I beg to move,

That this House has considered home-to-school transport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and I am grateful for having secured this important debate. At its core, home-to-school transport is a simple promise: where a child cannot reasonably walk to school, transport will not be a barrier to their education. However, that promise is under serious strain.

Across the country, and acutely in North Yorkshire, families are finding that promise being broken by policy changes that are short-sighted, poorly designed and, in many cases, deeply unfair. The national picture is stark; the Public Accounts Committee published its report on home-to-school transport in March, and its conclusions make for uncomfortable reading.

I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and I was the spokesperson for that report when it went to the media. The report dealt specifically with the education of those with special educational needs and disabilities, and it became very clear that there is a complete drop-off at age 16, meaning that many young adults aged 16 to 19 cannot get to school. The other point I would like to make is that, in rural constituencies like my own, the local special school is not a mile down the road, so it can mean a two-hour round journey.

I thank my hon. Friend for her diligent work as a member of the PAC, and for making that point about SEND, which I will come on to during my speech.

Local authorities in England spent £2.6 billion on home-to-school transport in 2024-25, which was a real-terms increase of 70% since 2015-16. SEND transport alone more than doubled in cost over that same period, and it now accounts for £2 billion of that total. These are enormous sums, but remarkably, the PAC found that the Department for Education does not know whether this spending is achieving value for money. It does not have the data needed to oversee the system effectively, and it cannot adequately measure the relationship between transport and school attendance.

The consequences of that failure are visible in other figures: some 1 million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training, and one in five children of compulsory school age misses at least a day of school per fortnight, which rises to one in three at sixth-form age. The Department’s own assessment looks only at transport disruptions on the day they occur, not the wider issue of whether the system is keeping children in school. This is a serious blind spot, and one that the Government need to address.

This is not just a North Yorkshire problem; the County Councils Network has warned that three quarters of councils are expected to tighten mainstream transport eligibility in the coming years. What is happening in my constituency today, and across North Yorkshire, is a preview of what families across rural England will face if this direction of travel is not reversed. Nowhere is the picture more stark than in some of the stories that my constituents have told me, which is why I secured this debate today.

At the heart of the problem is a growing disconnect between two systems that are supposed to work together but increasingly do not. We have a school admissions system built around catchment areas and feeder school relationships, and a home-to-school transport framework that has been interpreted ever more narrowly as being for the “nearest school only”.

For many years, county councils bridged that gap pragmatically by offering transport to the nearest or catchment school. That reflects the realities of rural England, where many children live well beyond walking distance, where public transport is sparse or often non-existent, and where the geography means that the nearest school on the map is often not the most practical school to reach—sometimes there is a dale in the way, sometimes a river crossing, and sometimes a simple county boundary that bears no relation to how communities actually function.

As budgets tighten and authorities retreat towards the statutory minimum provision, councils are removing catchment transport and reverting to nearest school only. In rural areas like North Yorkshire, the consequences are severe and they are being felt right now. Within days of being elected, the issue of home-to-school transport was landing in my email inbox, and it has not stopped since. North Yorkshire council changed its transport policy to base eligibility on nearest school only, rather than the nearest or catchment school. The council says this is to address rising costs, which are now expected to exceed £52 million—one of the three largest areas of the council’s expenditure—with unsubstantiated claims of savings of up to £3 million over the next seven years.

I understand budgetary pressures, and I understand that local authorities are being squeezed from every direction, but understanding a pressure does not simply mean accepting the response to it uncritically, when the policy is clearly not working. The system that North Yorkshire council uses to calculate the nearest school is not publicly available, so families receive decisions with no ability to interrogate the methodology behind them. That opacity alone is a problem, but when we look at what the methodology is actually producing, it becomes something worse than opaque; it becomes absurd.

The council measures distance using the shortest available walked route to school, which sounds reasonable until we look at what counts as a “walked route”. That includes riverside paths, farm tracks, roads with no pavements or street lights, cliffside grass tracks and hiking paths over the dales. Campaigners have discovered that the council’s mapping tool has even been thought to include a private farm track and a ford crossing of a river as an available walking route to school. In reality, the ford is passable only by tractor and the track is on private land. One family appealed successfully against the use of the route, but it remains on the council’s mapping system, ready to be used again.

The School Transport Action Group has documented routes that children have been expected to follow, including climbing over metal barriers on the A64 and using paths that cross an active military firing range. I am interested to hear the Minister’s view of whether any of those constitute a “nearest available walked route”, in North Yorkshire council’s words. STAG, which was formed to fight the changes, has done determined and important work in documenting the human and financial cost of the policy. I pay particular tribute to Jo Foster, whose campaigning on the issue has been tireless and has helped bring the national attention that it warrants. STAG puts the situation plainly:

“North Yorkshire Council has lost the plot on home to school transport”,

and I am inclined to agree. More than 1,000 families have been affected, with more than 200 appeals and 20 ombudsman cases in the past year alone. A senior councillor who voted for this very policy has publicly admitted that it contains errors, and some families have been left as losers. This is not a rounding error; it is a clear policy failure.

STAG has completed a survey of families going through the process right now, the class of 2026. The group has 60 responses so far, and the findings are telling: nearly 59% applied to a school because it was their catchment school, more than a third already had siblings there, and 84% live in towns and villages that have a school bus going to their chosen catchment school, yet 73% will not be eligible for free transport. Nearly two thirds of those families have no back-up plan at all.

Some have told STAG what their options look like in practice. One parent said:

“My back-up plan is to leave my job so I can drive my child to school.”

Another said:

“We would have to consider driving, but we both travel with work and it wouldn’t allow us to do our current jobs.”

A single parent wrote:

“I would not be able to work. I am a single parent household.”

One parent captured the particular absurdity of sibling cases:

“I shall have to take extra overtime at work in order to pay for my second child to sit on a bus that my eldest child is already on.”

Those families who plan to buy a paid-for bus pass face a further cruelty. Those passes will not be confirmed until August. They will be subject to availability and can be withdrawn with one week’s notice. The council has made it clear that its intention is to phase out catchment routes entirely, as soon as possible. Families are therefore being asked to plan their working lives around a service that may not exist by the time that their child starts secondary school.

Those are not edge cases; they are predictable, documented consequences of a policy that has stripped the transport system away from the admissions system it is supposed to support. The costs have not disappeared; they have simply been transferred from the council to the rural families who can least afford them. Council officers have described the changes as ensuring “fairness and consistency”, but I will put some individual stories on the record and let Members judge that for themselves.

Leanne lives in a village outside Harrogate. Her daughter has been waiting three and a half years for a diagnosis, but is on the SEN register and has a PDA—pathological demand avoidance—profile with emotional-based school avoidance. There is no public bus through her village and no safe walking route. Leanne’s other child has Down’s syndrome and an education, health and care plan, and cannot travel to school safely alone. Both children need to be at school at the same time; Leanne and her husband both work full time. Under the new policy, they have been denied free transport to the nearest suitable school and are now paying £94 a month for a bus permit. She told me:

“The system is broken and does not take into account personal circumstances or rural villages’ needs.”

