HACT puts D1 issue to Department for Transport

Yesterday 30/4/13 members of Halesworth Area Community Transport met with Graham Pendlebury the Director of Local Transport at the Department of Transport and among other things, they impressed on him the urgent issue of D1 licensing of volunteer drivers.

Mr Pendlebury is a member of DfT’s central Strategy Committee, and chairs several programme boards and inter-departmental committees on behalf of other government departments. He is also a member of the Audit & Risk Committees of the Government Car and Despatch Agency and the Driving Standards Agency.

He was Director of Road and Vehicle Safety & Standards from 2004 to 2007, with responsibility for road casualty reduction, traffic management policy and certain transport technology issues.

Previous posts in the DfT and its predecessors at senior civil service level involved responsibility for tackling the environmental impacts of air transport (2001-2004) and management of long term strategic thinking and cross-cutting work (1999-2001). He has also held posts in the international aviation and rail sections of the Department, and was Principal Private Secretary to the Minister for Roads and Traffic in 1989-91.

Mr Pendlebury kindly wrote and acknowledged he had taken the issues presented away with him.

The story was reported on the same day of the less heralded news that the Lowestoft Minibus for the Blind have appealed for more volunteer drivers who must be licensed before 1997.

EADT story: http://tinyurl.com/cupn4mb

Background why D1 issue is important: http://tinyurl.com/bnfsspd 

Apologies to the EADT but the report is posted here because sometimes stories drop off their website.

Suffolk: Community transport boss visits Suffolk

By Emma BrennanWednesday, May 1, 2013

CHALLENGES facing community transport providers in rural areas and towns across Suffolk were put to the Government’s director for local transport when he visited the county yesterday.

Graham Pendlebury, from the Department for Transport, met representatives from some of the county’s 19 community operators that all come under the umbrella of Suffolk Community Transport (SCT).

SCT is the first organisation of its kind in England. It was set up with a grant of more than £300,000 from the Department for Transport to champion community transport issues and implement an initial three-year strategy to enhance local voluntary transport services.

If successful, SCT’s strategy will be used as a ‘best practice’ model which could be rolled out nationwide.

Yesterday, Mr Pendlebury took trips on some of Suffolk’s rural links and dial-a-ride services before watching a presentation at SCT’s headquarters in Hadleigh outlining the concerns and the successes of the group.He told the EADT the visit had enabled him to witness how community transport operated at the “coal face.”

He said: “I have been seeing different aspects of the group’s operations today and it has been very interesting to see how it all works at ground roots level. These organisations are run on very tight budgets with a heavy reliance on volunteer operators, which enables them to provide viable services in some very thinly populated areas. As a result, they are able to provide a much more flexible and responsive service in places where people would otherwise become quite isolated. People who use the service have told me today how vital it is to them.”

Pat Moody, who uses the Felixstowe Area Community Transport Scheme (FACTS), told Mr Pendlebury: “The FACTS bus is extremely important to me. I use it to get to my craft club, to go shopping and to visit my daughter. It provides an absolute lifeline because without it, I would be housebound.”

SCT chair, Sue Jay said the group had several concerns which it had put to Mr Pendlebury during his visit. This included a plea to change legislation which places restrictions on people who passed their driving test after 1997, preventing them from driving disabled access minibuses over a certain size without a special licence.

She said: “We want the Government to look at this because the restriction is discouraging younger drivers from signing up as volunteers.” Mr Pendlebury said he would report concerns back to the Government, adding: “I have been very impressed with what I have seen here today. Having an umbrella group to enable resources to be shared is a valid model for all sorts of places, not just rural areas.”

Can you drive a minibus?

From leaflets supplied by the Community Transport Association and advice of colleagues I have drawn this flowchart which, although not totally definitive, I hope conveys the same information as the chart I got from the CTA to answer the question of what a volunteer can do with their license to drive a minibus for a community transport operator (CTO).

My intent is to enable anyone manning a volunteer recruitment stall, such as at a village fete, could determine who can drive a minibus for section 19 or section 22 operations, both of which my local CTO provides, or should be steered to a community car scheme.

Without this, every volunteer has to do all of the homework I have done so far and will likely feel it is all unnecessarily complicated. I have asked the CTA to produce an official easy-to-understand chart like this or confirm this one is correct so I can publish this more widely.

A volunteer-run CTO operating a section 19 service can't charge a fare or stop at bus stops, as section 19 is for services like collecting people for a day-centre and this CAN be done by a volunteer with a B license. Any service that takes the fare-paying public has to be run under section 22* and that prevents anyone without a D1 licence driving the bus whether they are paid or not and only people licensed before 1997 can get a D1 (101) endorsement without taking the PSV test.

* although there is apparently an 'Class E' exemption for rural areas.

It is quite apparent to me from my role as a volunteer with my local CTO that there is going to be great difficulty ahead as the pool of D1 (101) entitled drivers dwindles over time because there is no other pathway at present to enable a volunteer who didn’t take their driving test before 1997 (so couldn’t be any younger than 31 years old now) to operate a vehicle on a section 22 route (one taking fares) without completing PSV training.

The cost of this training is a very minimum of £1000 per person and since a CTO might need a roster of 20 volunteer drivers per route, this is an unsupportable burden on the transport services that rural areas depend on. Volunteer-run CTOs provide vital services in rural areas where commercial operations are unsustainable.

I have asked my MP Therese Coffey to consider the need for legislation to correct this but I need to be absolutely sure I have my facts straight but at the moment this is how I understand the situation without bringing all the ramifications of vehicle size and weight into it.

I looked on the DVLA website for some licensing statistics but getting the actual numbers of D1 and B category drivers would take a FOI request but you can get a rough estimate based on that non-photo licenses are likely to be from before 1997- so D1 eligble - and photo licenses will be after 1997, so restricted to B category. If we presume similar numbers of drivers continue to be licensed and presume numbers of 70 year olds driving now will be decimated by health issues in their 80's; in just a decade's time we shall see a huge drop in available volunteers of active working age, just as the population bubble of elderly people (who will depend even more on public transport when they cannot drive) begins to swell.