Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
17 NOVEMBER 2004
RT HON
ALISTAIR DARLING
MP AND MR
DAVID ROWLANDS
Q40 Mr Stringer: What is the extra power
you are going to give them then, beyond reducing consultation
time down to six months? I am not clear about what that extra
power is?
Mr Darling: It is the powers that
we set out in the White Paper, and which would be included in
the legislation to implement that White Paper.
Q41 Mr Stringer: You still have to pass
that threshold over this Section 124. You would not be repealing
that section.
Mr Darling: We are not proposing
to. Our intention is the one I have just described. It is set
out in the White Paper, and as and when this legislation comes
before the House, if people think it does not achieve what I intended
to achieve then, of course, I will look at it, but my intention
is that, standing by what I have said in the White Paper, I want
to make sure that if councils or PTEs adopt this wider policy
towards solving traffic congestion problems we will give them
sufficient powers to enable them to deal with the problems that
you outline in relation to buses. We do not want to have a situation
where you have an otherwise coherent programme that would be undermined
by that. Equally, given that I believe in some parts of the country
the relationship between councils and buses are working well,
what I do not want to do is to undermine that relationship.
Q42 Mr Stringer: So you are not shutting
the door completely on that?
Mr Darling: I am not shutting
the door on making it easier for councils that have a coherent
plan for dealing with congestion to do it; what I am shutting
the door to is, if you like—and this is in very crude terms—back
to regulation.
Q43 Mr Stringer: Your objectives in the
Local Transport Plans are commendable for reducing congestion,
pollution and increasing road safety and accessibility. Why, in
those objectives, are the wider objectives of the department about
helping economic regeneration not put into local objectives in
Local Plans?
Mr Darling: As you know, we are
about to start on the second round of Local Transport Plans, the
first five years almost being up. Of course, I am prepared to
look at suggestions but we have tended—and this predates
me—to concentrate on transport imperatives rather than anything
else. I think if you are going to have criteria you need to have
them fairly narrowly focused, although you can always add things
in. It has always struck me that in the case of regeneration it
is a terribly difficult thing to quantify, both in advance and
in retrospect.
Q44 Mr Stringer: It is a terribly important
thing, is it not?
Mr Darling: It is important but
at times, as you know, it can be a very difficult thing to work
out exactly what it is and, in retrospect, whether or not you
achieved it. As you know, there are many examples up and down
the country that are a triumph of hope over experience.
Q45 Mr Stringer: What worries me about
those, as I say, admirable objectives is that when you go back
seven years to the argument about putting transport with environment
it was all about making sure that transport supported other government
objectives, like regeneration, and I am worried that we could
remove that as an objective. I would like reassurance—or
not if that is the case—that you will consider that as one
of the objectives of Local Plans.
Mr Darling: I am happy to consider
it, Mr Stringer, but what I do not want to do is get a situation
where the criteria are so wide that, really, it would be very
difficult to reach a judgment on whether it was a good thing or
not. There are many transport schemes that we support in which
regeneration is one of the principal objectives, but in the LTP
process what we have tried to do is focus minds.
Q46 Mr Stringer: As you know, when the
White Paper was published I certainly welcomed the transfer of
power to PTEs, to control rail budgets. What I was not aware of,
and I would like you to explain why this happened, was that you
were also intending to remove the existing powers that PTEs have
over rail franchises.
