Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, it is part of the rules about money Bills that if we do not pass them within a month of their being introduced in the House of Lords, they can go forward for Royal Assent without our debating them. Although the hour is extremely awkward for many, including some who have not been able to stay, I am grateful to have this opportunity to make just one point about the Bill, about the Thames tunnel.

There has been a great deal of consultation on the tunnel with local communities up and down the river. I know that my noble friend Lord Fowler is going to talk about the area that he knows. I should declare an interest: I live in Vauxhall, and we are going to have one of the sites quite near there. Some of us have been putting some pressure on Thames Water to make sure that the absolute minimum of road transport is used for the purpose of the tunnel. It is a tunnel down the river, which should make it possible to move very large quantities of the spoil from the tunnel and the shafts by barge. There are also railway connections—one thinks of Battersea in particular—and it should be possible to take some of the spoil away by rail, and more importantly, to bring in by rail some of the components, some of which will be in very large quantities, such as the concrete for tunnel lining.

Will the Minister make it clear beyond peradventure to Thames Water that it must make every possible effort to reduce the amount of road transport necessary to construct this tunnel? In its briefing Thames Water states that its,

“current plans mean 50 per cent of all materials being transported directly from our sites by river. Over four million tonnes of material will be moved directly from our sites by river transport”.

Of course there is a cost element, and Thames Water has to balance that, but the evidence of a report by an acknowledged expert, Maurice Gooderham—a report called for by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who is one of those who cannot be in his place this evening—made it clear that he thought that river transport for spoil and materials would be economic. It would, in fact, be more cost-effective to use as much barge traffic as possible for this purpose. He makes the point that Blackfriars station, which of course is built out over the railway bridge, was supplied entirely by river and virtually no lorry transport was necessary to construct it. Of course, many parts of Crossrail are a long way from the river and therefore there is not the same possibility, but the project is making the best use of the railways as it can in order to reduce the amount of road transport.

What concerns me about this, and why I raise this point, is that when one talks to Thames Water about rail, it will tell you that it is currently exploring,

“opportunities to use rail freight to move material to or from our sites”.

As has been made clear by both my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, this project has been in the planning for years—indeed, it goes back decades. Why are we only just now starting to explore,

“opportunities to use rail freight”?

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I have had discussions with the senior management of Thames Water, and I was told by one of its senior officials that it has got the message loud and clear. Why has it not had it before? A letter I had from Thames tunnel earlier this week states:

“We have commissioned a transport strategy study, which brings together our transport assessment and environmental impact assessment work, to consider the benefits of increasing river transport and whether it is practical and economic to do so”.

Better late than never; but can my noble friend make sure that his department really brings as much pressure as it can on Thames Water to minimise the disruption to local communities from excessive use of road transport?

Of course, most of the work is going to be done by contractors. Contractors will bid at the lowest price they can and if they think it is cheaper to use lorries, that is what they will put in their contracts. There have to be very clear limits on what the contractors can do by road transport. That has got to be built into the tender so that they are all tendering on the same basis of the maximum use of river and rail and the minimum use of road transport. Can this be made a condition of planning permission? One needs to bring the maximum pressure possible on Thames Water and its contractors to make sure that there is the minimum disruption to local communities.

There has been a general acceptance—not universal—that this is the best way of dealing with these combined sewage outfalls, which cause the problems that have been described this evening, but it needs to be done with the minimum disruption to the local communities, who are going to have to put up with what will be quite a long construction period. If my noble friend can give me some reassurances on that, I shall feel that it has been worth staying until after midnight.