Examination of witnesses (Questions 44
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 20 OCTOBER 1999
MR KEITH
HILL, MR
ZYG KOWALCZYK
and MS BETH
ANN BOSTOCK
Mr Maxton
44. Minister, can I first of all congratulate
you on your appointment. We are delighted to see you here in your
new role. I am not sure you will not find this more arduous than
being a Government Whip, but we are delighted to see you. If you
have an opening statement to make before we question you, we would
be delighted to hear it. May I say that it was nice to see a Minister
sitting at the back listening to the previous witnesses.
(Mr Hill) Thank you, Chairman, for your kind words
and your welcome to me and my team. I am accompanied today by
Beth Ann Bostock and Zyg Kowalczyk who are senior officials in
the Government Office for London. May I say first, Chairman, that,
as you well know, I have picked up the baton, as it were, at a
relatively late stage on this matter from my distinguished predecessor,
the Member for Hampstead and Highgate, and I would like to pay
full tribute to her for her part in bringing these Millennium
access arrangements to their near and, I believe, successful completion.
With your permission, I would like to add just a few more words.
Many of the written memoranda submitted to you confirm that the
Millennium Experience Transport Strategy is now largely in place
with those infrastructure schemes that are not already complete
now entering their final stages. Of course this does not necessarily
mean that everything has run exactly according to plan. Our memorandum
reported that there has been a delay in implementing the full
original riverside pedestrian and cycle route. On police advice,
the London Borough of Greenwich were in fact already developing
proposals for alternative stretches of the route. They have been
swift to bring this forward to ensure that a complete link will
be available by mid-December. What can I say about the Jubilee
Line Extension which has not already been said? Admittedly, there
have been problems, but London Transport and Bechtel have together
risen to the challenge and are now very close to successfully
completing the connection of the extension to the existing line
which will enable through-running passenger services from Stanmore
to Stratford to become a reality. Anybody who has already taken
the opportunity to travel on the new extension will now truly
appreciate for the first time how it is setting new standards
for underground railways in terms of technology and public architecture.
It is, however, the combination of better integration with other
tube lines, bus and surface rail services, improved safety and
reduced journey times that will be most rewarding for passengers,
particularly visitors to the Millennium Experience. Mr Chairman,
I would like to conclude by reiterating that the great progress
that has been achieved on the overall transport strategy is very
much the result of the very close co-operation of all the parties
involved. I would, therefore, like to take this opportunity to
say a very big thank you to everyone for their professionalism
and commitment as we move into what will undoubtedly be an exciting,
but demanding last couple of months as we approach the opening
of the Millennium Experience.
Mr Maxton: Thank you.
Mr Faber
45. Good morning, Minister. Your predecessor,
when she came before us in December 1998, argued very strongly
against the so-called kiss-and-drop strategy which NMEC were planning
to implement and your memorandum to us today says that proposals
are being developed to prohibit kiss-and-drop. Could you tell
us a little bit more?
(Mr Hill) In fact with the co-operation of all the
parties concerned, Greenwich, NMEC, we have moved to a ban of
kiss-and-drop and perhaps I ought just to explain the detail of
that.
46. So it will be a snog exclusion zone?
(Mr Hill) At £20 a snog—yes, I saw that
headline too. Well, I will come to the £20 a snog in due
course. The ban will operate from 5.30 am until 9.00 pm and after
9.00 pm it will be certainly possible for people to collect and
deliver people at North Greenwich tube station. The object of
this has really been to discourage car use into the area. The
point about Greenwich is that anybody who knows Greenwich knows
that it is an extremely congested area, that it is a very dense
residential area which also has a lot of dense industrial development
to the east. It is already very congested and the objective in
encouraging a car-free approach has not been ideologically driven,
but it has been actually very much in response to the requirements
of the local population and also to simply easing access towards
the Dome. After nine o'clock, it is possible, as I have said,
for people to come and collect vulnerable members of their family
or relatives or friends. We think nine o'clock is a reasonable
time to permit the kiss-and-drop facility to develop from. In
the normal course of events, when the Dome is operating on a single
session, it will close at six o'clock which is fairly early in
the evening for young people to get away, but of course it ought
to be borne in mind that young people below the age of 16 years
will not actually be allowed to go individually or separately
to the Dome. However, obviously there is a concern about later
in the evening, but after nine o'clock when the Dome is already
winding down, it will be possible for people to come and use that
particular facility.
