Covid-19: Transport

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

This is an incredibly important topic. The Rail Delivery Group—the organisation made up of the train operating companies—is finalising staff guidance, which includes suggested example questions around where a customer may have a preference in the nature of the assistance provided. It has not been finalised. There will be public communications on this in due course, so the RDG will be able to provide further information. The rail industry is currently undertaking a comprehensive review of the passenger journey to understand better the needs of those passengers who have invisible impairments because, as the noble Baroness quite rightly says, sometimes those passengers have other needs.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, what strikes me about this is that the virus is the subject of a huge amount of numerical modelling and forecasting. I am amazed at the lack of numerical modelling in passenger transport of intermodal splits on different scenarios. In the medium term—in the autumn or something like that—we will need to sustain public confidence with more information, options and explanations of the dilemmas in the trade-offs of social distancing, in this case, with the rate of growth or decline of GDP et cetera. It is very important to have a higher level of public engagement and understanding.

Initially, will the Government institute more transparency on where the pinch points will be later in the year—information on which I am sure exists in the files of the Department for Transport—so that we can have an adult conversation, as called for by one of the Minister’s colleagues the other day? The modal split in town, country, big cities and so on will be different for rail, bus, car et cetera, but we need to make sure that we do not run into gridlock in some centres by digging up the road to put in a wider pavement, such as Piccadilly Circus et cetera being dug up at the same time as Oxford Circus. Is that not a danger? I do not know which forum might be useful, but I know that there are a lot of very well-informed and interested parties. Would this be something to look into so that we can have some numerical forecasts to scrutinise, with no skin off the Government’s nose? Public engagement will heighten public understanding.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

The noble Lord raises interesting issues to do with data and modelling. I reassure him that the Department for Transport has a vast amount of data and does a huge amount of modelling. However, the sort of thing that he is talking about—a very centralised, top-down approach to solving our local transport needs—is not what we are proposing at the moment. In fact, we think the right way to go is to talk to the metropolitan mayors and local authority groups and get them to refresh their local transport plans, because they are the ones who know what is going to happen in their local communities. They can really put into practice what will need to be done to support the future forecasts for the different splits on the different modes of transport.

I agree with the noble Lord that there is much to be done—much data and much modelling—and that there are things we can crack on with, but this is best done locally. The Department for Transport is very happy to help. We review these plans and have asked these groups to refresh their local plans in light of the changed circumstances.