Mr Darling: At the moment the
PTEs are co-signatories, as you know. Firstly, I do not think
that is necessary. Secondly, I can think of one case in particular
where the signing of the franchise was held up to some extent
because a PTE was in the position of having one line that stretched
into the area of the new franchise and therefore it had to be
a co-signatory, even though its principal place of business, if
you like, was far removed from where this franchise is. That just
struck me as being a very curious situation. There are two things
I would like to do. One is, as I said to Mrs Ellman's point, the
department will specify the direction of railways, it will specify
the franchise area and, when it allocates the franchises, what
the franchise will look like. It will be open to a PTE, if it
says "We want more than that", to say "Yes, we
can have more of that" and, of course, it will have to pay
for that because that goes with the whole thrust of what we are
saying. However, I do not think it is necessary for it to be a
co-signatory. The precise mechanism we use will be set out in
the legislation when it eventually comes, and, again, if that
legislation is not sufficient or does not work then of course
the whole point of Parliamentary scrutiny of these things is to
make sure we get it right. The whole thrust of what I was trying
to do in the White Paper is to simplify the structures we have
got at the moment and try and cut out the number of people who
are involved in these things, not just to reduce costs but make
it easier to actually run the railway. I do not think that PTEs
have got anything to worry about. What they are concerned about
is making sure that they have got the services they want, provided
they are willing to pay for it. Can I just say that I am glad
that you welcome the whole idea of decentralisation, which I think
must be the right way to go in transport spending and transport
planning anyway.
Q47 Mr Stringer: I do but I am concerned
that removing the Passenger Transport Executives from having to
sign the franchises physically takes them away from the table
and runs counter to the idea that the PTEs should have a greater
say in transport policies in their areas. I wonder if you would
reconsider that position.
Mr Darling: I will look at any
concerns they have got and I am aware of the fact that they have
some concerns here, but I do not think they are being kept away
from the table. After all, a lot of them will have views as to
whether they want more—they may actually want less—services,
and that is something they will be able to have views on. If they
are going to pay for more services they will most certainly be
sitting at the table with a cheque book at the ready. So I do
not think there is any fear of that. I just think we need to get
away from the problem we have got at the moment where it
is a complicated arrangement. As I said to you, I can think of
examples where PTEs, because of the way the service is spread
across the country, therefore, for whatever reason, had an influence
which I do not think was ever intended. However, in relation to
getting the services they want for the people they represent,
I do not see any difficulty with that. That, actually, is what
matters, at the end of the day. So I do not think they are being
pushed out of the door—far from it; when you follow our
policy through to its ultimate conclusion they will have a lot
more power and responsibility than they have got at the moment.
Q48 Chairman: I think we will want to
see the wording of the legislation, not surprisingly.
Mr Darling: Which you will.
Q49 Mr Stringer: Mr Rowlands, in his
very interesting performance before the Public Accounts Committee
last Wednesday—
Mr Darling: He has got the quote!
Q50 Mr Stringer: There are lots of interesting
quotes—mentioned that the amount of money for light rail
was under the heading "Local Transport Capital Provision".
I have looked in the departmental report and under either Table
E1 on page 142 or Table E2 on page 144 there is a "Local
Authorities" heading and a "Local Transport Investment
and Expenditure". I wondered whether that was the heading
you were referring to.
Mr Rowlands: E1?
Q51 Mr Stringer: Or E2.
Mr Rowlands: No. You will not
find it there identified in the same way that you will find the
specifics of SRA investment identified, because these are just
main headings. In simple terms (because it is complicated, I am
afraid) the funding for local authority light rail schemes is
usually a combination of grant and credits. The grants come out
of the local authority transport capital provision and the credits
generally come out of something called the PFI credits line. You
will not find the PFI credits in the department's DEL at all.
Q52 Chairman: That is, presumably, their
fund—
Mr Rowlands: I was not going to
call it "largesse" from Treasury but they are provided
by the Treasury to the department outside of our DEL. I am afraid
that is an over-simplified explanation of what can be quite complicated.
Q53 Mr Stringer: Do you think they should
be in your annual report in future?
Mr Rowlands: We would be very
happy to look at it and see what we can do. To pick up on what
the Secretary of State said, at some point this is going to assimilate
what the SRA does. We may want to think about counter-balancing
in more detail in some other areas.
Mr Darling: I can help, Mrs Dunwoody.
My view, for what it is worth, is that the more complete the picture
the better you can see these things. I think these annual reports
will develop over time. Ours is going to have to change as a result
of the railways anyway, but I think the PFI point is a perfectly
good one.
