Crossrail 2

Debate between Emily Thornberry and David Lammy

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate.

No debate on London can start without an assessment of where the capital city finds itself. Without doubt, London is the world’s greatest city. No other metropolis can claim to be so vibrant or so beautiful. London is a magnet for the world’s greatest talents, and it is the birthplace of some of the world’s most successful businesses and the adopted home of countless others. This city has been the inspiration to so many of our musicians, authors and artists.

There are thousands of reasons, including London’s great multi-culturalism, that make this a modern city that outfaces the world, but peel away the veneer of the capital’s dramatic skyline, scratch away at the patina of the city’s bustling shopping streets, and we will see one of them—the tube is the engine room that has propelled London’s success story for 150 years.

The Metropolitan line shooting off from Baker Street up towards Harrow and into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire began to make commuting to London possible. The City and South London railway, to be rechristened the Northern line, first tunnelled deep under the Thames so that people in Clapham no longer had to ride the omnibus to get to Bank or Euston, and in the middle of the great depression it was the Piccadilly line extension north to Finsbury Park on the edge of my constituency that drove growth and jobs to places such as Finsbury Park, Wood Green and Enfield. Yet that history of infrastructure has slowly been squandered by inertia, chronic underinvestment and a cowardly lack of ambition.

There has been relatively little investment since the Victoria line opened in 1967. The opening of the Fleet line, or the Jubilee line as we now know it, was, for the most part, a rebranding of an existing branch of the Metropolitan line. Although the subsequent extension to Stratford was impressive, it was also horrifically over-budget and over-deadline.

Small extensions to the docklands light railway and the construction of the Croydon tramlink have made differences in some quarters, but it is still fair to say that the overall reach of London’s transport network has barely changed for almost 50 years. Sadly, the signs of decay are there for all to see.

Despite the illusion created by Harry Beck’s distorted London underground map that coverage is almost universal, huge pockets of London are actually islands of isolation. Even in 2013, my constituents in the Northumberland Park ward of Tottenham, which has among the highest unemployment rates in London, are served by just one train an hour on weekdays and no trains at all at weekends.

Dalston Junction is just 3½ miles from Tottenham Court Road, but the journey on public transport takes more than half an hour. Huge swathes of south London rely on consistently inconsistent suburban rail services that are plagued by delays, cancellations and overcrowding. [Interruption.] I see my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) nodding her head, because she has waited for those trains on many occasions.

That those areas have the highest rates of unemployment, the highest levels of child poverty and the lowest levels of attainment is no coincidence. Without vital transport links, they are starved of investment, bled of ambition and left marooned from the city’s throbbing economic heart. In areas where services are frequent and extensive, users find themselves on some of the most overcrowded and expensive journeys in Europe.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

On my right hon. Friend’s point about overcrowding, the section of the underground that goes up to Finsbury Park runs through my constituency. Does he agree that, although in 2007 we had more than four people per square metre in my part of the underground, even after 2021, when more investment is proposed, there will still be more than four people per square metre? That is why I put on record my complete support for Crossrail 2.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In the morning rush hour more than four people stand per square metre on rail services in her constituency and across London. More than four people stand per square metre on all peak-time District line trains from Putney Bridge to Earl’s Court. The same is true for Victoria line trains from Finsbury Park to Victoria, for all Piccadilly line trains from Finsbury Park to Holborn, for Bank branch Northern line trains from Clapham Common to Euston and for Central line trains from Stratford to Holborn.

In this country it is illegal to transport cattle if there is more than one cow per square metre, to transport pigs if there are more than two pigs per square metre or to transport sheep if there are more than three sheep per square metre. Yet each rush hour in our capital city, more than four human beings cram into every square metre available just to go to and from work. At present, Londoners can only dream of being herded like cattle as they commute to work.

London’s viability as a global centre is already being undermined by a failure to resolve questions over its airport capacity, but the unspoken fact is that we are soon to lose out to our competitors because of what happens to those passengers the minute they leave the terminal building, wherever the new airport capacity is located. As Tony Travers puts it:

“London survives despite, rather than because of, its transport infrastructure planning and implementation”.

There are some who dismiss those concerns. They say that London’s congestion will be relieved once tube upgrades are completed and the long-awaited Crossrail 1 opens at the end of this decade. There will be some relief, of course, but such an attitude ignores the enduring lesson of the past century that, even if the economy stops, London does not. The capital is about to be hit by a demographic tsunami that, worse still, has taken policy makers by complete surprise.

The Mayor’s London plan forecast that the capital’s population would break 8.5 million in 2027. Data from the 2011 census suggest that that will now be exceeded in 2016 or earlier. By 2031, there will be almost 10 million people living in London, more than 1.5 million more than are living here today. An extra 700,000 jobs are expected to accompany that growth over the next 20 years, which means 700,000 extra daily commutes.