I agree with her entirely.

David lives in Upper Wharfedale. Every morning he drives in convoy with his neighbours, following the school bus past his house, because his neighbours qualified under the old policy, but he did not. For him, the bus goes to the nearest primary school, the only school that anyone in the local area has attended for 60 years, along the only safe route available. North Yorkshire council, however, is now saying that his children’s nearest school is Hawes, in Wensleydale. To get there, they would have to cross Fleet Moss, one of the highest and most remote routes in the country, which is treacherous in winter and frequently impassable. David and his family moved to the dales five years ago to run a farm diversification scheme, but they would never have come had this policy been in place then. He has told me that it will be

“the death of these communities, and that’s not hyperbole.”

I believe him.

Sophie, a friend I went to high school and college with, lives in one of the villages straddling multiple local authority boundaries, with a Doncaster postcode, North Yorkshire council oversight, an East Yorkshire postal address and a West Yorkshire phone number. Her children’s primary school cohort has been scattered across four secondary schools, in different local authorities and in four different directions. She made the point with her characteristic directness: it cannot possibly be more cost-effective to fund transport to four separate schools in four different directions than it would be to fund one bus to one school. The policy is not just unfair to families, but undermining the purpose that it is meant to be achieving.

There is also a wider consequence that is often not discussed. One in four small primary schools in North Yorkshire stands to lose pupils because of this policy. Small secondary schools in Settle, Whitby and Boroughbridge face an existential threat. When we hollow out the transport routes that sustain these schools, we do not just inconvenience rural families, but undermine the schools themselves and the rural communities they serve.

I also want to raise the issue facing SEND families specifically, and the additional injustice of a cliff edge at 16. I want to tell this Chamber about Noah, whose mother Catherine has shared his story with me. Noah deferred starting primary school by a year because he was unable to walk. After winning an appeal to attend St John’s, North Yorkshire council offset that deferred year and placed him in year 8. The consequence— I want colleagues to sit with this for a moment—is that Noah will now receive one fewer year of education than his peers, and four years of free transport rather than five because his transport entitlement ends at 16. He has already had more taken from him than other children, through no fault of his own, and the system’s response is to take even more.

Noah cannot walk independently and requires one-to-one support. His taxi to school has become the highlight of his day because it is the one moment where he does not feel dependent on his mum—when he can feel something like freedom. His family have one income, claim universal credit and have little to no savings; they cannot find the money needed to pay the monthly costs for school transport. When Noah turns 18, the assumption is that his mum will simply be able to drive him because she has a Motability vehicle, which will strip away his independence that took so long to build. This is not a bureaucratic edge case; the system does this to families like Noah’s without apology.

That is not an isolated experience. The Public Accounts Committee found that 40% of families with young people with SEND said that they needed to give up work because of transport provision ending when their child turned 16. Colleges report students failing to start courses because transport had not been agreed. I believe that there was an issue across the border in Leeds, where the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has already found the council at fault for its approach to post-16 SEND transport, identifying both individual injustice and systemic failure. However, families continue to report inconsistent decisions, inadequate assessments and personal travel allowances that do not cover the actual costs.

The charity Contact put it clear in evidence to PAC: the policy is simply not working post 16. The change in entitlement can feel like a cliff edge. For families who have spent years building routines and supporting a young person with complex needs, that cliff edge can be devastating for the young person and for every member of their family around them. We cannot have a system that claims to support inclusion and participation while simultaneously pulling the transport that makes participation possible.

I wanted to come along and support the hon. Gentleman in bringing this debate forward. He is a very assiduous MP in this House, whether it be on the Back Benches in the Chamber or leading debates in Westminster Hall, and I want to congratulate him on that. I also add my support to what he is hoping to achieve because, although this is not a responsibility for the Minister—this issue is devolved in Northern Ireland—we have similar problems when it comes to SEND issues, disabled children and road safety. In his quest to have a better system, I wish him well. I hope that, back home in Northern Ireland where it is devolved—the Minister here has no responsibility for it—we will see changes as well.

I thank the hon. Member for his contribution. As ever, he puts his point eloquently and passionately. I agree that, no matter where a SEND child is living in this United Kingdom, they deserve a lot better than they are getting at the moment.

I want to press the Minister on a number of specific points. The single most impactful achievable change that this Government could make is also the simplest. The statutory guidance on home-to-school transport should be updated so that the minimum provision becomes the nearest or catchment school, rather than solely the nearest suitable school. That one change would restore the alignment between admissions and transport that rural families depend on. It would give councils a clear framework and remove the incentive to reinterpret eligibility ever more narrowly. It would protect the community-school relationships that anchor rural life, and it would not even require primary legislation. I urge the Minister to give that serious consideration.

Secondly, I urge the Minister to impress on her colleagues at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government the need to reinstate the rural services delivery grant. The rural premium matters enormously for local authorities such as North Yorkshire, where distances are not a policy choice, but a geographical fact. Cutting that grant has had real consequences for the decisions that local authorities have to make, and those consequences are being borne by families in villages across the dales, across my constituency of Harrogate and Knaresborough, and in North Yorkshire more widely.

On that point, my first ministerial job was as Local Government Minister, and I think that the hon. Member makes an excellent point about the importance of the rural services delivery grant to councils such as North Yorkshire, which incur extra costs in delivering services in rural areas. Does he agree that that is an important aspect of local government finance that needs to be considered when MHCLG is looking at allocations, and that it is particularly important to our rural county of North Yorkshire?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point. It is one of the things on which we absolutely agree. I would like to see all parties and especially the governing party put that problem right. As I said, cutting the grant has had real consequences for the decisions that councils make.

Thirdly, we need to see expansion of the statutory minimum more broadly. The current system, which involves a 2-mile walking distance for primary, 3 miles for secondary and a duty that ends at age 16, was designed for a different era and different pattern of schooling. Where school systems have been reorganised, specialist provision has been concentrated and rural bus networks have been allowed to decline, the statutory floor is no longer fit for purpose.

Fourthly, will the Minister confirm that the Government will make data collection on home-to-school transport mandatory, as the PAC recommended? We cannot improve what we do not measure. Voluntary, inconsistent data collection across more than 100 local authorities is not a sufficient basis on which to run a £2.6 billion spending commitment. The Department needs a proper baseline if it is ever to hold local authorities to account and drive genuine improvement.

Home-to-school transport is not a niche issue. It sits at the intersection of SEND, rural sustainability, school attendance, the cost of living and the long-term viability of rural communities. In rural England, school buses are not a luxury, but essential infrastructure. Families across rural communities such as those in North Yorkshire are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for a system that works, keeps their children safe, keeps them in school and does not price them out of the education to which they are legally entitled. There should not be a rural tax on education. That is not too much to ask, and I hope the Minister agrees.

