Global Britain: Traffic
Lord Moylan Excerpts(12 months ago)
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Lord Moylan
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effect on the success of their ‘Global Britain’ initiative that, for a second year in a row, the Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard has found London to have the highest traffic delay times of any city in the world.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, the balance of transport choices in London, including the relative importance given to car traffic, is a matter for the mayor and Transport for London. However, with the opening of the Elizabeth line last year, London’s reputation for efficient and modern transport has been demonstrated globally, an achievement for which many, including the noble Lord, can share credit.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, with bicycle lanes that have not increased the uptake of bicycling as a mode of transport, with ULEZ extended to parts of London that neither need nor want it, and with a Labour-run local authority now tendering out its speeding enforcement to unsleeping robots to maximise its revenue, does my noble friend the Minister not realise that people are at the end of their tethers and expect the Government to act to defend them from these depredations?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My noble friend is asking me to withdraw from the devolution agreement for London. We have no plans to do that, and I encourage Londoners to hold the mayor to account.
Public Transport in Towns and Cities
Lord Moylan Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Moylan
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Built Environment Committee Public Transport in Towns and Cities (1st Report, HL Paper 89).
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, in rising to move this Motion, I start by paying tribute to my predecessor as chairman of the committee, my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, who in fact chaired it during almost the entire period when the evidence was being taken that resulted in this report. Any credit due to the chairing skills involved in producing the report must therefore accrue to her and not me. I also put on record the committee’s thanks to its specialist adviser, Dr Simon Blainey, and to its clerk at the time, Dee Goddard, and her team. Dee left the service of the House shortly afterwards in order to relocate with her family to Yorkshire. She and her whole team were wonderful in supporting us as we did our work. It is also very good to see so many current and former members of the committee present and participating in this debate.
I am not proposing in these introductory remarks to give a comprehensive account of everything the report says, partly because it would take too long and partly because it would leave very little for other members of the committee to say, but we were all agreed on the importance of public transport in our towns and cities.
The Government gave a pledge when elected to bring public transport in towns and cities up to the standards in London. We understand that that is difficult, because London has a large amount of inherited infrastructure, particularly rail and underground, and a large concentration of people, but we wanted in preparing this report to see how the Government were doing. The brief answer is, not terribly well, but a large amount of that can, I think, be explained by the effects of the pandemic and in particular by an understandable fall during it in demand for public transport services, which has to some extent been sustained, so that demand now is lower than it was before. It looks as though that might continue for some time—nobody knows—but it presents a conundrum and a difficulty for the Government.
Let me come straight away to my remarks on one of the two topics I would like to focus on, which is buses. Buses provide two-thirds of public transport trips throughout the country and are vital in all our towns and cities. We know that passenger numbers grow if bus operators offer what is referred to in the business as a turn-up-and-go service: that is, a service of sufficient frequency—of about 10-minute intervals—so that passengers do not have to consult a timetable before they leave home or decide to catch a bus, and are confident that if they turn up at any particular time, they will not have to wait too long. After all, a 10-minute interval means an average wait of five minutes for anyone who is regularly using a service. A turn-up-and-go service therefore attracts passengers. However, the effect of falling passenger demand has in fact been a reduction in services.
I want to congratulate the Government on maintaining the support for the bus network that they provided during the pandemic and have continued to provide at a certain level since. We predicted that if that support did not continue beyond the end of this March—which, at the time of writing the report, is when it was due to end—there would be a 20% fall in bus passenger services. The Government continued their funding and that 20% fall has not occurred, but even so, newspaper reports tell us that there has been a 10% fall, and that is probably, in a sense, the new normal.
As a country, we deserve to have a serious discussion about buses. Here, I refer with some admiration to Ken Livingstone when he was Mayor of London, because he illustrates an approach that worked. Until the point when he became mayor, bus services had been in a state of decline in London; demand had been falling and services were not reliable. He succeeded in ramping up provision so that most buses were operating on a turn-up-and-go service. Demand rocketed and has been sustained at that level, although not recently during the pandemic. However, it came with a serious cost because the subsidy—that is, the difference between the fare income and the cost of operating the service—grew substantially. In his time, it was well on the way to £0.5 billion a year and is now considerably in excess of that. In large part, that was to do with the fact that the fares were set lower than was necessary. So in my view there is a trade-off between providing the sort of service that attracts passengers and a willingness to set fares at a rate that makes the subsidy manageable financially, which is obviously a consideration for the Government.
