Crossrail 2

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and he will know that there are great cities with great histories such as Athens that have been plagued by a sense that they do not work, that they are polluted and that they are not the great cities that many would like. The Olympics made a difference, but, of course, there are big economic problems in Greece. Nevertheless, cities can establish reputations. Before Mayor Giuliani, New York had a reputation for crime and congestion, and the horribleness of getting on the subway there undermined the attempts being made to promote it as a world city.

The hon. Gentleman will also know that we have good plans, which we must get on with, to bring High Speed 2 to our country. That will increase the number of morning arrivals at Euston station by 30%. What capacity gains are made by Crossrail 1, the tube updates or the Thameslink programme are set to be wiped out by 2030. By 2031, overcrowding on network rail routes into London and London underground lines will be at the same utterly unacceptable levels as today. On the main north-south lines—the Northern, Victoria and Piccadilly lines—they will be even worse.

The Chancellor is fond of saying that Britain is open for business. Is it open for business if it takes the average worker more than an hour to commute? Is it open for business if we ask our business men and women to travel to and from work in conditions unfit for livestock? Is it open for business if the underground interchanges at the main line termini in our capital city—Victoria, Euston, King’s Cross and Waterloo—must close during rush hour due to dangerous overcrowding? Members will have found themselves in such shutdowns while attempting to get into or out of Victoria station as they commute in this city. What use is High Speed 2 if we must wait an hour and a half to leave Euston station?

As long as London keeps growing, the Government and this Mayor must ensure that our infrastructure is one step ahead, not two steps behind, yet if they pursue the same course that they have trodden during the first half of this Parliament, they will condemn London to some degree of failure. After all, they almost cancelled Crossrail 1 on entering office, the Thameslink programme is beset by delays, they cancelled the third runway at Heathrow and kicked the search for an alternative into the long grass and they cancelled the four-tracking of the west Anglia line, which would finally have provided a decent train service to some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the capital.

The only ambition that this Government presently have for the capital—the only vignette of a solution to the challenge that they face—is the two-station spur of the Northern line to Battersea power station, an extension that will make its Malaysian owners incredibly rich but do little for the businesses in Lambeth and Wandsworth that are being asked to foot the bill.

London needs a game-changer. We need a wholly new project to alleviate congestion, drive growth and improve journey times for Londoners. The Minister will have seen the report, published last month by Lord Adonis and London First, detailing the case for a new line, dubbed Crossrail 2, linking south-west with north-east London. He will also notice the breadth of support for Crossrail 2. It commands the support of London’s businesses: 69% of members of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry say that Crossrail 2 is vital to London, and a ComRes poll showed that 95% of London businesses believe that any cut to transport investment will damage the capital’s businesses in the long term. It commands the support of the major transport unions, and of successive Mayors of London.

The reason why Crossrail 2 unites so many frequent foes is that the case for it is utterly compelling. As Lord Adonis and his colleagues made clear, it is the only way that London will be able to cope with the challenges that it will face over the next 20 years and handle the 700,000 extra commuters who will be working in central London by 2031, and it is certainly the only way to deal with the extra burdens that High Speed 2 will put on congestion in the capital.

Better still, the report sets out the case for a regional and suburban route that will deliver immense benefits to London and beyond. It will finally bring tube stations to Mare street in Hackney, and it will double train frequency to places such as Kingston and Twickenham. It will also free track for South West Trains to increase the number of trains from Portsmouth, Basingstoke, Southampton and Farnham to London Waterloo that serve stations throughout Hampshire and Berkshire. Most importantly, it will provide a reliable train service and huge economic benefits to some of the most isolated and deprived areas of the Upper Lea valley, which includes my constituency.

The line can also be developed from Cheshunt through to Stansted airport, providing a stopping service on new tracks to complement a more frequent and faster Stansted express service. Not only could that mean better use of the excess capacity at Stansted airport, it would mean that communities with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country could benefit economically from having an airport on their doorstep and a new line connecting areas such as Northumberland Park, Edmonton, Tottenham, Dalston, Hackney and Wood Green to central London, Clapham, Wimbledon and Stansted station. It would clearly leverage investment from businesses and developers, create jobs each year after it had been completed and open up the Upper Lea valley as a growth area for the capital.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech, and I am grateful to him for allowing me to intervene. Does he agree that London is already well served in its number of runways and its total airport capacity? I think it has more than any other city in Europe, with the exception of Paris, which has one more runway. The problem in London is that we do not make good use of the capacity that we have. The point that he has just made, which is exactly right, is that by extending Crossrail to Stansted, for which the current Mayor of London has been pushing hard, at a stroke we would transform Stansted, which is only half used at the moment, into a natural destination for business travellers, which would in turn relieve pressure on Heathrow. To me, it seems like a no-brainer solution to our airport capacity problem. What does the right hon. Gentleman think?

