Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The tone of my remarks will be slightly different from that of the last speaker. I think Dublin's transport policy has suffered badly in the past 15 years. John Wilson's decision to abolish the Dublin transport authority was terrible. We are now re-establishing the authority after many years and many lost opportunities. Dublin's transport strategy has not had coherent leadership during this period — about four Ministers are involved with dozens of semi-State companies, all of which are monopolies, and four or five councils have their oar in. There has not been coherent leadership in this area. We have come up with ideas that were blindingly obvious, such as integrated ticketing. On the third attempt, as the Minister of State will have heard during his time on the Committee of Public Accounts, integrated ticketing was a disaster. We buried about €7 million or €8 million as the system was abandoned. Why did that happen? It was because wholly owned State companies deliberately obstructed the development of what was supposed to be public policy and there was no one to drive it through. There was no leadership within Government to deliver public policy. The Committee of Public Accounts rightly gave a withering report on the performance of the State in this area. We have also had withering reports from the committee on the way in which major public infrastructure projects were managed in the city, including the huge over-runs on Luas and the port tunnel.

The challenges faced by Dublin city over the last decade include a 42% increase in the number of passenger journeys over the last decade from Dublin county alone, not to mention Louth, Kildare and Wicklow. If we look beyond the boundaries the number is probably doubled. Why the Government decided to freeze the number of buses in the public bus network for five of those years defies understanding. Why it did not carry out its commitment to introduce bus competition, so that the private sector could offer alternatives and develop new opportunities, again defies understanding. These are public policies that were enunciated not by this Minister or previous Ministers but by Deputy O'Rourke in her capacity as Minister for Public Enterprise. She introduced these policies eight to ten years ago but they have not yet been carried out. Someone within the great army opposite must take some responsibility for this. I take my hat off to the Minister of State, who is willing to stand up, take responsibility and criticise people who are failing. This is a chronic failure, the consequences of which are very serious and will stay with us for decades to come.

The core Government strategy over the last decade was to achieve modal shift — to get people to leave their cars at home and switch to public transport, but a decade on the census shows there has been zero modal shift whatsoever. Whatever gains were made by Luas and DART were lost in the bus service. We have made no headway. Indeed, it is far worse than that. If we consider other modes such as cycling, which the present Minister, who is not here at the moment, has stated is a core aspect of his strategy, we find that the absolute number of people cycling has dropped by 20% in the last decade, despite a declared public policy of promoting cycling. I understand why people are not cycling — to ride a bicycle in the city would be taking one's life in one's hands much of the time. The number of schoolchildren cycling has dropped particularly precipitously, although one would imagine they would make a perfect target group for a public policy promoting cycling. The share of people who cycle has dropped by 50% over that period, with less than 4% of people using bicycles.

Another issue that has been clearly enunciated in public policy is the promotion of shared car journeys, so that cars are encouraged not to come into the city with only one driver. Again, over the last decade, the number of shared car journeys — those with more than one person per car — has halved. The outcome is entirely the opposite to the stated aim of public policy. Many extra journeys have been generated in the growth areas to the north and west of the city. Of these, 90% are undertaken by car, while public transport caters for only 10%. This represents a chronic failure in planning and delivery. Buses are a flexible tool that could have been used to serve those areas, but I know some of them myself and they have not been sufficiently targeted. We do not have any level of accountability for the way in which the resources we commit to Dublin Bus are deployed in terms of routes and frequencies. The poor results in the bus sector have been obtained at huge cost. As the Minister of State knows, the cost of the subvention to Dublin Bus has increased more than tenfold over the last decade, increasing from €5 million to €80 million. The amount of the fare attributed to subvention, which was the equivalent of 12 cent in 1999, is now 54 cent. Thus, we are investing more public money while persuading fewer passengers to use the system. It is costing us more. In the core growth areas, where we should be delivering services so that those living in these high-growth areas do not become car-dependent, more and more people are using cars as their sole source of transport.

This has been a decade of chronic failure in planning, execution and delivery of transport in Dublin. While I will give one cheer for the arrival of the Dublin Transport Authority, it does not deserve any more than that. I hope it will bring some coherence, but I suspect that many of the problems that have beset previous Ministers for Transport will also beset the authority. The fundamental obstacles that have prevented effective development of transport strategy have not been removed simply by moving responsibility from a Minister to this authority. That is the point I make to the Minister of State, who is standing in for the Minister on this issue. We need assurance that we are genuinely seeing change and that this is not a continuation of the tendency, for which we were criticised by the OECD, for Ministers, when they are tackling a thorny problem and find it is not being dealt with effectively, to set up an agency that removes responsibility from the Minister's desk, with all the attendant problems such as lack of accountability.

I am concerned that all the problems that have bedevilled Dublin transport in the last decade will continue to do so under this agency. There is no public accountability in this new agency. The issue of consumer powerlessness, which is the heart of the reason we do not have an effective system, is untouched. There is still no commitment to introduce competition so that we may have alternatives and contestability of the monopoly providers in this sector. The citizens of Dublin will not ride shotgun in this agency. They have been almost entirely squeezed out. Having a token councillor or official on the authority is not democratic accountability. Members of the House will also be cut out. There will be no more Dáil questions about performance in this area — not that the questions produce much useful information already. "Regulatory capture" is a phrase used by economists to describe a situation in which those being regulated have taken over the regulator. That is a real danger with this new authority, as it has been in the past.