I remind Members to bob if they wish to be called to speak in the debate.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. Massive congratulations to the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing the debate. This issue matters to so many people around the country.

My constituency is a coastal community, but also very rural in parts. Many of the issues raised by the hon. Member apply directly to Sittingbourne and Sheppey. A notable issue is the recent school allocations in the east of the island of Sheppey that sent people what on paper was a few miles, as the crow flies, but given that it is an island, there is an enormous body of water in the way, and as the Harty ferry from Harty island went many decades ago, it was never going to happen—unless the kids were really good at swimming. They are being sent on a more-than-two-hour journey by public transport, often on snarled-up roads, and we have terrible bus services, like so many rural areas.

However, I want to focus on the issues for children with special educational needs and disabilities and particularly those aged 16 and older. Kent county council has recently changed the criteria that allow people to opt for school transport to their education and has now made it all but impossible for people with special educational needs to secure transport. In fact, more than 50 families have written to me about this in just the last couple of months, since it was announced that the policy was being changed.

Some of the stories that I hear are heartbreaking. Anthony is one young lad. He is 17 years old and non-verbal. He is attending sixth form at the moment. Although he is mobile on his feet, he needs a lot of help with his day-to-day care: his toileting—the ability to toilet—but also his interaction with people if they are on public transport. In fact, he would always need to be chaperoned, which is not something that can now be afforded in this system. That puts him at risk and puts the public at risk as well. He is distraught—visibly so—and his mother is distraught at the fact that now he may be unable to access schools and complete his education. He is just one example of many. They have been through the appeals process, trying to get that overturned, and it is really opaque. When I have written to people at the county council to try to find out what the process is and what the criteria are for challenging these decisions—for Anthony and many other children in this situation—I am told that it is a case of exceptional circumstances only, but then they struggle to define what exceptional circumstances are. As we burrow through this, we find that in the end there is an absolute veto in terms of their local policies, which frankly, to my mind, just means that they can make it up as they see fit. There is no real guidance as to what is and is not possible.

Anthony is not the only one. One of my near neighbours in Sittingbourne is Mason. I went to see him. He is a young lad of 16 with cerebral palsy. He has a fantastic wheelchair. It is a big chunky piece of kit that he requires to get around on. He is having a great time in sixth form at the moment, but from September that is not going to happen, because although nominally some funding has been allocated to him, it is not enough to hire transport. More to the point, when his parents have gone round looking for available transport in the area and have phoned up all nine of the local cab companies in Sittingbourne, not one of them has an adapted vehicle. To the point made about how transport impacts parents and other members of the family, Mason’s father drives their adapted vehicle to work and so is unable to use it to take him to school. Mason’s mother does not drive and has to take their daughter to a different school and get to work herself. One of those two parents is now under pressure to give up work in order to protect Mason’s education, which is going to be vital. This is a lad who could absolutely thrive as an adult if he can get through the key stages.

We know a lot of people with SEND need to go through the later stages in education all the way up to 25 to give them the life skills and ability to interact with other people, and a degree of independence that means people like Mason and other children who are affected can get into work and employment, which we know is one of the Government’s key aims. In a constituency like mine, with particularly high levels of young people not earning or learning, the impact is felt ever further. There are other stories where people have gone through the appeals process. It is a very intrusive process pushed down on people where members of the extended family—uncles and aunts, near friends and quite distant members of the family—are all asked to give a reason why they cannot take the children to school. In one case, members of a family who live in Cornwall were asked to account for why they could not take the child to school, when, of course, my constituency is in Kent. Unless there is a rapid way of travelling, I do not think that is very likely. It is not very plausible and it just speaks to how the whole process is not coherent—and I am being very polite.

The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who is not here, as he often isn’t, came to Kent soon after the election to give his opinion and to tell the Reform administration what he thought should happen. He was very clear. He said it was an enormous waste to spend money on getting kids to school. In fact, he said:

“There are things called parents who for as long as modern times remember have had the aggravation of getting their kids to school.”

That is a very characteristic turn of phrase from him. This is the modern world, not the 1950s or the 1850s. Transport is very complicated and we have a very different relationship with people with disabilities. I think particularly of families in which both parents are working. It really feeds into everything that is happening in Kent under its Reform administration. The leader of the Reform council said that breakfast clubs are a disaster because parents should be feeding their children. The trouble is, when I spoke to the county council to try to get clarity about what the criteria are, it pushed it back on the national Government and said that there is no tight guidance.

In line with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, who secured the debate, I ask the Minister what we can do nationally to ensure that local authorities deliver what we want as a national policy: getting people into education, work or training, and making sure that everyone has access to a full and vibrant life. Is there a way of updating the statutory guidance for local authorities to include funding for transport for young people who need post-16 SEND transport? We need to get that in black and white so that local authorities have to consider it and cannot flim-flam away in the way that Kent county council has. That is my main ask.

I advise Members that if they refer to Members who are not here, they should have let them know beforehand.

As I have said to those on the Front Bench, I am unable to stay until the end of the debate, for which I apologise to you, Mr Twigg, and to colleagues. I commend the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing the debate.

I am delighted that we have such an influential member of the Labour party here on the Front Bench—the Minister for School Standards, the hon. Member for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale (Georgia Gould)—because we cannot have this debate without mentioning the context of what this Labour Government are doing to rural areas. We have had the family farm tax, intolerable rate increases on pubs and hospitality businesses, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 hammering the ability of businesses, particularly those in rural areas, to take on young people. We have had the business inheritance tax issue, which causes huge problems for the continued success of many family businesses in rural areas, including in North Yorkshire. We are seeing policies of micro- managing moorland from Whitehall, rather than allowing long-term landowners to care for it as they have for generations. In North Yorkshire, we have a particular issue with the Labour mayor, who is looking to impose an overnight tourism tax, which will cause businesses more problems. He is also taking a greater portion than the Government wanted to give him for roads in York rather than across North Yorkshire.

The context is that Labour is hitting rural areas incredibly hard. I know the Minister is a fair person—she is on a very short journey to greater and more senior things in this Government. Though I disagree with them, the Government need to be a success. I urge her: please start thinking about rural areas across policies. We heard about the work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak)—the former Prime Minister, Chancellor and Minister for Local Government—did to protect rural areas with the rural services grant. That has been taken away, as has the fairer funding formula. North Yorkshire council is running a £42.5 million recurring deficit. That is the context out of which many of the things raised in this debate are coming.

North Yorkshire council has been forced to move to a policy of nearest local school, rather than the much more generous policy that it had before. We are one of the most rural parts—if not, the most rural part—of England, but in order to be fair to other taxpayers and the services it looks after, this was the only position it could take. On a lightly political point, the Lib-Dem-led Westmorland and Furness council is having to look at this, as is Oxfordshire county council—everybody is facing these challenges.

