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Mr. Tim Smith (Beaconsfield): Is my hon. and learned Friend aware that according to the Evening Standard of5 March, Jimmy Knapp, the leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, called the Bill privatisation by the back door? Does my hon. and learned Friend think that Mr. Knapp may have drafted the Labour party's amendment?
Mr. Garnier: I gather that, under new Labour, all the doors have been relabelled--so we cannot be sure whether Mr. Knapp knows what a back door is. I was seeking to disprove the soundness of the case put forward by the Labour party's amendment. The explanatory and financial memorandum continues:
- "Clause 1 empowers LRT, subject to the Secretary of State's consent, to enter into certain agreements with contractors for the carrying on by the contractors of activities which LRT does not have the power to carry on.
- Clause 2 makes provision, subject to the Secretary of State's consent, for LRT to acquire land".
I refer again to the national health service which, through trust boards and health authorities, can acquire land. That is not deemed to be privatisation by the back door, front door or through the roof.
The memorandum continues:
A whole host of nationally important functions are carried out on behalf of the Government or on behalf of public bodies by individuals who are not part of the Government machine or who are not direct employees of public bodies. There is no diminution in the quality of the oversight or of the service provided by those individuals.
Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle):
Would the hon. and learned Gentleman be happy if the train drivers did not work for London Transport? Would that be acceptable?
Mr. Garnier:
What is important is that the driver of the train is qualified to do so. I ask the hon. Gentleman: would he be happy if a fully qualified brain surgeon performed an operation on his head, but happened not to be employed by the national health service? Of course he would. He would be interested in whether that specialist had the necessary skills and qualifications to perform the operation.
Mr. Richard Ottaway (Croydon, South):
The hon. Gentleman does not need one.
Mr. Garnier:
It is not for me to enter into personal banter with my hon. Friend, or to make comments about what is inside the head of the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew).
As my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon(Dr. Goodson-Wickes) is precluded from speaking in the debate, because he is the parliamentary private secretary to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport, I want to pay tribute to him for the work that he has done on behalf of his constituents to ensure that the Government and London Transport are kept fully up to the mark with regard to the southern end of the Northern line, about which a great deal has been said this evening. He has pressed vehemently for improvements in rolling stock, particularly new arrangements through the PFI, which was discussed earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) and which has provided huge improvements to what used to be called the misery line, but which I understand can no longer be so called.
My hon. Friend the Minister and many other hon. Members this evening have described this wholly uncontroversial Bill as a technical measure. It removes legal obstacles which would otherwise prevent LT from getting on with what it should be getting on with. This is part of a range of initiatives that the Government and the Department have entered into during the past year or so in order to introduce private finance into these huge and most important publicly needed projects.
Listening to the hon. Member for Eastleigh(Mr. Chidgey), I found it extremely difficult to decide whether he intended to vote for or against the motion, to abstain, or perhaps to go for a combination of all three. No doubt we shall discover later this evening.
Ms Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Highgate):
The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), at the behest of the Secretary of State for Transport, began his contribution to this evening's debate by referring to the channel tunnel rail link. The Secretary of State pointed out to him the relevant passages in Hansard when the Secretary of State made his announcement to the House. I am presupposing that, as the hon. and learned Gentleman had to have the initials CTRL translated for him.
Mr. Garnier:
I am not a professional actor so I am not as good at learning my lines as other hon. Members may be. I should inform the hon. Lady that the Secretary of State did not put me up to speak about the channel tunnel--whatever it is called. What I did was, because I am a Leicestershire Member whose constituents useSt. Pancras station, ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the details and the reference in Hansard since I knew that he had spoken about it on the occasion that I mentioned. I appreciate that there must be a degree of to-ing and fro-ing in a debate such as this, but I would not like the hon. Lady to advance her case on a false premise.
Ms Jackson:
I am grateful for what the hon. and learned Gentleman has said, but clearly the Secretary of State is desperate to make his case since he left the Front Bench and went to the hon. and learned Member for Harborough. If the hon. and learned Gentleman was asking for information, I should have thought that it would have been more courteous for him to have gone to the Secretary of State.
However, that was the opening of the hon. and learned Gentleman's contribution. He referred more than once to St. Pancras station and to what has been handed over to the designated operator by the Government, which has been estimated to be £5.7 billion of the nation's assets in cash and kind and, if memory serves, he believed that that was a good exchange for the country.
