Extraordinary Funding and Financing Agreement for Transport for London

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Boateng

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord that, once we know what the new normal is, we need to think boldly and creatively about the long term. However, everyone accepts that we have no idea what the new normal will be at the moment, because we are still in the pandemic. We have just gone into another wave, which is having a further negative impact on traffic levels.

It is utterly ludicrous for the Government to be forcing TfL into short-term, acrimonious funding agreements, as they have been doing every three or six months, when everyone knows that the problem is the pandemic. It is rather like denying a heart replacement patient blood on the grounds that they do not have a long-term plan for improving their fitness. Until they have survived the operation—got through the pandemic, in this case—we cannot look at these longer-term issues.

My noble friend’s strictures at the beginning were well made. Unless the Government want to kill the national economy, which I do not think they do, they simply will agree to roll on the funding; there will be an agreement tomorrow and it will be similar to the one that went before. This is wasting a huge amount of time and energy among the senior management of TfL and in the Department for Transport, where I know officials are at their wits’ end, having to go through this charade of negotiations, knowing that the status quo will be the status quo ante until we get to the end of the pandemic.

When we get to the end and know what the new normal is, some very hard questions will of course need to be asked. But we need to know what the new normal is in terms of traffic levels, and these are very hard to predict; I have seen a whole range of potential traffic levels. The report done for the mayor, the TfL independent review of a year ago, suggested we might get to about 80% of traffic levels. I have looked at the sourcing for those estimates and, to be frank, this is fingers in the air stuff—the Minister will probably agree with that. We simply do not know what the new normal will be.

It was very striking that, when so much encouragement was given to people to come back to the office and resume normal activity after the second lockdown, traffic levels were restored remarkably quickly. The idea that there is somehow going to be a systemic loss of traffic may be far too gloomy a prediction.

When we do know what the new normal is, we obviously need to address this. I will highlight very briefly four issues that we should address. The first has to be bus priority. If buses in London went, on average, 1 mph faster than they do at the moment, it would save TfL nearly £200 million a year in the running costs of the bus network, with fewer buses, much more efficient operations and so on. It should not be beyond the wit of good transport managers in TfL to ensure improved bus priority to get buses moving faster. There has been a significant reduction in average bus speeds in London over the last 10 years, because of a failure to join up policy properly when we are all in favour of faster buses in principle—

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

Cycle lanes are the problem.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My noble friend says that priority cycle lanes are a problem; we can debate that issue, but there needs to be much better joining up and we should encourage the mayor to look at that as a key priority.

The second issue has to be the future of congestion charging and road pricing in London. At the moment, we have a hybrid system of a low emission zone and a small congestion zone for which prices have gone up a lot. We need to join up and look at the longer-term role of congestion charging.

I will mention two other points and will be very brief, because my time is nearly up. We need to look at reform of council tax arrangements as part of future arrangements. There is a very strong argument for an additional council tax band, given what has happened to property values in the capital over the last 30 years, and that could help to fund Transport for London.

Finally, when Crossrail and the Elizabeth line open, I hope, next year—we are looking forward to it—a big issue will be the interaction between the transformational additional capacity of Crossrail, with its 10% of additional transport capacity in London, and new housing, which will also produce new council tax revenue. So, there are four big things that should be looked at, but not this short-term, ludicrous funding crisis that we have been going through during the pandemic.