47. We have always opposed the concept of the
kiss-and-drop facility on this Committee. Our concern is, and
I appreciate that this is not your responsibility, that the prohibition
has come quite late in the day because for the past two years
NMEC have been publicising the fact that you would be able to
just drop people off at the Dome, that you would literally go
and drive up and drop someone off. Like you, we want to discourage
car use and I share the Chairman's view, which you heard in the
last session, that very many more people really because of the
cost are going to choose to use their cars and, in particular,
I am thinking of people in the south-east. I know we have had
a written representation, and I cannot remember who it was from,
but certainly one of the written representations that I saw made
the point that the Jubilee Line, the tube will not serve people
coming from the south-eastern counties and that very many people
in those counties will be the sort of people who are quite used
to getting in their cars whether it is to go to an out-of-town
shopping centre, to go to a sporting event, to go to some kind
of event and that it will be very tempting for them simply to
arrive in Greenwich and to look around for somewhere to park.
I think our worry has always been about enforcement, and I see
that the Metropolitan Police have welcomed the prohibition, but
presumably they are going to be responsible for enforcement?
(Mr Hill) They certainly will be. NMEC will be responsible
for enforcement if people penetrate into the Dome area, but outside
the Dome, in the broader Greenwich area which has an extensive
controlled parking zone, that will be for Greenwich to enforce
and more widely of course, where there is illegal parking, it
will be for the Metropolitan Police to enforce. Let me just deal
with your anxiety which I know you have had for a long time because
I naturally took the trouble to read the evidence of your last
interview with the Member for Hampstead and Highgate, my distinguished
predecessor. First of all, I should emphasise that we have met
a concern expressed by the Committee nearly twelve months ago
in terms of the provision of park-and-ride facilities, so there
are now park-and-ride facilities in all the quadrants of London,
plus one extra one, and for the south-east it is at Swanley. Those
park-and-ride facilities will offer provision for 3,500 parkers
and riders a day and we think that is actually a generous estimate
of the demand for that park-and-ride facility. However, you are
absolutely right; the working assumption is that there will be
a great deal of driving towards London and, as I said earlier,
anybody who knows that south-east area around Greenwich would
be absolutely mad to think that it is an easy place to get to
by car, but we do assume that there will be a fairly large degree
of informal park-and-ride, as it is known, and perhaps one in
five of visitors will do that, but our assumption is that what
they will do in their cars is find their own route to a railway
station or to a tube station and then actually look for some parking
in that vicinity. The big message really has to be to the broader
part of the population that this is a car-free event and also
of course that pre-booking is essential for it as well.
48. So if someone in their car gets into the
enclave of the Dome and presumably there is not going to be a
barrier to stop them and they will be able just to drive up, what
happens? Will they be moved along? Will they have a fine given
to them for getting in there? Will they be fined only if they
stop and for however long they stop? How will it work?
(Mr Hill) First of all, we are going to seek to maximise
the publicity that this is a car-free event and that people would
be ill-advised to try to reach the Dome in their cars. Secondly,
all of the access roads in a large area around Greenwich are going
to be very clearly signed to say that there is no direct car access
to the Dome area. If they actually ignore all of those signs and
get into the Dome area, they will see on all of the access roads
into the Dome area clear signs telling them that again they are
not allowed to drive into the area and that they should take one
of the exit roads which will be clearly marked. There is a kind
of last gulch exit possibility for people to take and if they
actually proceed beyond that point, then I am afraid that they
will actually find themselves in a £20 penalty situation,
but it will not have been without advice.
Mr Maxton
49. Will it include ministerial cars?
(Mr Hill) I am somewhat reluctant to say, Mr Chairman,
that there does seem to be a VIP facility here, but we do not
expect that that will be extensively taken up because we expect
Ministers, like me, to travel to the Dome by public transport
and if any of the colleagues on the Committee have not done that
so far, they really ought to do it because it is a wonderful experience
on the Jubilee Line Extension.
50. We are doing it next week.
(Mr Hill) But there will of course be special derogations
in terms of car access for orange badge holders and various other
groups with identifiable disabilities, secondly, for some LT staff,
thirdly, for some Dome employees as well. Also taxis will be allowed
to go into the area to drop off and it is expected as well that
minicabs will have access to the Dome area, but on the basis that
they will have to demonstrate that they are a minicab and they
will have to receive a permit from a kind of toll booth to enter
the Dome area, so they are the arrangements for car access, for
approved car access.
Mr Faber
51. I was just going to say, Chairman, that
the Minister's predecessor said that there was to be no VIP parking
at the Dome in her last evidence.
(Mr Hill) Only on security advice, is the answer.
Mr Maxton
52. There will not be a taxi rank actually at
the Dome, will there?
(Mr Hill) No, there will not be a rank.
