High Speed Rail (London–West Midlands) Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

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

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, I recall the old luggage vans, although the Minister is far too young to remember things like that. I was travelling on a train in Australia a couple of years ago which still had a luggage van, and it was used for two things. First, it was used for people to put long-distance small packages on. They were not travelling on the train themselves; they were simply sending their package. That might be a company or a private individual. It was also used in the same way as we check our luggage on to an aeroplane—you checked your luggage on to the train. It transformed the experience of sitting on a crammed carriage with people jockeying for position with their luggage. I fully accept that that model is probably not acceptable or appropriate in the UK, but we need to move on from our fatal tendency to cram as many seats into the space as possible while ignoring the requirements for luggage space. I am sure that your Lordships will all have sat on a so-called express train to an airport—by definition in a scenario where you are likely to have quite a lot of luggage—and seen people sitting with large suitcases on their laps because there is absolutely no space left in the tiny amount of room allocated for luggage on those trains.

I support the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, because I think that we need to be more far-sighted on this. His suggestion on flip-down seats is extremely interesting and a useful compromise, because it provides seats where they are needed, when flexible space is not needed, allowing for change in future. Buggies are not going to go away. People are going to go on having children and using buggies and needing to put them on trains.

I want to use this opportunity to explore the issue of wheelchair space. By legislation, there will be such a space, but the Minister will remember that we had the discussion on the Bus Services Bill about what happens when two people in wheelchairs wish to travel together. Wheelchair spaces are very often a solitary allowance, so flexible space would allow additional space for wheelchair users. HS2 will be an absolute boon for wheelchair users; the current railway system is often difficult for people in wheelchairs to navigate, if not impossible. Air travel is very difficult for them. Many people in wheelchairs simply cannot drive a car. So this will be a huge opportunity for wheelchair users to undertake long-distance travel in comfort, and we need to ensure that the trains are designed in such a way that they are flexible enough to accommodate more than one wheelchair user at a time in a carriage.

Given that there has been so much publicity lately about the availability of toilet facilities for people with disabilities—noble Lords will recall the very distressing story of one of our Paralympic athletes who was put in a very undignified position by the fact that the sole disabled toilet on the train was not functioning—can the Minister clarify that these trains will have a modern and respectable level of toilet facilities for disabled people? I would like to feel that all the toilets were accessible for disabled people. By the time it is built, it will be the middle of the 21st century, and we really cannot have only a single available toilet on a train.

[Lord Adonis (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley are well taken, particularly in respect of facilities for the disabled, flexible space for carrying light freight and proper facilities for families and those looking after young children. There has been a tendency on the part of the railways to move in the Japanese direction of regarding freight and luggage as a bad thing and making it almost impossible for passengers to carry such items in comfort. I do not think that that is a direction in which we want to go.

However, the area where I am more doubtful is about facilities on high-speed trains or the next generation of trains in general for the carrying of bicycles. It is not that there should not perhaps be some facility at the margin for doing so—though I am not sure, even with the great wisdom and expertise of your Lordships’ House, that trying to design a train by committee is a good idea, so the figure of 10% that my noble friend Lord Berkeley has specified might be a bit too precise. If there is spare luggage space on a train that is suitable for carrying bikes, then that is fine. But the real issue in terms of encouraging much more bicycle use in relation to trains—which is out of all proportion more important than the capacity to carry bikes on trains themselves, which will only ever be marginal, particularly with very busy trains loading and unloading hundreds of people at a time—is decent cycle storage and rental facilities at stations, so that passengers do not need to convey bikes on the train in the first place. With the best will in the world, you are only ever going to be able to carry a handful of bikes on trains, but you can have thousands of bicycles, either privately owned or for rental, provided for at stations. By and large, our mainline stations, which were not designed for bicycles or indeed anything else modern, including in most cases decent retail facilities, have lamentable facilities for storing bikes. It is a telling indication of the big problems that we have in managing bicycles, even with all the improvements in London, that the cycle rental scheme does not embrace most London termini, because how to deal with the big issues of location and of shipping bikes backwards and forwards has not yet been worked out.

The contrast with best European practice in this area could not be more stark. I shall never forget visiting Amsterdam station and other major stations in Holland. Where you come out of the station, you have huge areas reserved for bikes, including rental schemes, along with bike workshops, so that you can get repairs done, and proper supervised bike facilities. It is a completely different situation from the one we have here. We are not yet at the stage of detailed station design plans for HS2 but I hope that, when it comes to the design of these hugely forward-looking stations that we want to see at Euston, Old Oak Common, Birmingham Curzon Street and other locations going north, there will be exemplary facilities for cyclists with significant space made available for cycle storage, repairs and rental schemes. In terms of a path-breaking approach to integrating cycling with railway use, seeing that there are state-of-the-art and capacious cycle facilities at stations is far more important than any provision that it might be possible to make in respect of the trains.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, as somebody who puts his Brompton bike on a train every day when I come here, I partly disagree with my noble friend, not on the substance of the point that he makes—that we cannot accommodate hundreds of bicycles on the train; there is a balance to be struck—but in that there are a significant number of people like myself who ride to the station and put their folding bike on the train and then get off at the other end and cycle a bit further. The other usage that I have is on my annual cycle tour, when I do want to take a bike on a long-distance journey on a train. At the moment, the facilities are very limited; you have to reserve in advance, which is probably what will obtain. While I agree with my noble friend that trying to design a train by committee is not a wise thing to do, it is wise to have this debate and raise these issues, which are important.

