Lord Bradshaw – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Bradshaw on 2016-10-03.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the capacity of the bus industry to meet the challenges arising from the need to deal with levels of air pollution in cities.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The Government has introduced several measures to encourage the uptake of environmentally friendly buses.
The Low Emission Bus Scheme (LEBS), announced last year, will provide over £30m to help buy several hundred low emission buses. The winners of LEBS was announced on 25 July, building on the success of the Green Bus Fund, which ran to 2014. Under the Green Bus Fund, £89million of Government funding helped to purchase over 1,200 green buses.
The Government is also encouraging the uptake of greener vehicles through the Bus Service Operators Grant low carbon emission bus incentive.
The Bus Services Bill, which was introduced into the House of Lords on 19th May, will provide local transport authorities with new powers to specify the emission standards to be met by local bus services – including through franchising and, with sufficient support from bus operators, under enhanced partnership arrangements.
The Government has also invested over £26million since 2011 under the Clean Bus and Clean Vehicle Technology Funds for local authorities in pollution hotspots across England to retrofit 1000’s of buses, and other vehicles, with pollution reducing technology. This includes converting some buses to either natural gas or to electric propulsion.