There is also the very sensitive subject of concessions. In London, approximately 40% of passengers were not paying a fare. There are, of course, statutory concessions for bus passengers—the Freedom Pass in London and the national bus pass scheme—but they are targeted largely at elderly people. A large number of voluntary and discretionary concessions have been granted that could be removed without amending the statute. At some point it is worth having a serious debate about how we are going to respond to the fall in demand, and perhaps today is the time to kick it off. Is it by cutting services, which in my view leads to a spiral of decline, or by ramping up services but controlling the subsidy, as I am calling it, through a combination of fares and more limited concessions? These are hard topics to face, but they are serious ones if we are going to look forward and discuss public transport, and buses in particular, in towns and cities in the coming decade.
The second subject that I want to concentrate on—the restrictions being imposed on the use of private motor vehicles in towns and cities—led the committee down some paths of inquiry it had not particularly expected to follow. While passenger demand for public transport has fallen, demand from local authorities for new public transport infrastructure has been rising. To some extent, this has been encouraged by the Government making funding available. I will step out of my main stream of thought for a moment to say that one of the issues the committee raised was whether the funding system is fit for purpose: in other words, whether bidding for government money in a competitive environment produces the best outcomes. Is it the case—the committee thought it might be—that bidding processes reward local authorities that are large and good at bidding, rather than those with a fundamentally good case for new transport provision? That is a point on which the Minister may well want to comment.
Where does this demand for new investment and infrastructure come from? From talking to highways engineers and local councillors in various places that we visited, it appeared that a lot of it came from the fact that they had set targets for reducing the number of vehicle trips in towns and cities and wanted the money not only to build the public realm in a more pedestrian-friendly fashion but for the transport infrastructure that would substitute for people using their cars. A target of 20% or 30% is found almost universally. When we quizzed the Minister about this, she said that this was not a government or national target but entirely a local matter. However, we inquired into why all the localities tend to come to the same number.
Those of us with experience of local government know that a lot of policy development takes place on the basis of what academics in the field are saying and what the professional bodies that represent that particular branch of local authority officers are disseminating. We discovered that the academic world was pushing strongly for this 20% to 30% reduction, partly on the basis of meeting non-statutory interim targets for net zero and partly on the basis that, if all vehicles become electric and the pollution and air quality problems largely dissipate, we will not have enough electricity to run them. These people have a vision of towns and cities with much more public transport, much larger limitations on car use and limitations on car ownership, because the electricity simply will not be available to run them.
However, there has been no real discussion about this. The Minister’s point that this was not a national policy, which I obviously accept in good faith, was controverted for me when my attention was drawn, only a matter of days ago, to the newly published Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) Vision to 2030, which is by a national body that reports to the Department for Transport and thus to my noble friend. On page 11, one sees that part of its vision for 2030 is for:
“Half of all journeys in towns and cities to be made by walking or cycling”.
It makes it slightly more difficult for the Government to say that they do not have a national policy on this if one of their executive agencies so clearly does. It needs to be flushed out and discussed. Does it command the support that policymakers think it might? If it does, why are they so reluctant to discuss it in public? Some honesty and openness on this would be very helpful.
I will not go on much longer, except to say that other topics we discussed included post-project evaluation, which we think needs to be undertaken much more seriously and in a much more determined way. This was the subject in our reply from the Minister on which we detected the most stickiness and defensiveness from the department. It is really not very keen on post-project evaluation, but we will continue to press on that.
Finally, we had a number of recommendations that I can summarise as “How to make public transport more user-friendly”, thinking about it from the perspective of the passenger. Examples include ticketing and timetables, better information and more integration of services, which we think the Government need to take in hand. There is also the issue of our rather fractured local system, with local authorities being required to adopt an enhanced partnership or a franchising model with local bus providers, which can make the situation more difficult. With that, I shall bring my opening remarks to an end and beg to move.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I see that, as rumours of the exciting quality of this debate have spread through the Palace of Westminster, the Moses Room has filled up with an audience keen to listen. None the less, I shall endeavour to be brief in summing up. I thank everybody who has taken part in the debate. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for reminding me that in my opening remarks I should have thanked the people who gave evidence to our committee in the course of our inquiry. I am pleased to do that.
I will briefly run through some of the key points made. My noble friend Lady Eaton put great importance on what is referred to as “the first and last mile” in transport: the getting to the hub that allows you to take part in the transport system, which we could have said more about.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, referred to Paris and the possibility of getting road users to be more courteous to each other. We know how to do that; we have just abandoned it in this country. We know how to do it because we learned lessons and started to apply them from the Netherlands in relation to shared space, but then we opted for a scheme of not sharing space but segregating it. If you start to segregate and allocate, top down, a limited resource, which is what road space is, inevitably you get people quarrelling about how much they have had allocated to them and about how others are interfering with their rights to their space, and so forth.