Q54 Chairman: We are assuming that once
you have absorbed all these functions then, of course, they ought
to be clearly shown because it will be in your interest to make
it clear to Parliament where the money is going and under what
heading.
Mr Darling: It also shows a complete
picture of what we are doing.
Chairman: Yes, that is always welcome
to Parliament, if not to all of your colleagues.
Q55 Clive Efford: Can I take you back
to railways for just a couple of supplementary questions? We have
recently had some new rolling stock on Network South East. Are
you happy with the reliability of that new rolling stock?
Mr Darling: No. There have been
too many teething problems. This is a problem for all the rolling
stock, not just South Eastern Trains. Problems are well documented
with the Pendolino trains. Bombardier who make South Eastern Trains
and also Southern's trains are having problems. I think we can
accept that, with anything new, there are bound to be problems.
These trains are more complicated than the Mark I stock that has
been taken off. There is a lot more computer-driven stock and
there is a lot more sophistication in the equipment they carry.
These problems are being sorted out but I think it points to something
else that I think is a big problem in the railway industry. There
has been a tendency over the last 50 years that, whenever you
order a new train, you do something different, they change the
specification and so on, and, if you do that, you will get teething
problems. I think, especially given that the Department pays for
this one way or another, we should be moving more towards the
airline model where basically you have short haul, medium haul
and long haul and, yes, try and vary things when you need to but
do not try and reinvent the train every time you order it. There
have been too many teething problems, they are being put right
but I think that, from the travelling public's point of view,
one of the frustrations is that you have brand new trains but
their reliability is lower than they ought to be.
Q56 Clive Efford: Is there any comparison
with trains that the same companies have manufactured that have
been purchased elsewhere and is there any analysis of our performance
there? Are we getting short changed here or are there similar
patterns of breakdown after new trains are introduced elsewhere?
Mr Darling: It is sometimes difficult
to make comparisons. We actually record and publish a lot of information
about these things but the same cannot be said for every other
country in the world, even other countries where these suppliers
provide trains and, in some cases, things are rather opaque to
see what exactly has happened. I do not think it is a question
of being short changed, the difficulty is that these trains are
all designed to run on particular lines. As you well know within
the British railways network, there are all sorts of different
requirements and so on, but I think there are times when, as I
say, our tendency to redesign things and to be the first people
to say, "I want this to happen on this train" or "that
to happen on another train" just makes for added complication.
Q57 Chairman: Secretary of State, we
are all rather sensitive about this because the same train that
is not working in the form of a Pendolino was seen by this Committee
working very efficiently in Korea because it had been, frankly,
redesigned by the Koreans and rebuilt. I hope you are not assuming
that everything that comes, as long as it is standardised, is
going to be suitable for the British railway industry. In fact,
we would rather like some new trains that worked because that
might be original!
Mr Darling: The Pendolino train
comes from the same sort of train that is running in Italy and
has been for some years perfectly successfully.
Q58 Chairman: I can assure you that it
does not run in the same way.
Mr Darling: No, it does not because
it had to be modified to run on the railway line that we have
here. It is not like if you buy a Boeing Jet and you could fly
it out of Washington, London or Tokyo because it is basically
going through the same sky. As you know, track and train are rather
intimately related and that is why there have to be adaptations.
I am not a technical expert and, maybe in one of your inquiries
in the future you might want to get the designers of the Pendolinos
and all the other train designers in and cross-examine them about
it, but I do know enough about it to understand that you do have
to make some adaptations and, in reply to Mr Efford's question,
nobody can be happy that, when we have introduced rolling stock
in this country, we have had more teething problems than we would
like.
Q59 Clive Efford: Are there any penalty
clauses for the companies that supply these trains?
Mr Darling: Yes, there are and
I would be happy to let you have a note of them, but there are
penalty clauses and there are incentives on the manufacturers
to get it right.
| 
