CONCERNS over school transport on the Peninsula are unfortunately not new. My daughter attended Our Lady & St Patrick's High School, Dumbarton, starting First Year in 2006.

The daily fifty-mile round trip to the school from Kilcreggan was by a small, elderly "urban bus" of the most basic type, with no seatbelts. Given the ten thousand mile annual distance travelled, and the state of the local roads, I was so appalled at the potential risks that I campaigned to have this situation remedied, especially when contractors were using vehicles with seat belts for school journeys of just a few miles a day. When this was unsuccessful, I transferred my daughter to Hermitage Academy after one year, the numbers of pupils from the Peninsula travelling to Hermitage being sufficient to require the use of a coach - which legally had to be fitted with seatbelts.

When McColl's were awarded the school contract in October 2011, things immediately improved. The overcrowding of the Kilcreggan coach - an issue about which my daughter had recently complained in writing to the local authority - was ended. McColl's also introduced bus stewards which before this had been reserved for double-decker school buses only. With the contract recently reverting to Garelochhead Coaches, I learned at the last Community Council meeting that in future the Peninsula pupils would be transported to Hermitage Academy on such a double-decker bus. Whole fleets of these double-deckers have been routinely used for school transport across Scotland for years, with dozens of them operating in this way in Dumbarton and the Vale of Leven. One was used for Garelochhead pupils attending Hermitage Academy in recent years. However, I was astonished - and delighted - to learn that under the new contract, all school buses were now to be fitted with seatbelts, even if that required the retro-fitting of seatbelts in older buses, including the Peninsula double-decker. This is extremely good news for local parents, because as the Hagley High School tragedy of 1994 - where twelve pupils and a teacher were killed when their seatbeltless minibus crashed on the M40 - it is not the type of bus, but the fitting and wearing of seatbelts that is of critical importance in this connection.

When I campaigned for the Dumbarton pupils in 2006, I was assured by the Council - which had to live "in the real world", as one of its employees put it - that to require seat-belt provision on all school buses was out of the question financially. In particular, the retro-fitting of seat belts in old buses - which did not legally require them - was so exorbitantly expensive as to be completely prohibitive. Things seem to have changed, I am glad to say, which is passing strange indeed, considering the untold millions of pounds that have been - and will be -deducted from Argyll & Bute's budget as a result of the economic mess into which the country was plunged in 2008. If these improvements are affordable now, why on earth were they out of the question in 2006?

Further enquiries revealed that we have McColl's of Dumbarton to thank for the fitting of seat belts on school buses. I had assumed that such a positive - and expensive - improvement must have come about as a result of a most welcome policy about-turn on safety grounds by Argyll & Bute Councillors. Not a bit of it! Our Councillors seem to have been completely disengaged from this decision, which profoundly affects the safety of schoolchildren for which they have a statutory responsibility. Apparently, it was the Council's school transport contract procurement team which decided that the standard set by McColl's should become the norm in the current contract negotiations. McColl's have effortlessly succeeded where I, Cameron Fyfe, the prominent Glasgow solicitor, an Edinburgh QC and several campaigning journalists on The Scotsman and other national newspapers had all failed in 2006. I suppose it's the old, old story - where there's a will, there's a way.

Tom Logue. Community Councillor: Cove & Kilcreggan.