High Speed Rail (London–West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 12th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, Amendment 18, standing in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is to do with traffic and transport issues during the construction of phase 1. It came from a conversation I had with people at the West Midlands transport authority—I think that is the right name; it has just been changed—who expressed concern that the Bill could allow HS2 to restrict the flows on motorways or national rail services as it felt necessary without any consideration for the needs of other rail travellers or drivers on the motorway and local roads. They felt that the consultation had been not that comprehensive to start off with and they were really quite worried about this issue, which they say could cause major trouble and problems for traffic on rail and road during the construction. It seems that Camden Council has similar worries and I think that TfL probably does, too. Their solution was to propose this idea of a regional integrated command centre. I do not know whether that is the right term. It is not a sort of Army command centre but a co-ordination body to bring all the bodies which I have listed, including,

“Highways England, local highways authorities, emergency services”—

the transport authorities local and regional—

“transport operators and the nominated undertaker’s contractors”,

and probably a few more, together on a regular basis to plan what is going on and minimise the adverse effect of traffic and transport on the users.

We can debate whether there should be one centre covering the whole route or several. The amendment I have tabled says that there should be one but that is for discussion. This is one of those things which, if it does not happen, probably would happen several years on when there had been a crisis or disaster. My suggestion is that it should be set up from the beginning, whether that takes three months or six months or whatever. I hope that it would be funded by HS2; after all, they are the people causing the problem. I think this would be welcomed by all the different users and could be a major benefit to the communities along the route and the longer-distance travellers, who would see all the obvious problems which come with construction mitigated to some extent. I look forward to some interesting comments and debate on this proposal, which would be extremely cheap to run and very beneficial. I beg to move.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I shall speak very briefly. The Minister has already said in reply to a previous amendment that local authorities would have substantial powers in organising traffic. I am anxious to have some assurance that HS2 Ltd will not, as it were, have overriding powers which prevent the proper processes taking place.

[Baroness O'Cathain (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps we could probe this amendment. A lot of the work that we did on the Select Committee referred to HS1, Crossrail and the tunnel. With all his expertise and knowledge, can the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, tell me whether this actually occurred in the case of HS1—the Channel Tunnel route—and Crossrail? Perhaps we should benefit from that, because we frequently went back to the experience of those two projects. There was no point to going through them if you were not going to get some learning from them. Are we trying to reinvent the wheel here or was there a separate way of doing it, which the noble Lord thinks was not good enough and is why he has tabled this amendment?

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[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, for the convenience of the Committee, I can speak to Amendments 19 and 20 together, which should save us a little time. This is a very short and probing amendment which comes out of experience with HS1. When the HS1 legislation was going through, Ministers seemed to have a lot of intentions to set it up so that it could be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest possible time and at the highest price. They seemed to think that if they did not have independent regulators keeping an eye on what was going on, that would dramatically increase the sale price. Anyway, the Bill received Royal Assent and it all happened, but a few years later we realised that, having no regulator with any teeth at all, the infrastructure manager, which could have been in the private sector, could charge exactly what it liked for the trains to run on it, could close it when it liked, and did not have to justify its costs of operation or anything else. All I have put down in these amendments is simply to probe the Minister to ensure that he is not trying to do that this time. I have no evidence that he is at all but I just wanted to probe to make sure. We spent an awful lot of time in the years after the HS1 Act—the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and I did a lot of it together—bringing in regulations, which the Government accepted, to right the mistakes of the first Act.

[Lord Bradshaw]

Perhaps I may just draw the Minister’s attention to the large number of occasions on which Ministers of both parties have committed themselves to the fares on HS2 not being excessive and taking into account ordinary people and various other things— I have about 20 of them. This is not a railway that is apart from the rest of the railway, I hope.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report stage: House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

If I may just follow up a few of the points made by my noble friend, we have discussed before the question of a link between Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. When I was deputy general manager at Euston back in the far-off days, it was being discussed—it is one of these projects that seems always to be under discussion but is never carried out. I am looking for something like the link you get between terminals in airports; that is, a wide, well-lit way of getting between the two stations with a travelator or similar device for your luggage. I am not looking for some form of futuristic railway, just a convenient, out-of-the-weather way for moving you and your luggage between the two places.

There will be a lot of time to think about this, because there will be a long period when Old Oak Common will be the London terminal for HS2. There can be dispute about how Old Oak Common could be used, but there will be six platforms there and the trains from Birmingham, which will take only 38 minutes, can almost be described as commuter trains. They will not require huge amounts of servicing at Old Oak Common, it will be possible to turn trains back there very quickly, and Euston may well not be needed until after phase 2A of HS2, so there is plenty of time to think about it and get it in place.