Mr Fearn
53. It was rather nice to see you sitting here,
as the Chairman said, Minister, listening to the previous evidence.
Now, listening to that evidence, you must have heard the use of
phrases like "perhaps the end of December", "reasonably
soon for Westminster". You came into the job in July, you
have listened to the evidence given today and you have heard some
of the answers given to us, but what are you going to do about
making sure that it does operate in time for the Dome?
(Mr Hill) Thank you for your kind words about my sitting
in. I was a Member of the Transport Select Committee in the last
Parliament and always felt that it was actually rather good tactics
for Ministers to sit in and listen to what the preceding group
had to say. You are right and other colleagues have referred to
delays. I sometimes begin to fear, even in my brief tenure of
office, that when I die the word "slippage" will be
found inscribed on my heart, but I have to say that Ministers
have certainly been extremely involved in making sure that the
timetable for delivery is adhered to as rigorously as possible.
There are weekly meetings, there are fortnightly meetings and
there are monthly meetings involving various groups of advisers
and Ministers to keep a very sharp eye on the way in which the
JLE in particular is being delivered and Ministers have certainly,
in my observation, worked very hard to drive the project forward
so that the timetable can be met.
54. In the phraseology used as well, you must
have heard, I do not think it was Mr Tunnicliffe, but the chap
on his left who said, when we talk about the number of visitors,
"We will look at the pattern after it has started".
I would have thought that the pattern, as in normal transport
schemes, would be looked at now. I would have thought that the
pattern would have been anticipated. They can look at it three
or four weeks after the opening of the Dome, but the biggest pattern
is going to happen when the Dome itself opens and it would appear
that that pattern has not been anticipated.
(Mr Hill) Well, I think it has actually, with respect.
Can I say first of all that there is enormous capacity in the
public transport provision on this. For example, there will be
up to 24 Jubilee Line trains arriving every hour at the North
Greenwich station and each of those can deliver about 1,000 Dome
visitors, so, in other words, up to 24,000 an hour. Actually the
maximum pre-booked single session entry to the Dome will be 22,000
and it is anticipated that at a maximum where you have two sessions
a day, there will be 35,000 visitors and they will each stay between
five and seven hours and at any one time it is anticipated that
there will be about 17,000 folk on the scene. Therefore, we really
do think that there is a lot of capacity for dealing with visitors
to the Dome and that fairly careful estimates have been made already
of the capacity of each of the services in getting there. It really
is quite interesting to see the analysis which has been done about
the various modes in terms of their delivery to the Dome, although
I ought to point out of course that in his reply to you in terms
of dealing with future patterns, I believe Mr Hodson of London
Buses was referring to patterns after the year 2000 and not during
the year of operation of the Dome.
55. The popular way to get there would be by
river of course, although the price may be prohibitive. That pattern
has already been looked at as well. Do you know how the anticipated
numbers would work out for the river against the Jubilee Line
against bus?
(Mr Hill) Yes, and it is quite interesting actually.
It is anticipated that about 10 per cent of visitors to the Dome
will actually use the river services, both the express service
which has been described to you and also the kind of stopping
service which will also be available, and there is, I am told,
some consideration of the possibility of using the regular kind
of river tourist vessels also for Dome access. Actually it is
a fairly high estimate for the river approach, but of course it
is the loveliest approach. The architecture on the Jubilee Line
is absolutely spectacular, but going along that river is absolutely
the way to do it, is it not?
56. That phrase you just used about the boats,
or I call them the boat people, being able to take people as well,
is that going to interfere with the service which is being particularly
put on by the company to take people to the Dome? I hope it is
right actually.
(Mr Hill) Well, I hope it is right, but I have to
emphasise that it is under consideration and it is not signed,
sealed and delivered, and they will obviously want to make sure
that if that does happen, it fits into other services and does
not get in the way of the two clear scheduled river services which
have been organised for a very long period of time.
57. On car travel, people are going to park-and-ride
because of all the notices you are putting out saying, "Don't
take your car in", and if they are booking for the Dome,
they can book the park-and-ride ticket as well, but what happens
to the great majority of people who will arrive without a Dome
ticket and without a parking ticket? Can they go on to the park-and-ride
scheme?
(Mr Hill) No, they cannot. The message really is pre-booking.
58. So what if they do not?
(Mr Hill) They will not be able to get in.
59. They will not be able to get in?
(Mr Hill) They will not be able to get on to the park-and-ride
and they will not be able to get into the Dome, above all. If
they have not booked their ticket in advance for the Dome, they
will not be able to get into the Dome.
|