I will not talk about SEND travel today, but a big issue in my inbox—as in that of the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough—is from parents who accept that things have to change, but who have seen anomalies impacting their kids and their ability to get their kids to school. For example, in Skipton and Ripon, there are selective and comprehensive schools either on the same road or very near one another. If kids are at the wrong end of town, they can be selected for one of those schools, particularly the selective schools, but are then unable to get free school transport because of the designated nearest school policy. In Settle and Upper Wharfedale, and other schools in the heart of the dales, feeder schools are needed to keep their numbers up. They have historical links with primary schools in Bentham, Ingleton and other parts of my constituency, but those kids are now being sent outwith North Yorkshire, into Lancashire and other counties.

My right hon. Friend, who is my dear friend and constituency neighbour, is making an excellent speech. He talks about families in the dales. I am sure that he agrees that families in the upper dales and Swaledale have been acutely impacted by this policy. He knows the geography well; families are also now being directed to schools in Kirkby Stephen or Barnard Castle, and getting there requires passage on minor, single- track roads through high moorland—roads that are often unpassable and unsafe in the winter months.

The situation has obviously caused concern for the families involved. They are being very well represented by Councillor Yvonne Peacock. I join her in urging the council—it has to make difficult decisions, and my right hon. Friend was right to point out the climate in which it is operating—as it looks to refine and review this policy using the discretionary powers that Government guidance allows it, to think about the particular geography of Swaledale, the impact of weather on these roads and whether it is right for these children to be going to those schools. Often, they are having their education disrupted or travelling on unsafe routes.

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. We have talked about Settle college, which is threatened by kids going outwith the constituency and is worried about its numbers, but in the upper dales, too—we heard about the Thomases and others in Oughtershaw—children have to go over the top into Richmondshire or to Settle college, which is much further away than Upper Wharfedale school. The impact is that historical links between communities and villages, and between primaries and secondaries, are being broken, and these schools are vulnerable to tiny changes in rolls from year to year. I urge the Minister to reflect on the fact that many of us have fought to keep some of these schools open, and this policy really is having a negative effect. There are issues with the siblings policy, whereby the school attended by a sibling is no longer taken into account. I hope that this and other examples will be considered as North Yorkshire completes its review and considers its post-implementation procedures.

We heard the proposal from the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough to look again at the definition of a local school and at the rural services grant. I think we need an emergency brake to ensure that Settle, Upper Wharfedale and other vulnerable schools are protected, and that one policy—in North Yorkshire or other counties—does not undermine schools. Parents also want to understand the opportunities for voluntary contributions. That interacts with commercial bus services; what are the options there? Above all, there is a need to look at the appeals process. Is the Department for Transport allowed to look at cases? In the case of Oughtershaw, it is just impossible to get over to the recommended school in winter; the Department had not really done an assessment of that.

It came to my attention that a freedom of information request to North Yorkshire council uncovered emails that suggested that the Conservative leader of the council was suggesting that there should not be more than one Liberal Democrat sitting on any of the council’s appeal panels. Does the right hon. Member agree that we need full transparency to understand what has been going on there and how the council might have been looking to fix who sits on those appeal panels?

Well, I thank the hon. Member for that point. [Laughter.] All I would say is that, knowing the personalities involved and their integrity, I think North Yorkshire council has been grappling with a difficult challenge. It accepts that there will have to be changes. It is key that we move forward, and a way to do that is to ask whether there can be a more empathetic approach to appeals and whether North Yorkshire can look at some of the points that the hon. Member and others have made about the fact that we are such a sparse area and need some changes. Ultimately, though, this falls on the Government. Although a small increase in home-to-school funding was earmarked in the previous local government funding settlement, it did not reach the need and the amount of money that North Yorkshire spends. We really need the Government to look at the specific needs of rural education, and to look again at how to assess sparsity and rural factors, in this and every other policy they have a part in.

Time is moving on, so before I call the next speaker, I kindly suggest that Members keep their speeches to about six minutes so that we can get everybody in with a similar amount of time.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this debate. I will focus my remarks on home-to-school transport for SEND children and young people, as I know others will talk about other aspects of the home-to-school transport system.

The home-to-school transport system for SEND children and young people is a good lens through which to view how parts of the SEND system in general do not really communicate with one another. There is currently a statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with additional needs who need to travel to a place of learning that is not within walking distance or is not their local place of education. However, the way that is applied often leads to rather negative outcomes for these children.

There are obviously financial constraints on local authorities, which are obliged to provide home-to-school transport, and that often leads them to going with the lowest possible bid from a company that can provide it. A number of home-to-school transport companies market themselves as “specialists”. In reality, however, their staff have minimal specialist training, which often consists only of how to correctly load and unload a wheelchair, and the vehicles are often highly unsuitable for transporting children with special educational needs—sometimes it might just be a taxi. Obligations are placed on parents, who can be deeply worried about putting their child in a car with an unfamiliar person, particularly if that child is non-verbal or has communication difficulties. Safeguarding concerns often come to the fore.

There also does not appear to be a great deal of monitoring or holding of companies to account for the service that they provide. Parents in my constituency tell me that their home-to-school transport turns up late or fails to turn up at all, and that getting replacement drivers or assistance for their children is a regular occurrence. One parent said that if they were taking their child to school and regularly dropped them off half an hour late, the school would have something to say about it. Indeed, schools quite often like to send messages out to parents—as they should—to remind them of the importance of punctuality and being at school on time. Lateness has a huge knock-on effect for children and young people. Disabled children are often at a disadvantage to their peers to begin with, and if a child needs a routine in their day and to begin their day in a certain way, constantly turning up late to class and having to be signed in at the office can put a real dampener on their day.

The costs of home-to-school transport have been increasing for some time, and I believe it is projected that they will continue to increase. The Minister will probably speak about how the SEND reforms will go some way to address that. The County Councils Network, among others, has called for the Government to consider means-testing home-to-school transport for disabled children. It highlighted cases where councils were sending transport to pick children up to travel sometimes for upwards of an hour and a half each day and claimed that that was unsustainable. To be clear, we do not means- test education for anyone in this country, and I do not believe that parents who happen to have a disabled child should be treated any differently here.

There is a hidden cost of having a disabled child that an income-based means test would not take into account, as has been pointed out by Contact, the charity for disabled children and their families. Often, a child has to travel a long distance to go to a school that meets their needs because the system has catastrophically failed to meet their needs any closer to home. That failure usually lands squarely at the door of the local authority, which attempts to dodge having to pay for it by means-testing and putting the onus back on parents. It is reprehensible that a system that has failed to provide an education, failed to intervene early enough to stop issues escalating, and failed to find somewhere suitable to educate someone close to their home tries to make parents pay for the privilege of sending their child to a special educational needs establishment a long distance away. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that there are no plans to introduce means testing of parents of special educational needs and disabled children for home-to-school transport.

