Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
MR JOHN
WEIGHT AND
MR TERRY
MORGAN
8 DECEMBER 2004
Q220 Mr Donohoe: Again, I go back to
being a travelling passenger on a very regular basis when I am
here in London. I have seen a marked difference in terms of the
number of trains that pull into stations that are overcrowded
and I think that responsibility is down to you. It is not myself
that is saying that. It is the passengers per se who are
saying that. You are responsible for overcrowding and it does
not look to me and it does not look to the passengers that they
are getting a better service.
Mr Weight: Perhaps we have not
succeeded in explaining how it works.
Q221 Mr Donohoe: What do you do to explain
to the passengers?
Mr Weight: If I may first attempt
to explain to you, that is whether or not we are running to timetable.
Let me take by way of example the Central Line. The peak numbers
of trains that I have to make available onto the Central Line
to deliver the timetable as set by London Underground is 72. Post-Chancery
Lane when that fleet first came back into service I have to say
I struggled to turn out something of the order of 63 trains at
peak. That was because of the condition of the trains. The responsibility
for that was partly mine; I had to deal with that. I brought in
a team from Bombardier to work on the Central Line depots and
now we are regularly turning out in excess of 72. That is my commitment
to the contract, that I make those trains available to run to
that timetable. Next year that timetable moves up to 79 trains.
There are 85 trains in that fleet. My contract commitment is that
I will deliver those 79 trains for Mr O'Toole to run his timetable.
I do not answer for the timetable. I answer for the number of
trains that are put into service on each of those peaks. Where
I am responsible is if the assets fail while they are in service.
Q222 Mr Donohoe: Do you monitor the overcrowding
on trains?
Mr Weight: Overcrowding is not
something that I directly monitor.
Q223 Mr Donohoe: Do you monitor it, Mr
Morgan?
Mr Morgan: No, I do not.
Q224 Mr Donohoe: Do you not think you
should monitor it?
Mr Morgan: I think it is very
important that we do and, if you take overcrowding as a good example,
on the Jubilee Line, Canary Wharf continues to grow. No more capacity
has been put in there but there are more people travelling to
Canary Wharf. All we can do and will do is that at the end of
2005 there will be an additional car going on every Jubilee Line
train and it will be delivered. On our plan right now the first
of them will start coming into play at the beginning of 2005 and
we will do a conversion of the fleet at the end of the year. That
will raise the capacity of the Jubilee Line by almost 20%. That
will make a substantive difference in terms of capacity to get
people down to Canary Wharf. That is the deliverables that we
are very concerned about delivering on time. That is our project
work which is critically important.
Q225 Mrs Ellman: Transport for London
have criticised you for failing to invest in new equipment. What
are you going to do about that?
Mr Weight: I hear the comment
and I referred in the opening to the plan. One of the things that
we have to be certain about as we move forward and are deemed
to be efficient and improve our efficiency is that we have a plan
that we are working to, that we have an understood commitment
and that our customer and our partner, London Underground, understands
what we are delivering to. That is the commitment that we have
made. There is now a discussion around, "What more can you
do?". There is certainly a lot that we can do within the
contract. I talked earlier about the work that we did at Farringdon,
Finchley Road and down at Southfields. There will be more things
like that which come along. There are other things that London
Underground are doing. I do not want to breach the commercial
sensitivity of it but there is discussion around the new cars
that are coming in now for the sub-surface routes, which will
come in around 2009, as to whether or not we can enhance and improve
the capacity of those trains by putting more trains into service.
There is a whole lot to be done.
Q226 Mrs Ellman: But is your track maintenance
on schedule?
Mr Weight: Our track maintenance
is broadly in line with schedule. We are certainly meeting all
of the safety standards. The inheritance meant that there were
a number of so-called non-conformities. These are not necessarily
unsafe conditions. Clearly, if they were unsafe the system would
not be allowed to be run.
Q227 Mrs Ellman: But does your own annual
report not say that you have a shortage of workers to install
important signalling work?
Mr Weight: I would agree with
all the comments that have been made so far, that there are shortages
in certain key areas. There are shortages in some of the technical
staff.
Q228 Mrs Ellman: What about the safety
areas and I am pointing now to one in your own report?
Mr Weight: No, not in safety.
We will not put safety at risk.
Q229 Mrs Ellman: Do you not say that
there is a shortage of technical officers to maintain and install
safety critical signalling? That has come from your report.
Mr Weight: We will maintain a
safe system. It may well be that we have to contract people in.
In the longer term, of course, we are training our own. For the
record, Metronet have responsibility for the single largest apprentice
training programme on engineering in the whole of London.
Q230 Mrs Ellman: How much is sub-contracting
increasing?
Mr Weight: We will use sub-contracting
resource in certain areas. I could not put a particular figure
on it. By the way, that is not a new question. That has always
been done on the London Underground.
Q231 Mrs Ellman: But is it increasing?
Mr Weight: No, it is not.
Q232 Chairman: Could you give us a figure
for investment in new equipment?
Mr Weight: We are investing in
the order of a billion pounds a year over the next seven and a
half years. That is the size of our capital programme.
Q233 Chairman: And is that sufficient
to cope with the problems you have got?
Mr Weight: I believe it will cope
with the problems we have got because some of those problems,
indeed many of them, are to do with the ageing assets and it has
to be said, and I think I have mentioned this before, that the
real essence of this work is to replace ageing assets.
Q234 Chairman: That was why you were
brought in, of course, was it not, Mr Weight? I do not think you
need to keep repeating why you were brought in. You were brought
in because there were ageing assets and it was alleged you were
going to bring large amounts of money in that would deal with
some of these problems.
Mr Weight: And I am going to spend
a billion pounds a year over the next seven years to deliver that
process.
Q235 Chairman: So you are not behind
schedule with track maintenance work?
Mr Weight: I am not where I want
to be in some of the areas that are non-critical.
Q236 Chairman: So that is yes, you are
behind?
Mr Weight: I am behind in certain
areas which are not key to safety and I intend to catch up.
Q237 Mrs Ellman: What are you doing about
catching up?
Mr Weight: We are looking to work
smarter; I think that is the key. Certainly we are looking to
work differently to see how we can improve the situation, and
we are forever training people to come in and do work directly
employed by us.
Q238 Mrs Ellman: We have been told that
there is a deskilling of workers involved in maintenance. Is that
correct?
Mr Morgan: There are a couple
of factors that have to be taken into account. Both Metronet and
Tube Lines in certain areas have offered to accelerate work. That
is possible. The challenge of accelerating work is that we disrupt
the network more, so there is a balance to be struck. You only
have to look at the local newspapers every weekend to see that
there is a massive amount of modernisation of the system going
on. London Underground have to decide whether they can permit
more access. I can say that in Tube Lines we have the capacity
to do that.
Q239 Chairman: You have not taken up
the amount of track positions that you are entitled to, have you?
Mr Morgan: We have. We have a
programme of work agreed with London Underground and we are ahead
of the programme we have agreed with them. On track maintenance
we have increased it. In terms of retaining resources we had problems
at the beginning in that people were leaving and were looking
to come back on a contractor basis to work for the Underground
again. It was a surprise to me that when we started I thought
we had 2,500 employees. We did not. We had 1,800. The remainder
were people who worked for London Underground who were not employed
by the company. I am very proud of the fact that not only have
we increased our head count from 2,500 to 3,000 but we have converted
500 of the people who were previously contractors to be full time
employees of Tube Lines. We have the massive advantage of long
term planning. We can offer people long term careers and that
is why we have been recruiting people into our business.
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