In this context, my noble friend Lord Carrington of Fulham and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, both referred to the importance of bus reliability and the fact that cycle lanes can impinge on that. Equally, you could say that bus lanes could impinge on the space that might be allocated to people using bicycles. But none of this is taken into account by the Government because, of course, it is all meant to be a matter of local choice.
A large number of participants in the debate—the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Best, and my noble friend Lord Haselhurst—talked about the importance of joining up the planning and transport policies. I do not see why this is such a difficulty for the Minister. She has told us how much money—a very large amount—the Government intend to allocate to local transport schemes over the next few years. Is it too much to say—other government departments do not find it too much to say—“If you are going to have this money, you need an up-to-date local transport plan”? It might be one that shows the department that it is coherent with local planning policies too, in particular for new development.
I have the highest admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, but my one quibble with his contribution is that he quoted a consultancy company that was critical of national and local governments for their reluctance to impose policies limiting private car use. I do not know where this consultancy has been, but it has obviously not been anywhere near a low-traffic neighbourhood that has been sprung on us recently, one of the many road-closure schemes that have been going on or indeed things such as the ULEZ. These policies are absolutely everywhere at the moment. However, the noble Lord valuably illustrated from his own knowledge and experience—coming back to my earlier point—how development and transport working together, a classic case of joining up policies, can produce the right results if it is done in a coherent way.
I shall not go much further. My noble friend Lord Haselhurst mentioned very light rail, and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, rightly pointed out disparities in funding between different regions. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for endorsing most if not all of the things said in the debate by those who participated in putting forward the report.
The Minister has put a great deal of preparation into this. She is highly committed to transport and public transport, and we are all grateful to her for listening to us today and for responding on behalf of the Government. I am relieved to be able to tell her that I do not think anybody in the debate actually suggested that she run all the local transport systems in the country from her desk in Whitehall, but even so, none of that—with her very correct emphasis on local choice by locally elected authorities—would stop her insisting that transport plans are up to date as a condition of funding. It would not stop her considering whether her active travel plans—which she says in that minatory tone are entirely a matter for local choice but obviously they will not get any money they do not adopt them and that other consequences might flow from them—are actually impinging on the reliability of buses, which she thinks is very important.
I think that we could do more and that the report remains still to be properly digested by the Government. We did not have time to discuss post-project evaluation, but many of the recommendations made in the report still have not been fully taken on board by the Government, though I think they would be very helpful. With that, I thank everybody and I commend the report to the committee.
Bus Services
Lord Moylan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I keep hearing this from the Labour Party, and I am not entirely sure which regulations and powers Labour is proposing to give back to local transport authorities. As the noble Lord well knows, at the moment, local transport authorities are required to produce an enhanced partnership, which is between them and the bus operators. If they do not want to do that, they can take all the powers they want and franchise the whole system.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, will my noble friend be issuing guidance to plumbers and electricians on how to carry their tools and equipment on a bus, especially in outer London, since the Mayor of London appears determined to deprive them of their vans?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Questions is fun today, isn’t it? The Government will not be issuing guidance to plumbers and electricians, on the basis that they probably know how to carry their tools. We are looking with great interest at the Mayor of London’s proposed extension of ULEZ. I would also point out that he announced—yesterday, I think—something called the Superloop for outer London, which sounded very new. However, I checked and in my area that includes the existing X26, so the Superloop involves quite a substantial amount of rebranding, as often happens with the Mayor of London.
Bus Industry Support
Lord Moylan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am not entirely sure that I follow the noble Lord’s thinking that, just by devolving it, the same amount of money will provide services at a lower cost. It is the case that local authorities get funding to support bus services, including from the fare cap, the bus recovery grant, BSOG and concessions. The simple answer here is that we have to make local transport authorities and bus operators work together more effectively.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, the Built Environment Committee noted in its report last year, which is yet to be debated, that without a continuation of the grant beyond March route mileage would fall by as much as 20%. Like the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, I am grateful to hear that the grant has continued. None the less, newspapers report that overall mileage has fallen by 10% up to only a couple of weeks ago. Does my noble friend the Minister consider this to be a satisfactory situation?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My noble friend is right that some routes have been changed and others have been reduced. It is the case that, if an operator wants to reduce a route, it must put in an application to the local transport authority, which has the ability then to subsidise or to tender that route. We have to establish a network which matches the revised passenger demand following the pandemic.