I will touch briefly on another aspect of the system that probably could do with changing. The statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with SEND currently covers those between five and 16 and those between 19 and 25. That leaves ages nought to five not covered—in some cases, children begin school at age four, which leaves a year-long gap during which the parent has to take them to school until the duty kicks in when the child turns five—and a gap between 16 and 19, where it seems that legislation has not kept pace. We acknowledge that some people require additional education until age 25, but we do not have the statutory cover for them to receive transport to get to a place of education.

I will leave it there, as I think I have gone over my six minutes.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing the debate. Members will be pleased to know that my speech will be under six minutes, so we will have brought that time back.

I want to speak about home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities and in particular about Lewis—that is not his real name, but he is a real Eastbourne boy with special educational needs. What happened to Lewis should never happen to any child. Lewis was physically restrained, relentlessly and brutally, by his passenger assistant on his home-to-school transport. His mum only found out when he came home that evening visibly distressed and bruised. She had not been told. That is because, shockingly, there is no statutory requirement to report incidents of physical restraint on home-to-school transport. We only know the specifics of what happened from looking at it, because it was captured on CCTV in the vehicle, and it was only captured because Eastbourne borough council—coincidentally, when I was a councillor—pushed for mandatory CCTV in cabs that facilitate home-to-school transport.

I raised Lewis’s case at Education questions last April and secured a meeting with the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who acknowledged that there is a clear gap in regulation. When I raised the issue again at Prime Minister’s questions in November the Prime Minister looked into the eyes of Lewis’s mum, who was in the Public Gallery, and said that the principle of safety and tailored support for every child would be “central” to his SEND reforms. I am asking, and Lewis and his mum are asking, why the issue was not addressed in those reforms. Why was that gap in regulation not filled?

The Challenging Behaviour Foundation, which does lots of amazing work and research in this area, has set out exactly what is needed. It has rightly said that we need national training standards for all staff on home-to-school transport—something that does not exist now but could have helped Lewis. We also need a statutory duty to record and report to parents any use of restraint on home-to-school transport. That duty exists in school settings, but the situation is patchy for home-to-school transport. The Challenging Behaviour Foundation has rightly said that stronger safeguarding guidance, linked to “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, is required.

Those are not complex or costly asks. They are nowhere near as complex or costly on a human level as the trauma that Lewis has experienced and the anguish that his family have been through.

The hon. Member is making an excellent point. I hope he will forgive me for adding another ask to his list. In assistance and drivers for home-to-school transport for disabled children—particularly those who have autism or neurodiversity—consistency is key. Does he agree that best practice guidance, setting out things such as consistency and the three points that he has made, would be very welcome?

I completely agree. My little brother is autistic so, as a family, we see up close how important consistency is and how disrupting the consistency of a particular service can be hugely disruptive to the flow of his life. The same goes for many others with special educational needs and disabilities, so I would absolutely add that ask. I hope that the Minister can address it in her winding-up speech.

Those four points are the minimum that Lewis and every SEND child travelling to school deserves. I hope that the Minister will meet me and Lewis’s mum to discuss this issue further—things fell through the cracks with the change of Minister at the last reshuffle—so that we can finally get closer to delivering on the promise that the Prime Minister made.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this important debate.

Connection and mobility are key to a social, happy and healthy society—and, as we are hearing, an educated one. The ability to build networks, reach community and simply get where we need to go matters, and it matters most in the early years of a child’s development. It councils’ responsibility to ensure that money allocated is properly spent, but it is Government’s responsibility to ensure that councils have adequate funding, including for home-to-school transport. That funding is provided through recurrent general funding allocations, and the Government must make absolutely certain that their funding formula matches local needs. When it does not, families and communities pay the price.

I have a local example of exactly that. When Ancells Farm, a housing development in my North East Hampshire constituency, was built with the promise of a local primary school, families moved there in good faith. That school was never built. However, as part of a new arrangement, Hampshire county council promised a free bus to take children to their catchment school. That promise, too, has now been broken. What exists today is a bus service restricted solely to eligible students, with no spare seat capacity whatsoever. The decision to reduce the bus size, removing additional seats that parents were not only willing but actively prepared to pay for, has had real and serious consequences. It is the subject of a stage 3 complaint with Hampshire county council and has been referred to the ombudsman, but while complaints work their way through the bureaucratic channels, families are struggling today.

Let me be specific about what that looks like. I am all in favour of children walking to school whenever practical and possible. Parents are doing the school run twice a day, every day. Even by car, that is still time taken away from work. For those in paid-hourly or shift-based employment, it means hours lost, and hours lost mean money lost. For those in salaried roles, it means arriving late, leaving early or relying on the good will of employers, which cannot be taken for granted indefinitely. Some parents have had to reduce their working hours; others have had to turn down responsibilities or opportunities at work. Those ripple effects reach into every corner of family life. Less income means less financial resilience. It means fewer after-school clubs, fewer activities and fewer of the enriching experiences that support a child’s development and wellbeing. The broken promise of a bus is not just an inconvenience.

For the parents who do not drive, the situation is simply unworkable. The walk to the catchment primary school is 2.4 miles according to Google Maps—other maps are available—which is 54 minutes on foot. For a five-year-old, it would take considerably longer, as I am sure we can all imagine. For a parent doing the round trip twice—there and back in the morning, and again at the end of the day—that is close to four hours of walking every single school day. Those are four hours that cannot be spent working, caring for other children, managing a home or doing any of the other things that family life demands.

The route crosses the railway station entrance with no pedestrian crossing, and runs along the town’s busiest roads at rush hour. Parents have raised serious concerns about its safety. They have paid out of their own pockets for an independent safety assessment, which has identified real hazards, while Hampshire county council has refused to conduct a safety assessment of its own. One school is 10 minutes closer, which is not nothing for a young child, but it is not in catchment, and there is no public bus as an alternative because rural bus services, even in semi-rural commuter towns, have been cut.

Let me turn briefly to the law, because it is instructive. The Government’s own guidance on free school transport sets out clearly how children qualify. Rightly, they qualify if they cannot walk to school because of special educational needs, disability or mobility problems. They qualify when there is no safe walking route, but if the council refuses to undertake a sufficient assessment, who decides what is and is not safe? They qualify if the school is more than 2 miles away and they are under eight, or if the school is more than 3 miles away and they are eight or older. That often leaves families in the ridiculous situation of having to walk an eight-year-old to school while their seven-year-old is on the bus.

It is arguable that, for families on Ancells Farm, every single one of those criteria is met for every child in one way or another, yet parents have been fighting for years to keep the bus service going. We must consider what more the Government can do to ensure that local authorities are adequately funded and meeting their statutory duties towards the children in their care. I urge the Minister to consider what families are facing in Ancells and elsewhere across the country.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship in this important debate, Mr Twigg. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing this debate and for the way he introduced it and shared his constituents’ stories. Our constituencies are very different, but the stories I heard were very familiar. The thread running through them is that children who are reliant on home-to-school transport are often failed.

