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11.29 am
Mr. Norman Baker (Lewes): I congratulate the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Mr. Fitzpatrick) on securing this debate. I do not know whether he accelerated the timing of the Deputy Prime Minister's statement yesterday, or whether he was just very timely, unlike some of the trains that many of us rely on. I found his comments and those of the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Linton) interesting. We all agree that we must make the maximum creative use of the existing infrastructure. I benefited from the London orbital, such as it is, on Monday, when I travelled from Brighton to Oxford without changing, on the line via Kensington Olympia. I agree that the line is hardly used, but the potential is there.
The Thameslink service has allowed people from outside London to go through the city without having to change. The situation 10 years ago, when people had to get off at Victoria, take the tube and get another train somewhere else was simply ludicrous. People going about their business in London do not want loads of people traipsing on and off trains at different stations.
The idea of merging sub-surface lines with the tube is nothing new. I used to live at the end of the District line, at Upminster. Long before my time--pre-war, I think--that line was used for a combined London, Tilbury and Southend and underground service; one could get a train from Richmond to Southend via the tube network and overground lines. Such ideas were used in the past and it may be simply a matter of reactivating them. There used to be shared use of the Bakerloo line north of Harrow, with combined services running up to Watford Junction but that has now been cut back on the underground map.
I sympathise with the point about south London. I used to live in north London, and south London was a different world; it was pretty inaccessible, partly perhaps because of the nature of the underground map, which is representative rather than accurate in its portrayal of the distance between stations. For example, the escalator link between Monument and Bank is shown as about as long as the distance between Upminster and Barking on the District line. That would make it the longest escalator link in the world, I imagine.
Perhaps the Government could consider encouraging London Transport to devise a more creative map that shows more of the existing connections with--to use the shorthand--the British Rail network, of which many members of the public are not aware. Why are not the links to Clapham Junction and Olympia on the underground map?
I am surprised at the involvement of Railtrack and the Government's warm reception of it. The Government have been highly critical of Railtrack, with good reason, for giving a first-class service to its shareholders and a third-class service to some of its customers. We have heard about underinvestment and broken rails in the Severn tunnel and the Deputy Prime Minister has rightly been trying to force Railtrack to invest more in the network, but it seems that its reward for not doing so is to be given a share of the London underground network. We can only conclude that, had it failed even more abysmally, it would have been allowed to enter the two deep-tube public-private partnership competitions as well.
We must be careful before we hand over more of our rail infrastructure to Railtrack, given its poor performance so far. I hope that belt-and-braces contracts will be signed to ensure that it does not get another milch cow for its shareholders, leaving people in London, and the Government, wringing their hands and wondering what has gone wrong.
One of the technical questions that need to be answered is about the effect on overground suburban services. I am not sure whether it is intended that underground or overground rolling stock should be predominantly used. There is an acute shortage of rolling stock, and that which is used on the overground lines, which would presumably integrate with the underground network, is in many cases very old indeed. The Connex services from my part of the world use 1963 trains, and I think that 1954 trains run from Uckfield; certainly they were built before I was born, and they are still in daily use. What would the criteria for new rolling stock be?
All the underground system is third rail, as are many of the suburban services, but the north London services use overhead lines, so that complication needs to be sorted out. I am also slightly concerned about the capacity of the underground system to handle more trains. We can do a certain amount by increased signalling, but my understanding from talking to London Underground employees and my colleagues in London is that one of the problems is not signalling but station capacity. If we had more trains, the congestion on platforms, which is a real hazard, would only get worse. For example, London Bridge station is regularly blocked to prevent people from accessing the platform until one or two trains have gone.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex):
Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that there may be a danger that the Government will take this opportunity to reduce the urgency of the Crossrail proposal? The suggested link has always been the Treasury's answer to Crossrail; it is the cheap version, allowing the Heathrow express to run along the top of the Circle line and into Liverpool Street. Better integration is on offer, but no new capacity. We should be wary of an excuse to drop the urgency of the Crossrail project.
Mr. Baker:
That is a helpful intervention. We need to do both: to use our existing infrastructure in the best way but also to have new schemes giving access to areas such as Hackney--which Crossrail would serve--that would not benefit from the orbital link.
The Minister for Transport in London (Ms Glenda Jackson):
I can understand the hon. Gentleman's regarding the intervention by the hon. Member for North
Mr. Baker:
That is equally true. I can agree with both Front-Bench representatives who have intervened on me.
There is a Treasury input in the public-private partnership proposal. The hidden hand of the Treasury is always there, trying to ensure that as little public money as possible is spent on the project and that as much of it as possible is shunted off to the private sector. We have heard that there are problems with the timetable and we do not know when deals will be concluded and contracts signed.