My noble friend commented on connections to HS1. I know that people in the south of England feel that it is very difficult for them to use it: they have to make a big journey. That will be alleviated if the Government could—again, they could work on this contemporaneously with the work on HS2—strengthen the link along the south coast between Brighton and Ashford. There are bits of that railway that need sorting out. I hope we can get some sort of assurance about what the Government intend to do.

Those are questions, not things that we will have disputes on, but we want to know what the Government envisage that they will do, in the long term, about the problems here.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my Amendment 9 is grouped, although I am not sure it is closely connected to what the two previous speakers have been discussing. It would delete one of the amendments that the Select Committee proposed in its report. Let me make it quite clear: I do not criticise the Select Committee on this issue; I am sure its amendments are just what is needed. I ask the Minister, however: is it not a bit unusual for a Select Committee’s amendments to be incorporated in a Bill without debate? I had assumed that they might have been tabled for debate today, and we could have debated and no doubt approved them, but it was surprising that a new issue of the Bill was published in the past week as a result of the amendments being included. This may not be a question for the Minister—it may be a question for the Chairman of Committees or someone else—but it is something that we should debate. Perhaps it will be different next time, if there are to be more committees such as this.

While I am on my feet, the Minister kindly briefed us on progress just before we broke up for Christmas. One question that many asked him was: were the Government going to respond to the excellent report from the Select Committee? It would have been nice to have their response before Committee today. We have not had it, but can he assure me that we will receive it in good time for Report?

Bus Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, since we are talking about the west of England, I should say that I met the person responsible for providing bus services in the city of Bristol, and a rather ridiculous situation has arisen there. The Bristol omnibus company, whatever it is called now, has introduced lots of new buses. It has been summoned by the traffic commissioner because its services are unreliable. Bristol City Council has agreed to appear on behalf of the bus company against the traffic commissioner, because it has concluded that it is impossible to run a reliable service. It puts that down not only to congestion, but to the near free-for-all which has been allowed by the utilities to dig up the roads for roadworks. This is not because there is a gas leak or a burst water main, but because somebody needs their telephone connected. Perhaps the Minister would address the whole problem.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, if the Minister does not accept the amendment to include the need to reduce congestion—bearing in mind what colleagues on these Benches have been saying—it may be that he wants to use it as an excuse not to do anything about congestion. I am sure that is not the case, but we would understand, because congestion in London, as we have heard, is so bad that the buses go slower and slower. The motorist will say this it is because there are too many buses; the bus passengers do not like it, because they could probably walk quicker. But what we really need are measures to allow buses to operate more on time, whether it is bus lanes, traffic lights that give them priority or many other measures that can be used. These all cost a little bit of money, but they are essential. It will be slightly odd if the Minister does not accept the amendment on the basis that it might cost local authorities money to provide the bus lanes that they should have provided anyway. This is terribly important; it applies to London, to other cities and to some places in the countryside. It is quite a serious problem and I think “congestion” needs to appear in this clause somewhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, one thing that my noble friend has forgotten is that these Oyster cards should possibly be called Whitty cards, rather like the bicycles that are called Boris bikes. I am sure he would not want to be related to Boris in that way, but they are a great success.

I am pleased to be able to tell your Lordships that the local authority in Cornwall is going to implement a similar thing. It is very long and based on customer focus, but I will summarise it. The big double-decker buses will have wi-fi and tables so that you can put your laptop on them. They are going to run very frequently on the main routes. Smaller buses will go into the smaller areas. They will link in with the railway timetable, and I think that the operators’ ability to talk to each other will be unique. They are proposing a single ticket structure—one standard, one band. I hope my noble friend will appreciate this. It is going to happen within the next year or two.

This is a real example of a local authority taking an initiative. It sees that where you have several different operators, as there are at the moment, they never fit with the train timetable. They are going to. Nor do they fit with the ferries to the Isles of Scilly, but I am not going to go on about that now.

Amendment 54A in my name and some other amendments propose something on the quality of standards and on frequencies. We should probably also include interchange points, but we have not done so yet. Maybe we should also add something about a percentage of the population not having to walk further than X miles to a bus stop and an hourly or better bus service. There are what you might call faster services between the major centres of population—plus ones that you might say wiggle between villages and take a lot longer, although they do get there for people who do not have access to public transport. I believe that TfL has a bus services plan, involving the public transport accessibility level, which takes this into account, as does Transport for Greater Manchester.