For another 10 months, my Woking constituents will be served by Surrey county council, and that is a real challenge for them. I have called many times for the children’s services at that council to be investigated and put into special measures, and home-to-school transport is another area in which I think the council lets people down. Surrey has third biggest local authority spend—at the last count, it spent more than £65 million in one year—on home-to-school transport, and it regularly overspends. The vast majority of that money is spent on home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs. Last year, The Daily Telegraph said that

“Workers in Surrey have been left unable to book a taxi first thing in the morning because firms are too busy ferrying pupils to…schools”.

On top of that, I speak to many parents and carers in Woking who are struggling and fighting to get the home- to-school transport that their children need. No one is happy with the system; it is not working for anyone, be they parents, carers, taxpayers or the wider community. It is broken, particularly in Surrey, where the county council has not invested enough in SEND school places. That means that the school places available for SEND children in Woking are often far away, making home-to-school transport absolutely essential. If we had capital investment—an invest-to-save approach—to build more SEND school places, the bill for home-to-school transport could be reduced and the quality of life for my young constituents would improve. Surrey county council is not doing that, and I think that is disgusting.

A young male constituent of mine, who is in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy and suffers from epilepsy, was given an education place 25 miles away from his home. He had to leave my constituency and go through the next constituency, through the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer), and then into another. The county council did not think that that journey merited home-to-school transport; it said that the child was on their own. That decision was absolutely appalling, but thankfully it was reversed.

My county council has also tried to suggest that children should travel on inappropriate routes so that it can avoid providing home-to-school transport. One young girl was told to walk down a narrow country lane, with no streetlights and no pavement, to ensure that she would not qualify for home-to-school transport. Yet again, we got the right decision via tribunal, following complaints from my office, but parents should not have to fight time and again to get what they are entitled to.

I therefore echo the calls from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, especially for a joined-up approach to school places and home-to-school transport. He talked a lot about the challenges for home-to-school transport in rural areas. I agree that the rural services delivery grant was important, and it is sad that it has gone. Surrey is the fifth most congested place in the country, so there are other challenges in my Woking constituency. Having a home-to-school transport system in a congested county is a real challenge.

Another issue that I have raised before is safeguarding. I have led Westminster Hall debates about safeguarding, following the appalling abuse, torture and murder of my 10-year-old constituent, Sara Sharif. That case has huge implications for local authorities and children’s services—I will not repeat those now—but it also has a significant impact on home-to-school transport. Sara’s father and murderer was a licensed taxi driver. He was employed by the county council to support vulnerable children with home-to-school transport. Even though, from day one in her life, the council knew that Sara was at risk from her father, it did not give that information to the taxi licensing team or the home-to-school transport team.

I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde). I was there when he raised this issue at Education questions and at Prime Minister’s questions. There are clearly safeguarding issues, and I urge the Minister to meet me so that we can improve the situation. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 made notable improvements on data sharing, but I do not believe it goes far enough to have stopped what happened in Surrey.

I hope this debate forces the Government to review home-to-school transport and reassure constituents that services will not be taken away from them. I believe that we can deliver better value for money and the better service that young people deserve.

The Front Benchers will have roughly 10 minutes each.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this incredibly important debate and on setting out this deeply concerning issue eloquently and passionately. It does not affect his constituency alone; as we have heard from right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, it is an issue right across the country, from Yorkshire right the way down to Kent and Sussex, and everywhere in between.

It feels a bit basic and obvious to say this, but it bears repeating: every child deserves to be able to get to school. There is a legal requirement to educate our children, and their ability to get there is a fairly basic right. They also deserve to get to school safely, efficiently and on time, yet the shocking stories that we have heard from around the country show just how hard that is for far too many children. The fact that the changes in Yorkshire mean that parents are being charged almost £900 for bus passes is, frankly, ridiculous.

Sadly, those stories are symptoms of wider failures by a number of Administrations to consider the needs of rural communities and SEND families. As a London MP and a born-and-bred London girl, both of whose children walk fewer than 10 minutes to get to their primary and secondary schools, I hesitate to talk about rural communities, but I hear from colleagues in my party and others about the real challenges of getting to school in rural communities. I have seen that when I have been on visits to Shropshire and talked to families and schoolteachers.

Under the last Conservative Government, bus services withered. Between 2015 and 2023, the number of local passenger journeys fell by a quarter—1 billion trips—and many routes were scrapped altogether. We have heard today about the Public Accounts Committee’s recent report on SEND home-to-school transport, which highlighted the ongoing decline of bus services, particularly in rural areas. It notes:

“Better local transport options…would reduce home to school transport costs”.

I will address the soaring costs that local authorities face when it comes to home-to-school transport, but I will first take a moment to focus on the fact that it is the most vulnerable in society who are impacted by poor transport provision. I find it somewhat surprising that the Department for Education seems to have little interest in what transport looks like for those who use it. As we have heard, it does not collect clear data about who receives home-to-school transport or whether it is reaching those in need.

As we have heard from Members from both sides of the House, children are being made to feel that their education does not matter because of where they live. They miss after-school clubs and activities and are made to walk on unsafe roads, often in the dark before school starts. As we have heard very clearly from some case studies today, parents are forced to sacrifice their time and income to drive their children to school, all because a computer said no—because of the rules that have been put in place by their local authorities. Grandparents or other extended family members are forced to go out of their way and step up when no one else is able to—although, as the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) pointed out, Cornwall to Kent seems rather extreme and pushing it somewhat.

There is, however, a larger underlying issue here. We have seen the costs of home-to-school transport soar alongside the need for SEND provision. While the Government have made the welcome move of committing to write off local authorities’ historic SEND deficits, that, sadly, does not extend to transport costs. My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I have been urging the Government to exempt SEND transport operators from the Government’s national insurance contribution increases to curb further cost increases.

I hope the Minister will address that issue in her response today and will set out what the DFE is doing to address it now. Pushing it into the reforms that we have seen announced, which we know are going to take years to implement, will be too slow to address this particular issue.

The cancellation of a number of planned special schools around the country does not help this situation. I strongly urge the Minister to revisit and reverse the cancellation of planned special schools. As I think my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) said, if the specialist provision was closer to home, we would not need to spend quite so much on home-to-school transport.

I have been campaigning since before I was elected to get the special school for autism in Bilton Woodfield reopened. The situation has now been dragging on for years. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to see North Yorkshire council, the trust that has now been appointed and the DFE work together to get that open on time for this September?

I 100% agree that they need to crack on as soon as possible.