I certainly concur with the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on disability. It is not just about the number of wheelchairs—it is about ensuring that you have level surfaces so that you can go from platform to train in an easy and effective manner, rather than what you see at the moment. I think that we briefly raised that in one of the Select Committee sittings, but I am not absolutely sure about that. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, this is my last amendment in this section and it is to do with timetabling. Again, we had this experience with Crossrail and the great western route. We were pressing for a long time, saying, “You’re adding extra trains on to the great western. Where will all the freight trains and the intercities go, as you’re not building any more tracks?”. I said they had to produce a timetable. The first timetable produced for the great western between Reading and London was wonderful but it had only Crossrail trains on it. They said, “That’s the timetable” and I said, “What about the other trains?”. They said, “Oh, we haven’t put them on”. I said, “If you’re running a railway, you’ve got to put every train on the timetable. Don’t be silly, go away and do it again”. After about a couple of years, they came back and said. “Here it is”.

I gave their timetable to my experts and said, “Is the freight capacity that the Government have committed to on the timetable?”. They said, “Well, you’ve got 22 freight trains a day on it and you asked for 26”. I said, “Where are the others?”. They said, “Crossrail says they are on the timetable”. They were, but for a different line that went across the great western route on a bridge, so it was completely irrelevant. I got pretty angry then and said, “Can they go the other way?”. They said, “We haven’t checked that but it’s on the timetable”. They were adamant that they had to get priority for the Crossrail trains to Reading on the slow lines. They really wanted all the other trains to go on the fast lines. I got as far as telling some Members of Parliament in Cardiff and Bristol that they were going to have one train an hour and not two, because Crossrail was going to take all the paths. Eventually, the infrastructure manager was told by the Government to do a comprehensive timetable, which is Network Rail’s job. That is what should happen.

Here, we have HS2 and the west coast main line. As I said on Tuesday, you have six tracks at Handsacre junction going into three for a bit, so there may be a traffic jam of trains. It is reasonable to have a draft timetable produced either by HS2 or Network Rail, or hopefully by both, to demonstrate how many of the trains that everybody wants to run can actually run up there. I argued against Handsacre on Tuesday but if it happens, we have to have a timetable because otherwise something will go wrong. It should be up to the regulator to decide which trains have priority and who can run them.

This is very much a probing amendment. The Minister may say that it is happening already, although I would slightly challenge that. If it is not, perhaps he could say a few words to the relevant people to make sure that it does happen quite quickly and that there is good consultation with all the operators. I beg to move.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, unless I mistook what was going on, I have a feeling that the Minister has already replied to this amendment. I feel that the reply he gave to Amendment 22 was in fact a reply to Amendment 24A, hence the reference to freight paths and to keeping arrangements flexible in advance and not making commitments this far out. It may be that he has more to add on these issues.

I would make just two points. It is not clear to me why my noble friend thinks that publishing a draft timetable nine years before the line opens is a good idea. This would build up a whole set of debates, expectations and controversies long before the likely pattern of demand and usage is clear. Was there some particular reason why he was so keen that this work should be done so far in advance of the opening of HS2?

The second point that the Minister replied to earlier was about freight use, but of course it is not envisaged that there will be any freight paths on HS2. Perhaps my noble friend will say why he thinks there should be, because the released capacity on the west coast main line will provide very significant additional freight opportunities, and of course freight trains do not run at the speeds achieved by passenger trains, so they would significantly disrupt the operation of the high-speed service if they operated during the day. Moreover, as the Minister also said earlier, I understand that the custom and practice on most high-speed lines is that maintenance work will be done overnight and it is therefore essential that the lines can be closed for that purpose. So I was not quite sure about some of the points made by my noble friend—why he wants either to set these in stone now, or in the case of freight, to build up expectations that there would be freight services on this line, which is quite unlikely to be the case.

[Lord Framlingham]

My Lords, I rise briefly to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and to support what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is trying to say. This is a long and complicated process and however far in advance one talks about timetables, surely there is little point in building something if it will not deliver what one wants at the end of the day. One must look at the end as well as the beginning to make sure that one gets the system right.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, just to be clear, the illustrative timetables have been published already and, indeed, have been a part of the business case. What my noble friend’s amendment refers to is a comprehensive and detailed working timetable, which, as I say, will greatly build up the expectations of those who will benefit and lead to big and controversial campaigns by those who will not. In some areas, particularly with regard to freight trains, I am assuming that they would not feature in any event.

[Lord Framlingham]

I hate to labour the point. I can understand why detailed timetables would not be wanted, but surely identifying possible bottlenecks and flaws well in advance is absolutely essential.