Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 379)
MONDAY 14 MARCH 2005
MR JOHN
PARRY, MR
CASPAR LUCAS
AND MAJOR
KIT HOLDEN
Q360 Chairman: Good afternoon. Mr
Parry, I think you win our award for the most persistent of our
witnesses, although you cheated a bit by getting the Deputy Speaker
on your side! However, we will allow you to escape any suggestion
of favouritism! You are most welcome this afternoon. Would you
like to tell us your full name and designation, and introduce
us to your colleagues.
Mr Parry: My name is John Parry.
I am the chairman of a small engineering company in the Black
Country, which has, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, maintained
a manufacturing capability; but the majority of its manufacturing
activity is through creation of supply chains of companies, which
is traditionally the way things are done in the Midlands. We created
a new company in 1992 to embark into light rail. Caspar Lucas
is from the railway industry and is a mechanical engineer. My
colleague Major Holden is somebody this Committee has met before
in another guise, as he was former senior inspecting officer in
light rail in the Railway Inspectorate.
Q361 Chairman: Mr Parry, you say
light rail in Britain is distorted by the fact that the consultants
involved always have vested interests in prolonging the process.
Surely customers have a greater interest in speeding it up?
Mr Parry: At the beginning of
my presentation I had a gripe about consultants and it was really
the interface between the consultants and the public officials,
that it can be a career-building exercise to keep the work of
study and review reports ping-ponging backwards and forwards,
and almost if you say "we will go ahead and build now"
it turns off the tap of the fees, and so we have to be realistic
that the professionals are interested in furthering their interests
as well as furthering the projects.
Q362 Clive Efford: That sounds very
anecdotal. What evidence is there of anyone in any scheme you
could name where funding has been turned off in order to prolong
the consultation process?
Mr Parry: There is no point in
picking instances. I can certainly provide adequate follow-up
of instances where it has happened. The real issue is the over
complication of everything. This is going to be very much the
thrust of our presentation, that things do not need to be as complicated
as they seem to be. The professionals could be better than they
are at the process of simplification.
Q363 Clive Efford: You can forward
that argument against anyone you disagree with, but you would
have to back it up with some evidence and examples to demonstrate
your argument.
Mr Parry: Well, you heard it from
the previous speakers from Manchester; that there does seem to
be a remarkable prolongation of the process of consideration and
the more complicated the reporting the longer it takes to consider,
and that is why the Department takes a long time to make up its
mind, because sometimes massive documentation is submitted where
things could have been presented more simply.
Q364 Chairman: Do you think that
trams as opposed to other modes get extra costs imposed by the
planning and approval process?
Mr Parry: Yes, indeed, because
if you wish to introduce a bus to the public roads you do not
have an enormous amount of activity to study whether it fits the
infrastructure and meets this, that and the other regulation;
in fact my colleague will probably be able to provide a comparison
but it is probably 10 times longer to introduce a tram than a
new type of bus.
Q365 Chairman: Major Holden, do you
know of any such formula?
Major Holden: No formula, Chairman.
Certainly the legislative process, the Transport and Works Act
Orders now, the old private bill process under which Metrolink
was built, takes up an inordinate amount of time both in terms
of public officials' time and the preparation for it. Certainly
some of the evidence you were hearing earlier indicated that there
is an awful lot of time spent on preparing these schemes, whereas
apart from the necessary operator's licence for buses, it is comparatively
easy to put in a new bus service.
Q366 Ian Lucas: Do you have any experience
of exporting your product?
Mr Parry: Yes, the other side
of the business is almost 90% export. This is what has stimulated
the product on the rolling stock side in that our business is
in human settlements. We have been responsible for school buildings,
housing settlements all over the world; and probably our manufacturing
products have got to 80 countries, mainly in the tropical developing
world. I participated in the Technology Foresight Programme in
the mid 1990s, and that looked at what it calls in world environment
terms "the burgeoning cities of the third world," where
you have poverty and yet you have traffic jams, which is absolutely
bizarre because nothing consumes international resources greater
than a traffic jam with all these engines turning over burning
fuel, and the traffic not going anywhere. We went into our introduction
of this new lightweight people-mover development with exports
in mind because we felt a simplified version of light rail had
a world-wide market.
Q367 Ian Lucas: I ask because I was
interested as to whether in more developed economies that are
analogous to our own you have experience of the system for procurement
being more straightforward than in the UK—in mainland Europe
for example?
Mr Parry: I have no experience
in exporting to mainland Europe so I am not the right witness
for that. What I am very well aware of is the tropical developing
countries. If you want to get somewhere and there is a mountain
in the way, you know it is a physical obstruction, or a river;
in Britain it is because of some regulation that somebody has
written.