Electric Vehicles: Supporting Access
Lord Moylan Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The Government feel that the take-up of electric vehicles should be countrywide. The key thing about rural areas is making sure that they have appropriate access to charge points. We are aware that rural areas are more poorly served than their urban equivalents, which is why we are looking carefully at the amount of support we can give to local authorities. For example, so far, 157 local authorities have applied to the On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme—I wish it were more—and we expect 11,000 charge points to be rolled out with this scheme. I really do think that there is an opportunity for rural local authorities to grasp the financial support that the Government have made available.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, quite apart from the cost of electricity, does my noble friend accept that many people in this country are reliant on cars with a price point of roughly £15,000? That would not buy you an electric battery, let alone an electric car. Are the Government not in danger of pricing large numbers of people out of car ownership altogether?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My noble friend is right that many people do not buy any vehicle. Indeed, fleet operator businesses represent around half of the new vehicles purchased in this country. It is important that those vehicles then come into the secondary used car market once they have ended their useful life within businesses. That happens after around three years, so we expect a number of zero-emission vehicles to come into the used car market in due course. We recognise that there are probably not enough of them there now, but that is just a function of time. We can work with fleet operator businesses and get them to buy new zero-emission vehicles, which will then come into the used car market.
Payments to Train Operating Companies
Lord Moylan Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I do not accept that at all. It is right that we ensure that our services meet the needs of passengers and are punctual and reliable, and that the contribution from the national taxpayer is appropriate. There will be areas of duplication and areas where efficiencies can be found. The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail states that in five years’ time, savings of about £1.5 billion should be available after simplification and efficiencies. Those are the things we are trying to drive out of the system. We want passenger services to be as good as we can possibly make them because we really would like people to travel on our railways.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend have a view on the level of unionisation on the railways and what are the consequences of it for the cost of staff and pay?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My noble friend makes a very important point. All noble Lords will have seen that there is a level of unrest among the unions that represent those working on the railways. Sometimes I feel that their behaviour might be potentially counterproductive in the long term. For example, we have strikes at the moment on the London Underground where, because of the pay deal that was reached a couple of years ago, the staff will be getting a pay increase of 8%.
Global Traffic Scorecard: London
Lord Moylan Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Moylan
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the report by INRIX 2021 Global Traffic Scorecard, published on 6 December; and in particular, its findings (1) regarding the number of hours UK drivers spent in traffic, and (2) that London is the most congested city in the world in terms of traffic congestion.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, although officials have noted the INRIX report, the department makes its own assessment of congestion using the metric of average delay based on seconds of delay per vehicle per mile. This is generally a more accurate way of estimating congestion in contrast to grossing up the total hours lost from a small sample to total driver population, as INRIX has done.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I assume the implication of that Answer from my noble friend is that there is no congestion for us to worry about. I was going to ask her whether the Department for Transport still holds to the assumption that vehicular traffic congestion has an economic cost, or whether it has, since Covid began, altered the methodology by which it applies that assumption, so that it is much less concerned about it.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I reassure my noble friend that we still believe that vehicular congestion has an economic cost; this can be a personal economic cost and a national economic cost. But we do not estimate a total cost of congestion on the road network as a whole; that is not routinely assessed by the department. We look at things such as journey time savings on road schemes appraisal, alongside many other impacts, be they economic, social or environmental, to make the right decisions.
Extraordinary Funding and Financing Agreement for Transport for London
Lord Moylan Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I live in London. I have a 60-plus Oyster card. I was a TfL board member for eight years and deputy chairman for half that time. I have great affection for Transport for London. Nobody wants to see a long-term settlement for it more than I do, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, just explained, it is impossible to put one in place at the moment.
A comparison is sometimes drawn with the train operating companies, which have been funded. Politically, constitutionally and legally, they are agents of the Government. The difference is that, politically, constitutionally and legally, TfL is an agent of the mayor. To understand the Government’s anxiety about entering into a long-term settlement with the mayor, one needs a forensic understanding of his financial responsibility over the past four years. He was elected in May 2016. The pandemic hit in March 2020, almost exactly four years later. I want to concentrate on those four years.
Before the pandemic hit, the mayor came into office with two dangerous pledges. One was a fare freeze at a time when public transport was heaving with people and there was money for him to collect. As he has accepted, the cost of that fare freeze over a four-year period was £600 million; that is £600 million forgone. He added to that the Hopper fare on buses, allowing people two rides in an hour. TfL budgeted £35 million per annum to fund that, only to find after a year that there were 100 million usages at £1.50 a pop. That is a top figure; TfL will not give an estimate. It is a bit complicated—some people might have hit the daily cap, for example—so let us be generous and say that this represented only £130 million forgone per year. That means another £600 million forgone over four years, adding up to £1.2 billion left on the table by the mayor in the fat years. The result was a subsidy for the buses, which hit £600 million under Ken Livingstone. Under Boris Johnson, that was brought down to £450 million with no loss in bus mileage. Under Sadiq Khan, before the pandemic, it rose to £750 million a year, with a 7% cut in bus mileage to go with it.