The challenge we had with the Government announcements before Christmas was that some local authorities were given the option to crack on with the special school or be given money instead. From talking to councillors on the ground who went for the money, I know that it is not going to be anywhere close to what they need to cover the provision that they were looking for, but they felt kind of forced to take that option.

I am really worried about what these announcements will mean for the continued ferrying of children with special educational needs and disabilities very far away from home. Parents of children with SEND battle against the system enough as it is. It seems really unfair that they are now being made to choose between the right school for their child, but not being able to get them there without further sacrificing time and income, and getting their child to a school, but not one that can actually provide the right support.

A number of hon. Members have today highlighted the cliff edge in transport provision for students over 16 both with and without SEND. Local authorities do not have a duty to provide a universal transport system after the age of 16. For young people with SEND, their access to education is at the discretion of their local authority. Given what we have heard about financial pressures, it is sadly no surprise that young people with SEND are around 80% more likely to not be in education, employment or training than the average student.

The Public Accounts Committee has said:

“the Department appears unconcerned about the clarity of offering for this age group or the impact that losing transport at 16 may have.”

My hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), who cannot be here today, told me that the cost of a Stagecoach South West termrider increased in September 2025 from £238 per term to £444 per term. Sixth-form students who are not entitled to free transport are being forced to pay more than £1,300 per academic year to access education. I want to be clear with the Minister that the increase was due to the rise in national insurance contributions, which meant that, over and above all the other inflationary cost pressures faced by the company, like many others, it needed to generate an additional £3,500 per year per vehicle to make ends meet.

In the light of the Milburn report published last week and the shocking numbers of young people not in education, employment or training, it is deeply disappointing that the Government’s policy on national insurance has exacerbated the problem. Like me, the Minister is a London MP. We are very fortunate that our 16 to 18-year-olds have free transport to be able to get to college and education, so this is not an issue for our constituents, but it is shocking to read those numbers for residents in other parts of the country.

I understand that local authorities are under immense financial pressure. As was rightly said by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), who is no longer in his place, home-to-school transport is a problem for all political colours, right across the country. Sadly, the policy on national insurance has made the problem worse. I hope that the Minister will consider the exemption I called for, and I echo the request made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough for the Government to review and update national guidance on home-to-school transport. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) for the passion with which he has campaigned for his constituent in the terrible case of Lewis. I urge the Government to look at safeguarding standards for home-to-school transport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing this important debate, and hon. Members across the House for their thoughtful contributions. When introducing the debate, the hon. Gentleman rightly advocated for his constituents, talking primarily about North Yorkshire. Although he left in some political barbs about his Conservative-controlled local council, he, like the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), had the decency to recognise that the problem is not local, but is faced by all counties and councils.

My right hon. Friends the Members for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) and for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) highlighted the scale of the challenge in North Yorkshire, which is now the highest spending local authority in the country, at £52.5 million a year. When talking about North Yorkshire specifically, we must consider the context of the council having one of the worst outcomes in the country from the Government’s so-called “fair” funding review, as well as losing the rural services delivery grant. I am afraid to say that this Government have whacked rural areas quite broadly. Honestly, it is felt on the Opposition Benches that that takes a partisan flavour.

The hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) made a fluid and passionate speech. I am not familiar with the geography of his part of Kent, but it is clearly not sensible for councils not to take into account where bodies of water are—obviously, that is utterly ridiculous. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) said that the failure of local authorities to build spaces locally is upstream of this issue, and that building places locally where children and parents want them would help remedy the problem.

The speech from the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) was one of the more moving contributions to the debate. He articulated the story of Lewis, which is disgraceful. I hope that in the Minister’s response, she will assure the hon. Gentleman that he will get the changes that he is campaigning for. The hon. Members for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) and for Woking (Mr Forster) talked about the necessity of safe walking routes to school. Often, councils mark their own homework in determining that, so I would be interested to hear how the Minister might be able to hold councils to account on upholding their statutory obligation.

In this country, legislation is intended to ensure that no child is prevented from accessing education due to lack of transportation, which all hon. Members here support. However, the reality is that growing demand and spiralling costs are causing councils to question the sustainability of their current policies. An estimated 520,000 pupils use local authority-funded home-to-school transport, which cost councils a staggering £2.3 billion in 2023-24—a 70% real-terms increase on the cost in 2015-16. Of that money, £1.2 billion was spent on transporting under-16s with special educational needs to school—a figure that has gone up by 106% in real terms since 2015.

Home-to-school transport is about more than just getting children to school. The Public Accounts Committee found through its evidence gathering that for many children and young people, home-to-school transport is also about gaining a sense of independence, building their confidence and preparing for life beyond school; I know from speaking to my constituents that it is also relied on by parents so that they can go to work. However, the figures show that the rising cost of home-to-school transport is placing significant financial burdens on councils, which, they warn, is making delivery of their statutory obligations increasingly unsustainable.

If meeting statutory obligations is becoming an increasing challenge, the non-statutory things that make our communities what they are all get squeezed. We also know that local authorities are consistently spending more on home-to-school transport than they have budgeted. In my time in the cabinet of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the mid-2010s, the home-to-school transport budget was one that continually popped out with significant pressures. I know that it is many magnitudes different today.

We have to look at how we can make home-to-school transport more sustainable for the future. We have had many discussions in this House about the pressure on the SEND system more broadly. While many questions remain, it is right that the Government are talking about reform. Children deserve the right support, and parents want a system that works for them and not against them. As Members have highlighted, the huge increase in the number of children with EHCPs, which went up by 166% between January 2015 and January 2025, has had a knock-on impact on demand for home-to-school transport.

The National Audit Office estimates that around a third of pupils with EHCPs attend special schools. As those schools tend to serve broader geographical areas, it is more likely that their pupils will live beyond a statutory walking distance and therefore qualify for transport. A survey conducted by the Local Government Association suggests that the average cost per child of providing SEND transport is now nearly £9,000 per year. That is almost triple the average cost of providing mainstream transport, which is just over £3,000 per child.

Effective SEND reform is essential if councils are going to be able to sustain school transport services for those who rightly require them. For SEND children, the Education Secretary has said that the Government will

“respond to the challenges that local authorities are facing with home-to-school transport…by improving provision closer to home.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2026; Vol. 781, c. 75.]

That is welcome in principle. However, we know that implementing that scale of reform will take a substantial amount of time. The bulk of the reforms will not be introduced until 2029 at the earliest. Local authorities and children who rely on their services need help now, not in three or four more years.

In some instances, I am afraid to say that we are actually going backwards. In my own constituency, the much-needed Chiltern Way Academy Trust, a 100-place specialist school that was promised for west Windsor, was withdrawn from the Government’s free school programme. Instead, £5.4 million of additional high needs capital funding was offered and accepted by the Liberal Democrat-controlled royal borough. In my view, that is a deeply disappointing short-termist decision. I am sure that is a story replicated across many constituencies across the country.

