Extraordinary Funding and Financing Agreement for Transport for London

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I will follow his excellent example by also declaring my interest as a resident for the whole working week in London for many years and a regular user of the District and Circle lines and the cheerful 507 bus service from Waterloo.

That said, and to pick up the noble Lord’s last point and the point he made about how important London is to the national economy, I think the Government have stepped up to the plate, keeping TfL running not with Londoners’ money but with more than £4 billion and counting of taxpayers’ money, gathered from all over the country—national money, in other words. So it is to me a considerable paradox that Members of our national Parliament cannot usually put down, say, a Written Question about TfL, because we are rightly told by the Table Office that it is independent and nothing to do with Parliament. Shedloads of money is going into London and TfL, but we cannot even have a Written Question such as the one noble Lords have tried to table in recent weeks on what is happening about the wearing of face coverings in London, because that is said to be something that is not for Parliament. So it is very hard for us to know, on behalf of national taxpayers like me, what is going on within the Bermuda Triangle that seems to me to characterise TfL accountability.

It is clear that the mayor should have done much more about the wearing of face coverings on the London Underground over the last few months and encouraging it. It is equally clear that the mayor and his team have made scant efforts to attend even to the basics in TfL, such as seeing that fares are properly collected and that fare dodgers are reasonably, properly and carefully brought to account. I hope that is something that everyone in this House would agree with.

The money to keep services running is being provided by national taxpayers, so the mayor now needs to show much more leadership and to take more financial responsibility himself. He needs to look at everything that could raise more funds to help run TfL from, for example, road users paying per mile to widening the congestion zone, however unfortunate and unpopular that might be to some, lest we be stuck into infinity with an annual round of campaigning from the mayor to cover up bus signs and shut down Tube lines in a fashion that even the late Dr Beeching would not have dared to do.

All that said, it is pretty obvious to the attentive noble Lord that I am a supporter of the Government in this, so I will save my last word for them. I certainly strongly support the Government—although I might be something of an endangered species, if you read the morning papers. As soon as the latest pandemic threats are evaluated and things get back to whatever the new normal is, I hope that Her Majesty’s Government will adopt an attitude or even a policy of creative courage where they can in order to, without any cost at all, bring passengers back into central and outer London.

One way of doing that is to bring civil servants back to their offices again, as soon as possible, for the good of the nation, London and the Civil Service itself. Bringing civil servants back to their expensive and now too often white elephant office blocks, to seeing and talking to colleagues at the coffee point and to helping and encouraging new joiners; all these things are critically important. To parody the old saying “Get on your bike”, it is more a case of “Get off your Pelotons” at home and get back into the office in the cause of a better Civil Service.