The mayor’s second pledge was that there would be no strikes on the Underground. That is an easy, but expensive, pledge to fulfil: you just give in to the unions. Until recently, that is exactly what he did. One consequence of that has been a considerable growth in the number of Tube drivers. The system needs about 3,000 as a minimum to run. When I last looked, before the pandemic hit, there were in excess of 4,000. Let us say that there are 1,000 excess posts at roughly £50,000—possibly £60,000 now—a year. That is £200 million over four years, which brings us up to £1.4 billion forgone. To his credit, the mayor embarked on a reduction in the management head count but, given the generous severance packages negotiated by the unions, it will take several years for TfL to see the cash-flow benefits of that come through.
There is little to say on Crossrail, given the time. According to the mayor’s own account, he was totally surprised and shocked when it blew up in his face—presumably because he had taken no interest in it up to that point.
Of course, from his own resources, the mayor could not have coped with the pandemic. Nobody is suggesting that, even if that £1.5 billion or so was in the bank waiting to help him through, he could have got through a pandemic of the length we have seen without government subvention. However, it is hard to discern how he has faced up to the hard choices that this sudden, possibly continuing, loss of income has made for TfL. There is a lot of pleading for money from him but very little leadership; this is consistent with his behaviour in the fat years.
My noble friend the Minister will have her own view but, having myself struck long-term deals for TfL with, among other people, Conservative Governments and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who just spoke, I well understand the difficulties that the current Government have in doing so now.
Insulate Britain
Lord Moylan Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Moylan
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the costs to (1) public services, and (2) the wider economy, of the recent campaign by Insulate Britain of obstructing motorways and major roads.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, Insulate Britain’s irresponsible actions have disrupted thousands of people’s lives. National Highways estimates that the financial impact on drivers from time lost during just three days of disruption totals £559,946. This does not include the costs of missed appointments or of managing the incidents, disruption to manufacturing or retail, or the impact of disruption on other days. These costs would have been even higher without prompt action by the police to remove protesters and free up traffic.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, according to the Observer at the weekend, Insulate Britain activists are baffled as to why they are not in jail already. They thought that their campaign would be over in two days, rather than being allowed to go on for five weeks. I think that the rest of the country rather shares their bafflement. As they resume their very expensive campaign of disrupting ordinary people’s lives, can my noble friend say that the Government both have and will deploy the necessary legal powers to bring them before a court of law?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
We are investigating all possible legal avenues to bring these people to justice. National Highways and Transport for London have both rapidly put in place injunctions to deter these sort of dangerous actions. Only yesterday, the High Court granted National Highways an interim injunction banning activities which obstruct traffic and access on any part of the strategic road network—that is, all motorways and major A roads. Last Friday, National Highways applied for committal for contempt of court in respect of nine individuals suspected of breaching injunctions. If found to be in breach, these individuals could face an unlimited fine and/or imprisonment.
North of England: Rapid Mass Transport System
Lord Moylan Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Moylan
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given to the construction of an underground Maglev rapid mass transport system between cities in the north of England.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, the Government have thoroughly investigated whether our forthcoming major investment in connectivity between northern cities should be maglev rather than rail. We concluded that rail remains the best option for a number of reasons, the most important being that new conventional rail infrastructure can better be integrated into the existing network.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, maglev is a great British invention increasingly deployed in Asia for high-speed travel. As our world-beating British tunnelling engineers have shown, constructing railways in-tunnel can be cheaper than constructing them on the surface, provided that it stays in-tunnel. However, it seems that every proposal for maglev that comes from the Department for Transport is rebuffed. Can my noble friend explain why her department is so wedded to a 200 year-old technology that, when constructed on the surface, can both cost more and be very annoying for local voters?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am sure all noble Lords will agree that, just because something is old, that does not mean it is useless. We must look at all technologies, and that is precisely what we do. My noble friend makes an important point in saying that systems around the world use this, but just one operational high-speed system does so at the moment: the Shanghai City maglev. There are many others operating at lower speeds—that is, less than 100 mph—and obviously, there is one in construction in Japan, but it is coming up against some cost pressures.