Speeches by Alexander.

“My comments are in relation to the way in which the DFT will be reimbursing the bus operating companies.”

“I do not think it is. We are thinking about the longer term. We will bring stakeholders together over the next year or so to discuss what the long-term arrangements might look like. I go back to the point I was making earlier: in a world where there are finite resources, there is always going to be a trade-off between …”

“I am Heidi Alexander and I am the Secretary of State for Transport.”

“I would be very happy to keep this Committee informed. This obviously is news that has emerged in Norway over the last couple of days, and my officials are looking at this case. We do take national security issues with the utmost seriousness. We are working with the intelligence community, as you said, to make sure tha…”

“All those things that you talk about are important to passengers. My first point, when we were going through the spending review process and in my discussions with Treasury colleagues, was to get the right balance between protecting vital bus services and having access to bus routes that people need in order to access …”

“I want us as a Department to give certainty to local authorities about the funding that they will have available to them to support bus operators in their local area. This has often been done on a year-by-year basis, so it is very difficult to plan. It is very difficult for bus operators to think about their commercial…”

“It was a specific decision of the Government to publish the spending review, the industrial strategy and the infrastructure strategy around the same time, so that we could make sure that they were aligned and could provide long-term certainty about the investment pipeline, for example, to lever in private sector invest…”

“It has been striking the right balance, because affordability is important to people. It obviously costs a significant amount of money for Government to reimburse operators for the difference between the £3 cap and what they would normally have been charging. I do hear what you are saying about the concerns of some ope…”

“The guiding principle for me is around cost recovery. When you think about driving test wait times, for example, it would not be right to whack up the cost of a driving licence in order to somehow manage the problem that we have with capacity in the system to deliver driving tests at the moment. The guiding principle r…”

“It is my understanding that those discussions have started between officials in DFT and MHCLG about earlier sharing of information about utility connections. It is at quite an early stage still, so I would be very happy to share more information about that, as that progresses, with the Committee.”

“It would be very challenging because local areas have very differing economies. You will see local areas with very differing levels of car ownership, different demographics and different needs. In a period when we have good but finite funding for the buses, i.e. we are spending nearly £1 billion this year on supporting…”

“We share an ambition, which is to see improved public transport connectivity across the country. We probably differ slightly on the best means by which to get there. We agree on the end and that is why I mentioned the bus franchising pilots that we are running in York and North Yorkshire, Cheshire West and Chester, and…”

“The quickest and easiest way to explain this is that we need to get more bums on seats. We need to increase the number of people who are using the railways. The less we are paying as a country to move half-empty bits of steel around the rail network, the better value for money we will be getting, so there is an ambitio…”

“Getting the balance right between reducing disruption and enabling essential works is a perennial problem, is it not? We are taking action as a Government, in that we are increasing fines for works that are overrunning. That can be up to £10,000 now for works that are running into weekends. The new fine level will come…”

“The Chancellor and the Treasury are very aware of the potential electric vehicles offer in terms of jobs of the future. We are investing in battery giga plants, for example, and supporting developments down in Somerset around that. We also moved very swiftly in the summer, when we had some volatility around internation…”

“We are looking at how we devolve decision making on lane rental schemes to mayoral strategic areas. There is a question about the appropriate geography over which lane rental schemes could operate. I hope to be saying more about that devolution of decision making on lane rental schemes in due course.”

“It is an Act.”

“This is a really important issue, and it is a big priority for me, the Minister Simon Lightwood and the whole of the Department. We did say initially that we were looking to reduce the wait time to seven weeks by the end of this year, but you will recall that, when I came in front of your Committee for the first time i…”

“You are right to say that this is a really important moment for the east coast main line. The production of this timetable has been a number of years in the making, but it is important to unlock new services, and to provide additional seats and additional capacity. The way in which we have decided to approach this is w…”

“We made the announcement in March that Chiltern Railways was going to be the operator. Since then, it has been getting its drivers trained up. It has trained 44 train drivers now, and there has been a new facility created at Bletchley. My understanding is that the operating agreements required for the start of passenge…”