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I tend to agree with much that he says, even though he belongs to another party. He makes his point incredibly well. Stansted is key to London’s development. It is extraordinary that the line currently running from Stansted to Liverpool Street is as chaotic, delay-prone and slow as it is. Clearly, efforts must be made to improve that service. He is absolutely right: a lot of attention has been paid to airport capacity. That is not the subject of this debate, but it is clear that investment in our train capacity, so that people can move around the city, will take a fine eye and focus. I hope that it will command the attention not just of the Mayor, as he rightly pointed out, but of the Government.

Yes, Crossrail 2 is ambitious. Its ambition comes with a price tag, but the central question is: what price doing nothing? What is the price of leaving communities cut off from central London, letting travel across London become more arduous than it is and causing major businesses to leave our capital for more mobile and modern competitors in Asia, Europe and America?

Some will still say that this is all too sudden and that more time is needed to consider and contemplate before the Government can decide, presumably, to consider and contemplate a bit more. I have sat where the Minister is sitting, as a Minister in different Departments, and I know the business of kicking things slightly into the long grass as one negotiates hard with the Treasury, but let us not forget that Crossrail 2 is quite long in the tooth. Part of the route was originally conceived as early as 1901, only to be dropped five years later. After the second world war, the idea of a Chelsea to Hackney line peppered almost every London rail study. In the early 1990s a route was finally safeguarded, and mutations of it have slowly been making their way between Whitehall in-trays ever since. Successive Governments have already had time to contemplate and consider the plan. It is now time for leadership and action.

As I outlined, London’s congestion problems will come to a head during the next period. The line needs to be open in the early 2030s, which means breaking ground in the early 2020s. We therefore need a hybrid Bill sooner rather than later and, because this project will no doubt be completed, owned and amended by successive Governments, it is critical that we establish cross-party support now, before the parliamentary cycle begins to gear up for the 2015 general election. In that spirit, I invite the Minister to address the inaugural meeting of the all-party group on Crossrail 2 that I am hoping to set up with colleagues here and in the other place over the coming weeks. Most importantly, will he detail exactly when he expects the review of the safeguarded route to begin, with an outline of the process involved, and when he expects it to be complete?

The Government’s role is not only to take leadership on this issue but to empower others to do the same. The most recent comprehensive spending review outlined funding for the Department for Transport only up until 2014-15, scrapping the long-term funding guarantee in previous spending reviews that provided a 10-year forecast of budgets. In December 2012, therefore, we had the ludicrous scenario of Transport for London publishing a 10-year business plan that could only outline funding until 2014-15. If that practice continues in the second spending review later this year, TfL will still have no certainty over its funding settlement after the 2015-16 financial year. It is clear that we need a proper funding settlement and that that need is great. Does the Minister agree that the best way to ensure the delivery of transport investment projects such as Crossrail 2 is to provide the bodies tasked with delivering them with clear indications of their future funding settlement over the long term?

Furthermore, I am sure that all of us who are keen to see more transport investment are concerned at the enduring silence of the Secretary of State for Transport while his Cabinet colleagues are peacocking across television studios to try to spare their Departments from further cuts. I invite the Minister to put all our minds at rest when he responds. Will he announce his membership of the national union of Ministers and will he put on record that he would like to see Crossrail 2 explicitly included in the comprehensive spending review in the same manner in which Crossrail 1 was included in the spending reviews of 2004, 2007 and 2010?

Will the Minister ensure that he does his best to get us into position to have a hybrid Bill shortly, with cross-party support and with some certainty that the dates will hold? Although 2030 or 2031 is still some distance away, we want to be sure of getting there so that we can begin the work now and not delay it until after a general election kicks the project into the long grass, in which case we will not see Crossrail 2 come to fruition during the lifetime of anyone in the Chamber.