Writing in The Guardian on Monday 4 March, Victor Keegan, in his economics notebook, the headline of which was, "Public taken for a ride on railways", said:
and would in fact have cost just £1.4 billion as opposed to the £5.7 billion the CTRL is now costing us. He goes on to say:
That is what is at the heart of the Opposition's concern about the Bill.
In common with, I believe, every other hon. Member who has spoken in the Chamber this afternoon,I congratulate the Minister for Transport in London on a sparkling and entertaining speech. We have come to expect the Minister to be invariably entertaining, but he excelled even his high standard this afternoon. He spoke for more
than an hour and he was generous in allowing interventions. The fact that 99.9 per cent. of the time he managed to deflect attention away from the Bill is a great compliment to his abilities. In common with other hon. Members, I think that it is sad that the House will lose his presence if he is true to his word and does not stand again at the next election.
The hon. Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) claimed to have spoken more often, asked more questions and made more speeches regarding the Northern line than any other hon. Member. It must be a bitter agony to him that after all those questions and speeches and after all that time, he managed to bring about absolutely no improvements on what has become known as the misery line without the aid of the all-party Northern line group which, by excessive pressure, managed to get the Government to move from what seemed an intransigent position to consider the proposals that at that time were being presented by ABB on the leasing of new rolling stock for the Northern line.
Here again, I must pay tribute to the Minister, who assisted the all-party Northern line group in bringing pressure to bear upon the Treasury and assisted in at least getting new rolling stock on one of the oldest sections of the oldest underground system in the world.
The hon. Member for Hendon, South was somewhat excessive when he suggested that the leasing of new rolling stock is somehow transforming the misery line into some modern, efficient and consistently reliable line. That is not what I and my constituents know it to be. We will indeed have new rolling stock, but that is about all that will be new. There will still be the agony of waiting to see if the trains will arrive because the track and signalling have yet to be modernised. All that is in the future. The plans that the Government have presented to us this afternoon via the Bill do not lead me to believe that we will be seeing those improvements in the near future.
One of the most charming aspects of the Minister's speech this afternoon was the way in which he presented London underground as being already almost perfect.His description bore no relation whatever to the London underground that I know and which anyone who has occasion to use it regularly will know to be the system for this, our great capital city.
We could undoubtedly argue all night and probably all day tomorrow about the root cause for London's underground system becoming, according, I believe, to the Evening Standard, the worst underground system in the world. Opposition Members have made strong representations that the basic root cause has been the failure to invest adequately in it during the past 16 years. A briefing put out by the Capital Transport Campaign in November 1995 speaks of broken promises and says:
This blamed "chronic underinvestment" for deficiencies in the levels of service--this was five years ago--
he is now Foreign Secretary--
The system has had reduced budgets and many broken promises from the Government on the investment that is desperately needed to make the London underground "a moderately modern metro", to quote the managing director of London Underground.
The infrastructure is in serious trouble. For example, London Underground has to remove more than 3 million gallons of water from the system every day. The pumps and the drainage systems were designed in the Victorian era. The problem of flooding was identified in an internal London Underground report in 1993, which stated that emergency investment in drainage systems--at a cost of £18 million--was required simply to keep the network operational. In the event, only £9 million was made available and current investment in the drainage system is running at £5 million a year.
I find it hard to believe--although I would be delighted to be proved wrong--that the Government's private finance initiative, as it is at the moment structured, would attract that level of investment to London's underground system. I regret to say that I have forgotten which of my colleagues made the point--it may have been my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill)--but the drainage system is one of those hidden problems into which the private sector is always somewhat slow to put its money. The private sector tends to like to have its contribution publicly emblazoned and visible. Something as basic as modern pumping and drainage systems would be unlikely to attract the private part of the private finance initiative, given--as my hon. Friends have pointed out--that the system as devised at the moment by the Government is both cumbersome and expensive for those businesses which would be interested in entering a public and private partnership--we consider that the best way forward--to invest in the vital and necessary infrastructure of our capital city and the rest of the country.
The lack of investment has led to speed restrictions being imposed on a number of routes and, unless the problem is tackled in the next three years, whole sections of line face closure. We have already had advance warning from London Underground of major closures this year on four lines--the longest and, it could be argued, the most serious being the Bakerloo line, which is expected to be closed for between six and seven months. There are also speed restrictions on the East London line, between Surrey Quays and Wapping; on the Central line, between Stratford and the west end; on the Northern line, between Leicester Square and Moorgate--although it seems on some days that there are speed restrictions to the point at which no trains are running at all on the Northern line; and on the Piccadilly line, between Piccadilly and King's Cross. That is not the only area on the London Underground system that is in desperate need of major investment.