Not all these things need to be in the Bill; the amendments here are perfectly adequate. However, they and the initiative that Cornwall County Council has shown would mean that neither partnerships nor franchises would provide a much better quality of service for all types of people who want to use it. The irony is that although it has been suggested that Cornwall will be able to have franchises in the same way as authorities with mayors—we will come on to that later—it is confident that all this will happen without the need for a franchise.

It is encouraging that the Government have produced a structure. I am sure that we can improve it, but at least it is there, and it should enable the volume of bus passenger traffic to go up, which is what we all want, with a much better quality of service. I commend what Cornwall is doing, but I hope that the Government will seriously consider adding something about the standards and the frequency of service, as well as the quality, and perhaps come back with their own suggestions on Report.

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, perhaps I may add a point to what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said. Any move towards smart ticketing or reduced fares for young people is revenue-generative. It is not a dead-weight cost. In fact, some bus operators are voluntarily introducing reduced fares for young people and they are finding that they can be almost self-financing. Young people have a very high propensity to travel. They will travel at the weekends and in the evening, provided that the cost does not build up.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Bradshaw

Thursday 5th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, neither I nor my noble friend Lord Berkeley wishes to detain the House long. However, since we had the debate in the House, real misgivings about the cost of this scheme have emanated from the Cabinet Office, and I believe the need for economy is very strong. I say that as someone who has a lot of experience with these things.

One of the things the committee should consider—I am not giving it an instruction—is the appointment of a technical engineering expert to get under the costs which HS2 Ltd is proposing: I can nominate people who will not charge the earth. I believe there are billions of pounds to be saved if we can unpick the HS2 figures.

One of the issues is very important, namely whether Old Oak Common can be the phase 1 terminal. It will have six platforms, which is quite adequate to deal with the trains from Birmingham. They can be turned round in that space. It would then give time to sort out the huge costs and disruption proposed at the London end and in Camden. These issues were not properly examined by the Commons committee, which ran out of either time or energy to give them proper consideration. I suggest that the committee should consider starting its work not at the Birmingham end, as the Commons committee did, but at the London end, where the real costs are.

One of the most important things surrounds rolling stock. HS2 is proposing or considering using rolling stock which is not compatible with the rest of the network and is capable of running at very high speeds. I believe that both those things need to be challenged very strongly. It will reduce the cost of the rolling stock by billions of pounds if we have slightly lower speeds and rolling stock which is compatible with the rest of the network, not unlike the Javelin trains from St Pancras into Kent but, obviously, made better for intercity travel. The journey from Birmingham will not take very long—probably about only 38 or 40 minutes—and many noble Lords travel far further than that in commuting to their homes.

I stress that it is not European regulation that is driving HS2 to bring in world specifications. They are not necessary on our railway. This is a domestic railway—not an international one—and I believe it is important that these things are brought to the forefront of the committee’s considerations.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to all four amendments, two of which are in my name. First, I congratulate the Chairman of Committees on the quality of the committee that he is announcing today. There is a lot of talent and experience there, as one would expect from your Lordships’ House, but I also know that under the chairmanship of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe, the committee’s procedures will be conducted properly and fairly. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, said in a letter to most noble Lords who spoke in the last debate, this will be a proceeding under quasi-judicial conditions. That is very important and I certainly welcome it.

I turn to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, concerning the committee taking advice from a technical expert. My worry is to do with timing. The experience of the House of Commons Select Committee was that there was no time for people to bring in their own technical experts because the hearings were very much truncated, and in my view the committee ended up taking advice from the promoter without questioning any of it at all. I was particularly concerned when I read a letter from a number of groups in Camden—the Camden Cutting Group, the HS2 Euston Action Group and the Camden Civic Society—to the chief executive of HS2, basically saying that the consultation that was supposed to have taken place had not worked at all. That is supported by two other reports—those by PACAC and Bynoe. The Bynoe report says:

“We are concerned that HS2 has failed to identify with what we believe to be the root cause of the”,

consultation,

“forums’ failings: namely that the process was treated as a one way ‘box-ticking’ exercise by HS2 Ltd, with no genuine two way engagement”.

Many noble Lords have been involved in consultation processes, as have I. Some are good and some are bad, but this is some of the worst criticism that I have ever seen, and I trust that HS2 and Ministers will take note and put it right.

My final comment concerns my amendment to the Motion that would leave out the words,

“if the Committee so wishes”,

to publish evidence. I am surprised at this being in the instruction because, after all, the evidence is given in public hearings of the committee. I envisage a slippery slope—not with this committee but it would be possible—where the hearings are held in secret and there is no justification for the committee’s decisions. I argue that all evidence should be published, or that at least there should be a public link to a publication in another journal, so that anyone can read all the documentation referred to or produced as part of the committee hearings.