Going through the Bill, one searches in vain for any measure designed to empower users of public services. This is a core issue. The recent OECD report stated that the problem with our public service is that it is not consumer-centred or customer-friendly. It is not out there trying to assess customers' needs and meeting them. Nowhere in the Bill is there a new mandate under which public transport providers will have to become customer-sensitive agencies. There is not even a commitment to route and frequency review. We know Dublin Bus has not matched the changing population patterns in the city. It has been content with what it is doing and it has not responded to consumers. This must change. In the section that refers to contracts, tucked away at the end as a sort of also-ran, it is stated that the contracts may include, where the authority considers it appropriate, issues of consumer satisfaction and performance. There is not even an obligation on the authority, when it enters into contracts, to monitor these issues. It is just an afterthought.

The existing State companies have been given exclusive rights to continue operating the routes they already have. If exclusivity has been guaranteed, where is the change? The public operators are being put in the driving seat in terms of setting public service obligations. This is the notion that some routes are loss-making. There should be a tendering process for loss-making routes and if there is no tendering process, there should be full transparency. The authority must set the appropriate subvention and if the company does not deliver, it should look elsewhere. However, the situation is the reverse. The public company is being asked how much it would cost to deliver a service and is then being written a cheque. This is not a change, rather it is the persistence of what has always been the case. The subvention increased from €16 million in 1999 to €80 million currently because the question of whether the €80 million so-called public service obligation is delivering real public service to a travelling public in need has not been asked. There has been no scrutiny and there will be none under the Bill.

No provision has been made for publishing route by route the cost of the public service obligation. The Government is persisting in the belief that a monopoly's bus route performance should remain a secret. Why should this be the case? We are paying for the service and we have a right to know how many passengers are travelling, whether the buses are travelling on time, whether the routes are losing money and how much of the taxpayers' money goes to subvent the buses. Why should we be denied this information? There is no mention of opening the system up to public scrutiny even within the monopolistic structure to which the Government is committed.

Accountability is a core issue for Fine Gael. The authority will be run by an executive and five ministerial appointees and will have an advisory council. The Bill does not establish a forum for public scrutiny. There will be no monitoring and scrutineering on behalf of the ordinary travelling public of the standards of service provided by the companies awarded contracts. An internal club of people examining one another is a recipe for regulatory capture, as has been the experience time and again among regulators. The scrutiny must be public and the advisory council must conduct its work in public, but the latter is not provided for. This is public rather than private business, the spending of taxpayers' money to provide public transport. Why should it not be out in the open, which would allow us to question whether something is value for money?

We will be kept in the dark concerning many performance standards. The authority will not rail against poor performance or set and publish standards. The Bill does not provide for the publication of the contractors' standards of performance. The contracts will be private, but the fact that there will be no publication must be changed. The fact that there is no requirement to reveal what has been paid must also change. Accountability to the Dáil is crucial, as there must be some accountability in the new structure. The Dáil would not be the only suitable forum. In 2002 when we believed that a Dublin transport authority was imminent, the Joint Committee on Transport, of which I was a member at the time, recommended a body comprised exclusively of Dublin politicians to scrutinise the performance of the authority and the agencies delivering public transport services. The body would eventually become directly elected. Why should there be no direct democratic accountability, which is at the core of the issue? There will be none, nor will there be Dáil questions, rather there will be occasional appearances before committees, as is the unsatisfactory case in respect of the HSE.

The Bill runs the risk of creating another HSE. We are not considering whether the establishment of a centralised body will lead to many savings among the bodies that have been regulating and managing public transport to date. The OECD outlined a key issue in lights, that is, if one is restructuring operations and establishing a new agency, as occurred in respect of the HSE, one must determine whether savings will be made, whether services will be delivered more effectively, how management structures will be rationalised and redundant bodies will be removed. None of these matters is addressed in the Bill. Rather, it accepts that everything will continue unchanged. A new body is being foisted on top of current bodies. Local authorities and monopolising companies will retain their roles and that is being copper-fastened, which is not the radical reform required.

I will make myself unpopular, but price is the most effective tool in demand and traffic management. Deciding not to consider congestion charging for many years is crazy. We are continually introducing physical rationing mechanisms. For example, we install lanes, ramps and one-way systems and prevent people travelling on them. Despite imposing regulatory obligations that incur costs and affect people, we will not consider pricing as a means through which to allow people to make choices on how to spend their money. I had believed that we were in the market system and that we recognised price as an efficient tool to help people to allocate resources more effectively. It ensures that expensive public infrastructure is used effectively. However, it has been decided that price will not play a part in this matter. While road pricing may not be popular, it is an important element in any public transport strategy. The Government is deciding that pricing will not form part of the current strategy and that we must wait for God knows what to befall us for it to be included.

Pricing cannot be applied everywhere, but it can form part of a strategy that matches investment in infrastructure with pricing mechanisms to try to increase the efficient usage of the infrastructure. It would be a legitimate and logical way to proceed. The ESRI's medium-term review stated that installing infrastructure is easy whereas managing it effectively to deliver the intended results is difficult. Policies must underpin the management, but the Government is fascinated by installing infrastructure. Ministers claim that the national development plan is a God send and that we should spend, spend, spend. Deputy O'Connor knows that roads will be full a day after they have been built. People will buy more cars and fill the space. Pricing plays a role in using infrastructure intelligently and allocating it efficiently.

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