Hansard

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for allowing me to speak to the committee. I speak especially on behalf of the families who have recently lost children—the Oldham and Milne families—and other families who have been in the same position in the past 30 years.I ask members to imagine being told that their child will rely totally on others for the rest of their life or that their child was killed when coming home from school. School transport can and does have deadly consequences. In this room in 2006, I brought a similar school transport problem before the committee, but nothing was done. Alex Neil raised the matter with the Scottish Executive, but nothing was done. He said:"I beg the Scottish ministers to take the matter seriously and to produce an action plan early in the new year."—Official Report, 23 November 2006; c 29818.However, still nothing was done.I was three weeks home from speaking to the committee in 2006 when a young lad from Crossgates in Fife was killed while getting off a school bus. Still nothing changed. In September 2008, Robyn Oldham and Alexander Milne were, tragically, killed within weeks of each other. Nothing has changed. I now appear before the committee again. Surely members will not let me leave this time without things changing.Parents are right to ask how safe their children are on school transport. Children are our most precious commodity. If we cannot pass laws to protect our schoolchildren, something is seriously wrong. Regardless of where they live, every child needs the same level of safety.I will describe doable measures that can be introduced to save lives. I am sure that the Scottish Parliament could introduce at least some of them under devolved road safety laws. The safety sign on school buses has been abused for years. It is displayed on old-age pensioners' runs, on tours and on minibuses that are used as taxis at night. Legally, the sign must be displayed when children are on board a bus, yet no law says that it must be removed when children are not on board a bus. That is ridiculous. Advertisements on school buses are larger than the safety sign. Should the situation not be the other way round?Dustcarts are more visible than school buses. Is that common sense? Buses need extra hazard lights that are set higher on the vehicles, as with all ambulances. The Department for Transport allows that, yet no council insists on that in its contracts, just as no council insists that the safety sign should be removed when no children are on board.Each bus could have a flashing scrolling message on the back window that said, "Caution—schoolchildren crossing."Strobe lights could be fitted. Just as undercover police cars have blue strobe lights fitted in radiator grilles, the same lights could be fitted to the back window of a school bus. They can be bought easily—they are certainly not expensive—and they would draw attention to the fact that it is a school bus. School buses should be instantly recognisable as such.We cannot have service buses also used as school buses with different laws; we need the same laws for all buses that carry children. We need dedicated school transport with trusted drivers and better safety education at school on a regular basis. Those are doable short-term measures that the Parliament can take.Stewart Stevenson and Aberdeenshire Council recently met the families involved. The one measure that all the families agreed with—as do many other families to whom I have spoken since—was stopping other vehicles passing school buses as they load and unload. It works in North America, and if that were made a criminal offence here, the law would save lives. Passing vehicles kill children who are leaving a school bus. If we stop them passing, we have a cure. Nothing will prevent every accident, but that measure will prevent most.Such a law cannot be passed by the Scottish Parliament. You need to take a stand and test your own powers in relation to transport laws. If a new law is needed in Scotland, it should be created. If Westminster does not agree, that is its problem. You must be forceful about this and say that we need this law to benefit our children, even if they do not wish to benefit theirs down south. If our MSPs voted on the matter and secured a majority, that would surely be enough to take it forward regardless of what Westminster thinks. If our Parliament has the will, it will happen—you can fight for it.It appears that some motorists have so little time that they cannot stop to save a child's life. Is a few minutes really that important? We have 20mph limits around schools and 30mph signs that flash as motorists enter a town. There must be something that we can do. We must get rid of the cheapest form of school transport for children—which many buses are—and replace it with the safest form of school transport. The families whom I represent all expect that the law can be changed and that lives can be saved. In fact, that is what is expected by every parent and every child. Do not make the mistake of saying, "It can't happen to my family." We all thought the same. It will happen again to another family unless legislation is introduced.I ask the committee one simple question: can you put a price on a child's life? We cannot.