My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) did not get an answer when he asked:
Why are the Government so opposed to the idea of a public interest company, which could provide the investment that the underground system needs? Do not large older systems such as London's tube network require access to predictable long-term sources of capital, including the ability to borrow against their own revenues? Allowing London's new transport authority to borrow, free from the artificial public sector borrowing requirement constraints, would enable it to access a capital market at far less expense than any private sector borrower. Why have the Government ruled that out and taken a more uncertain route?
There are problems with station capacity. Railtrack has said that the new Canada Water station on the East London line is unable to take more than four-vehicle trains and that peak demand "may cause serious overcrowding." That does not sound like a world-class transport system.
Significant investment will be required in signalling, station capacity for passengers, platform capacity, rolling stock, new connections, dealing with the third rail overhead problem and ensuring that suburban overhead services do not suffer as a consequence. I welcome the idea of using infrastructure, but I put those points in a constructive manner to the Minister and ask her whether proper estimates have been made and, if so, who will pay.
Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Hackney, South and Shoreditch):
I am delighted to join in the debate and I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Mr. Fitzpatrick) has raised it. I want to concentrate on the vital missing link in the London orbital, which in Hackney we describe as the east London tube line extension. As we have heard, there are two gaps, one in the southern area and one in the northern area. I want to concentrate on the urban regeneration consequences of filling in that vital missing link.
I have been arguing the case for the east London extension for about 10 years. I think that it was about eight years ago that I raised it in an Adjournment debate. I am glad to see that there is much more support for it now than there was then. In those 10 years, Ministers and shadow Ministers have come to Hackney and said that it is a super idea, but they have gone away and not much has happened. The only real thing that has happened is that, after a lengthy and cumbersome Public Works Acts inquiry, the Secretary of State has given permission for at least the northern missing link to be filled in.
But now we are told that we must await the arrival of the Mayor of London. To the putative front runners, whether it be Trevor Phillips for Labour, Jeffrey Archer for the Conservatives or--well, I will not mention my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) because my pager tells me that to do so would be off message--I would say that I could neither vote for any of them nor recommend that anyone else should vote for them unless they can give a copper-bottomed guarantee that this will be a top priority when a Labour Mayor of London is elected.
The scheme will have a huge number of regeneration consequences for the London borough of Hackney. Although £150 million is petty cash for the railways, this is not some small scheme for us. The regeneration consequences of the east London tube line extension are enormous. Hackney is the third most densely populated authority in Britain. More than a quarter of its population live in the corridor of the proposed east London tube line extension on the orbital route, and they are waiting for the benefits to flow from it. Unemployment in Hackney is double that for London and Britain, and is comparable only with the highest rates in the north west and the north east of England. In some wards in the east London tube line extension corridor, the rates are three times the London level.
In that corridor are 2,500 businesses, employing30,000 people, so two-thirds of all Hackney's jobs are in this new line catchment area. We estimate that 14,000 jobs are waiting to be created if the missing link is put in, 8,000 of which will be directly attributable to the new line, and the others will be offshoots of the new line.
Not all those new jobs will be taken by Hackney people, but the unemployment rate in Hackney is expected to fall by 10 per cent., which is a massive fall, once the line is up and running. In addition, we calculate--this was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea
(Mr. Linton)--that the link with central London and docklands could provide another 2,500 jobs for Hackney residents and many jobs for residents from other parts of east and south London.
In addition to that, Hackney's age profile is such that during the next five years a huge surge of school leavers will come on to the job market, and unless the line is up and running, many of those school leavers will not have a job at all, even with the excellent work being done under the new deal.
Like Battersea and certain other areas in London, we do not have a tube at all, so two-thirds of Hackney's work force travel outside the borough. Some use private cars, although car ownership is also at almost the lowest level in London. Many use the buses, although they are becoming less and less reliable. Therefore, this is a critical reliable route for the people of Hackney. To make a quick comparison, neighbouring Islington has three tube lines. Its demography is almost the same as Hackney's, yet it has 50 per cent. more local jobs. I suspect that many of those are related to the transport in the area. Therefore, the orbital line is critical for Hackney.
"If there is a further delay to the PPP plans, what allowance has he"--
the Deputy Prime Minister--
"made for the extra finance that will be required to ensure that maintenance and investment continue? At what point will he show that the public-private partnership is best value, and will he use the public sector comparator to do that? Are the Government holding discussions with other consortiums . . . about the possible integration between the national rail network and the sub-surface lines . . . or is only Railtrack in the running?"--[Official Report, 15 June 1999; Vol. 333, c. 161.]
Those questions, with respect, were not answered yesterday, so I am hoping that if I repeat them today my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington and I will be able to read the answer in the Official Report tomorrow.
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