What are the Government are doing now to help local authorities cut the ballooning cost of home-to-school transport in the immediate term? What specific assessment has the Minister’s Department conducted of the longer-term impact of SEND reforms on the cost of home-to-school transport? The Public Accounts Committee has warned that plans to write off 90% of the historic deficit from overspend on SEND

“fail to take into account burgeoning home to school transport costs.”

I implore the Minister to urgently clarify what those funding arrangements will actually mean for home-to-school transport cost pressures.

It is also worth highlighting that school places nearer to home could go a long way towards supporting young people to build their independence as they move into adulthood. While independent travel is not possible for everyone, it is right that the Government make every effort to support those who could use public transport to start building experiences while they are in school. The Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport found that travel experience from daily to-and-from school transport could help children to become independent and use public transport. In some cases, helping children gain the tools that they will need is what true support might look like.

Rather than launching attacks on individual councils for decisions to align their policies with DFE guidance and address rising, unsustainable financial pressures, we need to look at how we can support all councils to manage those pressures and make home-to-school transport sustainable for the future. That is not just an issue facing a handful of councils. The spiralling cost of home-to-school transport is a nationwide issue, and without urgent action from the Government, those pressures will only continue to grow.

I ask the Minister to leave a few minutes at the end for the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) to wind up.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I thank all Members for an incredibly constructive and thoughtful discussion. It was particularly powerful that so many Members brought the lived experience of their constituents and some of the challenges that they face with home-to-school transport to the Chamber. I welcome the visibility given to those stories.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this important debate. His passion for and commitment to this subject came across in his speech, as did the fact that he has been an avid campaigner who has widely engaged with families. We have heard today why this is such an important issue.

We also heard why the support that is available through home-to-school transport matters to families. It is the mechanism through which many disadvantaged families, many children in rural communities and many young people with SEND are able to access education. We heard how the existing statutory rights are incredibly important.

In addition, we heard about the particular challenges faced by rural communities, where the distances are greater and home-to-school transport costs are higher. That is why the Government made changes as part of a fair funding review, which included a distinct home-to-school transport relative needs formula, based on pupil numbers and home-to-school distances. The focus on distance deliberately supports those authorities with the longest distances and recognises the needs of rural communities.

We heard about the statutory guidance and about the discretionary opportunities available to local authorities. Local authorities have a discretionary power to arrange free travel for children who do not meet the eligibility criteria, in recognition of specific local factors. We have heard about some of the challenges that areas face, and local authorities are best placed to make those decisions.

We heard from the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough about the importance of data, and about the data that the Department holds, in holding local authorities to account. We have added a new absence code to reflect issues with local authority-arranged transport. Since September 2025, local authorities have been able to evaluate absences that are the result of home-to-school transport. Just 0.011% of the total number of school sessions that are missed is due to such transport; for special schools, the percentage is higher. That is really important data. Of course, any missed school session is one too many. Data helps with accountability, but I understand that the hon. Gentleman was referencing wider data and I would be very happy to have a follow-up conversation about that.

We also heard from many other Members about the interaction between SEND and disabilities, and about the increase that we have seen in the need for home-to-school transport for children and young people with SEND. As I have engaged with children around the country, that is something that I have heard time and again. Sometimes, children have to spend up to two hours on transport to access education. For some children who sometimes have issues regulating and who can find change disruptive, as well as for their families, that can be an incredibly distressing experience, despite the best efforts of the providers.

This also disconnects children from their communities. I always remember speaking to an 18-year-old who travelled a long distance to school every day. He said that when he returned to his community, he did not have friends or networks within it, so he felt very isolated going into adulthood. It is therefore incredibly important that children have access to SEND provision locally and closer to home, and Members today have agreed with that. Improving home-to-school transport is core to the SEND reforms.

The hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin), who spoke for the Opposition, rightly challenged me on how we can move as quickly as possible to deliver such improvement. As he knows, we are investing £3.7 billion into 60,000 new places. That investment has gone in last year and this year, so it is going into communities urgently to help them to address those challenges.

We are supporting a large number of free schools to go forward. As we have heard, some local authorities have chosen to use their share of that investment to move faster in providing new places, at a cost of around £50,000 per place. The development of new places is critical, but it is also critical to make schools more inclusive for students—everything from improving school buildings and teaching—to develop the expertise around schools, so that local schools are accessible for children with SEND and every area has the right specialist provision available.

This investment will transform children’s outcomes; it not only reduces travel time but, as we have heard, saves money, which is also important. And the money that is saved can go back into improving outcomes for children in some of the really critical issues that have been raised during this debate.

We also heard a number of Members talk about support for young people post 16. There was a particularly powerful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) on the topic.

At the moment, local authorities have a statutory duty to make sure no young person is prevented from attending education post 16 because of a lack of transport. Local authorities must publish annual transport statements on this, and it is expected that local authorities will make reasonable decisions. Many local authorities do subsidise transport for young people post 16, but I have very much heard the passionate responses in the Chamber today. The issue also came up in the SEND consultation that we recently completed. We will look carefully at those responses.

As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Windsor, said, the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) made a powerful speech about an incredibly distressing story from his constituency. I will of course meet him and Lewis’s family to discuss it and look at what we can do to make changes in the future. I thank him for raising that—I am sorry that they got caught in that transition.

The hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) also raised issues about safeguarding and an appalling tragedy that happened in his constituency. He will know that some of the measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 were very much a response to the lessons learned from that horrendous case, but again I am very happy to meet him to discuss this further.

More widely on the national criteria and the statutory guidance, we heard a powerful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft), who is a brilliant campaigner on these issues. I want to reassure her that there is no intention to look at means testing. We absolutely reject some of the calls we have heard from, for example, the Reform leader of Warwickshire county council to try to reduce those statutory distances. We are not in the business of reducing disabled children’s rights to transport.

In conclusion, this has been a thoughtful and important debate. A number of issues have been raised that we must continue to look at. I hope we can follow up on conversations in relation to not only special educational needs and disabilities but the wider system and our shared ambition, which have been highlighted in this debate, to ensure that people have access to opportunity and education.

This has been an involved and thoughtful discussion. I appreciate the cross-party support for this issue across the Chamber; it is one of the few areas where the right hon. Members for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) and for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) and I see relatively eye to eye. I appreciate them both turning up today to make this case to the Conservative-run North Yorkshire council.

It was, as always, fantastic to hear from the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) on the work she does around disabled children and SEND. She is one of the best voices I have heard in this place on those subjects. Hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) regarding the horrendous situation he outlined and Lewis being physically restrained is heart- breaking. I hope he gets a solution and the accountability that is needed.

I appreciate the Minister’s response. I would love it if she could be open to the further conversation she mentioned and make sure we can rule out things such as the nearest available walking routes to schools including river and motorway crossings and so on. There might be something in the statutory guidance that we could tease out to put some prohibitions on those things being part of those calculations.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered home-to-school transport.