private contractors.
But administered by Bus Éireann.
The administration of the services in the four counties involved will transfer from Bus Éireann to a local authority and the arrangements provide for representative local involvement. I take the point when Deputy Higgins interjected and said "administered by Bus Éireann. I would consider that Bus Éireann" business is to be in the transport business rather than in the administration of it which might be carried out just as efficiently by others who are already in engaged in the education provision.
Who will repair the buses?
I will come to that in a moment. On the operational side, the open tendering arrangements will allow Bus Éireann the opportunity to maximise their share of the contracting to the benefit of employees whose future is of concern to the Deputy.
Finally, I would emphasise again that we are talking about a pilot project. I cannot predict what its outcome will be. I feel I ought to say, however, that the concept of the transfer of the organisation of the school transport service on the ground to local parties has been put forward by many interests over a good many years. My view is that we shall never know how a devolution of the service to local organisations would work out unless we get around at last to actually trying it out on a pilot basis and I am sure the Deputy will agree with me in this. This, indeed, is all we are doing now.
I want to refer to one or two points the Deputy made in his speech. He talked about purely ideological reasons for this change. I refute that absolutely. There is simply one reason, that the people of this State are entitled to services at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. Deputy Higgins mentioned the efforts by the previous Government to bring in this scheme, and he rightly pointed out that these efforts were thwarted by the Labour Ministers. These represent just one of a number of efforts that were thwarted by the Labour Ministers which led this country almost to the point of being a banana republic when the previous Government left office.
That is rubbish.
We were up to our neck in borrowing largely due to the kind of policies pursued by the previous Government.
That is cheap stuff.
That is not cheap stuff.
(Interruptions.)
Anois, níor chuir sé isteach ortsa.
Let me be quite candid. Every time I have come into this House Deputy Higgins has called for this Government to spend more money. That is exactly what has been happening in this country over the years and it has got us into the position we found ourselves in 12 months ago when we took over in Government. I have nothing but admiration for the Bus Éireann operation in particular——
Crocodile tears.
——as it has been operated since Bus Éireann took over as an independent company. Here is a challenge to Bus Éireann. There is no reason they should allow any drivers to become redundant if they are capable, as I am sure they are, of competing in an open market economy with other people. They are much stronger then anybody else.
They have written to their employees.
I did not interrupt Deputy Higgins.
I have read the letter to the Minister of State.
They are much stronger at this time to take up the option of running the buses in the private projects areas. There is no reason they cannot do it competitively. If they cannot do it competitively they do not deserve to be considered. As a company if they are not able to meet this challenge they are to blame if they have to allow their drivers to become redundant. However, I am confident that will not be the case. I feel that Deputy Higgins is simply scare-mongering here this evening——
When 135 people are getting notices for redundancy.
——in the allegations he is making. The private project will be monitored carefully and it will then become clear who is correct this evening. I am quite confident the Government's stand on this issue will prove once again to be the correct one.
The Dáil adjourned at 11 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 19 May 1988.