If we look at the supporting structures of the underground, we find that at Sloane Square station last year a supporting girder cracked and the platform had to
be closed. There was no risk to passengers or staff on that occasion, but that girder was fitted in 1868. The problem of aging support structures is compounded by the age of the network. We have the oldest underground system in the world. The East London line was built in 1869, the Metropolitan line in 1863, and the Circle and Hammersmith lines in 1863.
The track on the network is now so old that the number of speed restrictions on the network has doubled over the past two years. London Transport has videos showing the track physically bending as trains run over it. I would hate Conservative Members to accuse me of scaremongering. It is not my intention to suggest that the bending of the track is necessarily a danger to the millions of people who use the underground system every day, but it significantly lengthens journey times and increases the deterioration of the track and the rolling stock. Renewal expenditure alone in 1994-95 was £56 million, but even that level of investment is insufficient to tackle the problem.
Most of the embankments--not an invisible part of the network--on which the track is built were built and designed in the Victorian era. The Victorian building techniques involved piling up mounds of earth that were then overlaid with the rail line. As a result, large sections of the network face problems of subsidence and land slippage. London Transport is engaged in a costly programme of reinforcing the embankments with steel girders to deal with that problem.
I return to the subject of that well-known misery line, the Northern line. Signalling on parts of the Northern line is pre-war. The cost of replacing the signalling on just a small section of the network will be £22 million.
That is enough of the depressing list, which I could lengthen with no great difficulty, to show that there is, and has been for a considerable time, a total lack of the necessary investment in what surely should be the central and supporting arm of London's transport system.
We have heard contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House, and I regret that I do not know their constituencies in some cases. We heard about the enormous benefits that have been produced for the travelling public by the introduction by the Government of passenger and citizens charters. I know, from talking to my constituents, that charters have increased complaints and smoothed the line between the consumer and the provider of the service so that it is easier to make complaints, but they have not improved services.
Much was made during our debate on fares on the London underground that fare revenues could be used as part of London Transport's central investment structure, but we know that some fares have risen in real terms by 70 per cent. in the past 10 years. For many people, who have no other means of transport to and from home and work other than the underground, the increase in fares can be an increasing burden, especially as the Government have been assiduous in the past few years in ensuring that wage rises have been kept very low.
The point was made that there is already a way of stopping trains on the underground because a driver can close together two wires that run along the tube train tunnels. That is fine, but I have read about the possibility of totally unmanned underground trains without even a driver--although I cannot imagine that they are going to be any part of the Government's plans in the future. There is enough technological expertise around at the moment
to allow trains to run without any staff on board at all.I would not want to travel on such trains, and in any case I cannot see it happening in the foreseeable future.
The last clause of the Bill has to do with reductions in staffing. That causes me some concern. One of the first ways of cutting costs in previous privatisations has always been to reduce staff numbers. I know that the Minister has said that there would be no overall reduction in staff numbers; staff employed by London Underground will simply move, he says, to the private business that is due to enter the two schemes to which he referred. I find that unsatisfactory. Whenever private businesses have taken over from public sector entities, in whole or in part, there have been staffing reductions, wage reductions and usually an extension of the hours that staff are used to working.
I am most concerned about the gradual erosion of LU manning levels and its impact on the safety of the travelling public--especially women. Perhaps the popular press like to dig up stories on this subject, but lately there seem to have been too many reports of attacks on women travelling on their own late at night on certain parts of the underground system.
"Clause 3 enables the Secretary of State, by order, to provide that certain of LRT's statutory functions are exercisable by another person".
13 Mar 1996 : Column 1042
"Don't be deceived by claims that the fast rail link is a triumph for the Government's private sector finance initiative. As the Financial Times pointed out on Saturday, this scheme may even be costing the Exchequer more than the British Rail option which bit the dust in 1989",
"There is no chance of the private sector extending the link to the north unless the Government, as usual, underwrites the whole risk while leaving the profits for someone else."
"In 1991 the Government commissioned an investigation into London Underground by the Monopolies and Mergers"Commission--
"and recommended that investment rise to around £700-750 million a year.
In response, Malcolm Rifkind (then Transport Secretary)"--
"said the Government was 'committed to providing the resources for both improving the existing underground and expanding the system'. He promised that investment in the existing railway would be over £700 million by 1993/94. Last year it was just £528 million.
In 1991--just before the general election--the Government also promised £2.1 billion over three years for the existing underground. In the Autumn Statement the following year it was slashed by£700 million. Last year the Chancellor cut the three-year figure back to just £1.2 billion."
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