Q368 Chairman: I do not want to stop
you, Mr Parry, but you have, from your very excellent newsletter,
a lot of experience in building in Africa, but the money has almost
exclusively come with the assistance of government departments
or international organisations?
Mr Parry: Would it were so. To
try and get money out of DFID to support British manufacturing
products is a conjuring trick I have not yet mastered.
Q369 Chairman: You are saying you
have not had to apply to them for money for those things.
Mr Parry: No. Most of our markets
around the world are individual businesses and local money, people
buying British products as good value for money.
Q370 Mrs Ellman: What are the problems
in introducing new track?
Mr Parry: You cannot do anything
unless you can trial it and demonstrate it, and this is where
the weakness of the public sector comes in. It is not necessarily
the politicians because politicians very often want to do something
but then find they cannot do it. It is really the failure to respond
and take up opportunities or to give the facility for a trial
that gives us the problem. You throw up the business case and
everybody says "my God, this is wonderful, but we will not
believe it until you try it" and we say, "yes, let us
try it". It goes on and on. The danger is—and this
is what we are really focused about—that it endangers the
supply chain. We may have a twopenny-halfpenny company in Cradley
Heath but we have got very serious engineering companies and we
come to them and say "we have something here; we think it
fits the need of the time but we are going to need your large
factories and your engineering sophistication to be able to deliver
this product". They say: "All right, Mr Parry, that
is a good idea; we will come along behind you. You deliver the
market; we will deliver the product." Then I find two or
three years later I am waiting for a committee to do this or a
local authority to do that, and it does not happen, and I could
lose my supply chain.
Q371 Mrs Ellman: Who should be funding
the trials?
Mr Parry: Until recently the Department
of Transport has had no innovation funding, I believe; it has
all lain with the DTI. I know more recently there have been discussions
particularly under the new legislation to provide innovation funding
so that the Department can push new technology forward. David
Rowlands, the Permanent Secretary of the Department mentioned
this when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, so
this is good. Previously, it was always with the DTI. The DTI
were judging what they should support in terms of innovation based
on appraisal by technical experts rather than reference across
to market need as being thrown up by other ministries. One of
my tasks in recent months was to get the DTI and Department of
Transport to talk to each other, and for the Department of Transport
to say to the DTI, "yes, we need this". Previously the
DTI was arriving at decisions about transport innovation without
referring to the Department for Transport.
Q372 Mrs Ellman: So this is a new
problem.
Mr Parry: It is a problem that
seems to have been resolved because—I do not know whether
there is an election coming or something, but a clear light of
reason seems to be bathing the whole situation now and people
are listening more than they have listened for a very long time.
Q373 Mrs Ellman: Are you saying there
is not a problem now?
Mr Parry: Well, I would not be
here if I thought the game was won.
Q374 Mrs Ellman: New trams, new vehicles—what
are the problems there? Are they resolved?
Mr Parry: My young colleague Caspar
Lucas is engaged in an exercise that is like the Greek legend
of the chap who keeps on rolling boulders up the hill and they
roll back down again.
Q375 Chairman: He does not look like
Sisyphus to me, Mr Parry.
Mr Lucas: Not yet, Madam Chairman.
Q376 Chairman: Do you want to tell
us, Mr Lucas, about your Herculean task?
Mr Lucas: I will attempt to explain.
I would first like to say that I have come to this maybe not late
in the day as it will turn out—we will see—but prior
to my arrival at the company at the beginning of 2004 the vehicle
was built in 2001, and since then the company has been attempting
to operate the system on a branch of the national rail network
on which no other trains can gain access to at the same time,
on a day when there are normally no other services. We are now
in 2005 and we have had a great number of discussions with the
relevant figures within the railway industry. The minimum time
it will take to achieve this approval of a single car running
on a single railway that is three-quarters of a mile long is four
more months minimum, we believe, with considerable scope for that
to be extended. What really gets us frustrated is that the greatest
effort we will be expending is not in demonstrating that the system
is safe, because we know that it is because it has already been
accepted as such by Her Majesty's Railway Inspectorate, but in
measuring the system and the operation against a completely different
form of transport, namely the heavy rail operation, and in justifying
every single reason why our vehicle necessarily is different from
a heavy rail vehicle.
Mrs Ellman: What needs to be done to
improve things?
Q377 Chairman: How could that not
be the case? Who is to know how efficient your vehicle is? To
be Devil's Advocate, you are producing something which is a lighter
vehicle expected to run on a different track.
Mr Lucas: Or on the same track.
Q378 Chairman: If it ran on the same
track would it not automatically be expected to maintain the same
level of safety?
Mr Parry: Can I bring in the question
of community railways because—
Q379 Chairman: No, I want Mr Lucas's
answer to this.
Mr Lucas: My answer to this is
that it is very difficult to assess an alternative to the status
quo by standards that are entirely based upon the status
quo.
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