Examination of Witness (Questions 53 -
59)
WEDNESDAY 5 APRIL 2000
MR STEVE
NORRIS MP
Chairman
53. Good afternoon, Mr Norris. I shall give
you exactly the same amount of time as the other candidates and
I will stop you on the dot. Do you want to make a first general
remark or will you go straight for questions?
(Mr Norris) Straight for questions, Chairman.
Chairman: Can we ask Mr Donohoe to begin the
questions.
Mr Donohoe
54. Do you think the Piccadilly Line is adequate
to serve the capital's principal hub airport?
(Mr Norris) No, but then it has really been the advent
of the Heathrow Express which has transformed access to Heathrow.
It is pretty obvious that assuming the Secretary of State permits
T5, what should really be planned is something that extends the
Heathrow Express to the city. What we really need, in other words,
is a CrossRail. This is because the limitations on the Heathrow
Express is Paddington. For a huge number of people access to Paddington
is as difficult as some of the journeys that you are required
to make on the Piccadilly Line. These days it is serving a market,
particularly west of Barons Court, but it is no longer going to
be the essential public transport route in. The public route in
is increasingly the Heathrow Express and then, as I say, the real
future to me is to look beyond that to the city.
55. So you see no need for there to be any investment
in the Piccadilly Line, is that what you are saying?
(Mr Norris) No, certainly not. To point out that there
are now other ways in which Heathrow Airport is serviced is not
to minimise the importance of the Piccadilly Line: (a) as a commuter
route, which it still is; and (b) if you are going west of Barons
Court, there is an enormous amount of local traffic into Heathrow
for people where it is a more convenient mode than going back
into the city to Paddington. So you do need, as on the other lines,
to look at the refurbishment of the stock there; and also to reduce
the MDNF(?) on the Piccadilly Line, which is not very satisfactory
at the moment, and to make sure that you build in some greater
reliability. As with most of the lines, although not with all,
there is a large funding gap.
56. You would not have a link between Terminal
5 being built and the Underground? Is that what you are saying
as well?
(Mr Norris) No, that is one aspect of Terminal 5,
which I always thought made enormous sense. In fact, if Terminal
5 is not supposed to be, after all, about feeding more runway
capacity but about accommodating the 80-odd million passengers
a year that we are going to be looking at, it surely makes sense
that every conceivable public transport opportunity ought to be
fed into Terminal 5. It does not seem to me to make much sense
to construct this new terminal and actually deny access to a major
means of public transport.
Mr O'Brien
57. What would you suggest are the new measures
of private finance that the Mayor should use to pay for new lines
and extensions?
(Mr Norris) I think there are a number of models.
The first thing is that there is not just one template that you
use for private finance. If you look at the sort of schemes we
have been doing over the last four or five years they are actually
very different. If you take a model like the Northern Line Trains
Deal, now that latched on to the fundamental proposition that
when you bought trains as London Underground, you got a rather
less satisfactory guarantee than you get on the average Korean
motor car.
Chairman
58. Try not to be racist, Mr Norris.
(Mr Norris) Oh, you get a very good guarantee on a
Korean motor car, Chairman, as I am sure you will be aware. But
the great thing is that if you actually transfer the risks of
maintenance—which is, in effect, the whole life cost on
to the constructor, which is what the Northern Line Trains Deal
did—it is not just about saying that the public sector does
not have to fund the new stock, that it actually only buys it
when it works on a daily basis; it is also about getting the new
stocks about eight years earlier than we otherwise would have
been getting it. It is about making sure that on a daily basis
the contractor has to deliver every one of those 96 train sets,
otherwise the contractor does not get paid. Now that fundamental
shift of risk is what good PFI/PPPs are all about. If you look
at others, like Power, like Connect, like Prestige, all of them
have identified areas where there is a benefit to the contractor.
In terms of Connect, it is the ability to run mobile networks
through the tube system, but the spin-off is much increased telecoms
capacity for the Underground. In the case of Prestige, it is no
doubt a benefit to the ticket issuer in terms of the products
which can be bought with the ticket, but for the Underground it
is a massively better integrated contact with a smart card ticketing
system. I would want to pursue each of those initiatives, which
concentrate on allocating risk to where it should go and minimising
public sector input. There are a huge number of examples.
Mr O'Brien
59. Are there any new initiatives then?
(Mr Norris) Yes, what you take is—
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