Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 8 MARCH 2006
MR STEPHEN
JOSEPH AND
MR JASON
TORRANCE
Q60 Mr Chaytor: Is there scope for
improving the use of targets with the Department for Transport
and what are your observations about their current PSA targets?
Mr Joseph: On targets, I think
that at the moment the targets they have got are specific around
congestion, perhaps more specific than they have been. There are
some quite specific ones around air quality. On climate change
their only target is to contribute to the wider Government target
and it is unclear to us that that is enough. We think that whether
within that PSA target or just within the Department itself, it
needs to set its own targets for the transport sector, or at least
to come up with ways of measuring the progress on that, otherwise
it will tend to push responsibility onto other Government departments,
including the Treasury in relation to taxation, in relation to
emission standards and the Department for Trade and Industry and
also onto other sectors.
Q61 Mr Chaytor: But would not the
Department's argument be that they do not have control over the
key levers, such as taxation? It is interesting that in your submission
you respond to the question about what specific steps the Department
for Transport should take by listing here the tax reforms, which
are the responsibility of the Treasury. Is not the Department's
defence that they do not control taxation and therefore they cannot
be held accountable for specific carbon reduction targets?
Mr Joseph: Actually, we start
our answer to that question of tax reforms. We were very careful
to list nine areas. The first one is tax reforms and it is the
case that there are things which are outside the Department's
control and it goes back to the answer I gave earlier abut joined
up Government, or lack of it, but it is also the case that there
are things within the Department's control, levers which it is
not pulling and which it could do. I give a very good example,
actually. It is nearly a year now since the Department for Transport
was joined up to the PSA target on climate change and within that
year one of the critical things it could have done something about
and did not was the local transport plans. Every local authority
in England has to produce its next five year local transport plan.
Submissions go in to the Department at the end of this month.
In the guidance on the local transport plans, which came out last
summer after the Department was associated with this, there are
four shared priorities: accessibility (which is around social
inclusion), better public transport, air quality and safety. Climate
change and carbon dioxide emissions are treated as, "You
can think about this if you want to." What individual local
authorities do about transport in their areas will be a determinant
of what the transport greenhouse gas emissions are not just in
five years but well beyond that. This is an example of where the
Department for Transport had a lever available to it and did not
pull it. In other cases the Department has levers which it has,
as it were, pushed in the wrong direction in relation to its approach
to road building and aviation. You have had evidence in fact from
our Salisbury group about what that means in practice on the ground
in an individual case where what ends up happening is that in
the case of an individual road scheme which it is admitted will
increase carbon emissions this is treated as irrelevant because
it is only such a small part of the national picture and, as the
group rightly points out, if everybody takes that view then of
course there will be a big increase in transport emissions.
Q62 Mr Chaytor: Is the logic of your
position that carbon reduction should be the absolute number one
priority for the Department for Transport?
Mr Joseph: It would be nice if
it was seen as a priority, actually. There are clearly other things.
As I said earlier, we are concerned not just that carbon emissions
and the environment are treated—well, local air quality
is a priority, but many environmental issues, particularly carbon
emissions, do not seem to be given the priority they deserve by
the Department, but also that social inclusion is not. The kinds
of spending which actually happen at the Department seem to overwhelmingly
benefit richer people and the richer fifth of the population and
the kinds of spending, for example, on supporting bus services
in deprived areas seem to take a back seat, or indeed tackling
traffic problems in deprived communities. The indictment of the
Department, I think, is not just that it is environment-blind,
it is distribution-blind.
Q63 Mr Chaytor: You refer to some
of the problems of methodology in terms of the way that rail projects
are assessed, for example, because you said that current appraisal
of rail projects does not include the full benefits of rail. Could
you just develop that and give us an example of how that works?
Mr Joseph: Yes. We have had a
detailed report done on this by a firm of consultants called Scott
Russell Railways, who know this territory intimately, and their
point was that a large number of benefits have not been assessed.
In some cases it is simply things like improved personal security
does not get factored in. Those who read the Evening Standard
will have seen how important that is in the London context. We
know that that is very important and the critical point which
those consultants made was that when the Scottish Executive, in
looking at the expansion of Edinburgh Waverley station, kind of
took the brakes off and allowed them to consider a wider range
of factors they were able to justify a much larger scheme at Edinburgh
than a traditional cost benefit analysis would.
Q64 Mr Chaytor: So is there a dialogue
with the Department about that, or did the Department reject the
criticism?
Mr Joseph: What seems to have
happened is that the Department has in practice changed the appraisal
guidelines on rail whilst saying that it has not and not telling
anybody about it. The last comment I had from the consultant who
did this work was he knew that it had changed. He was working
through two projects using the new appraisal guidance and he would
let us know in a few weeks whether it was good or bad, because
it was so complicated he did not know himself!
Q65 Mr Hurd: Your memo states that
without action on road and air transport it will not be possible
to meet the targets, but the memo is silent on aviation. Quite
simply, do you think that the European trading system is the solution?
Mr Torrance: I think our previous
witnesses pointed to dangers in the ETS being seen as a panacea.
Let us remember that we are looking towards 2012-13 and by no
stretch of the imagination is it a dead cert really. We also have
an aviation industry which is, by the Government's own recognition,
set to treble by 2030. We see incredibly low cost air flights
in the context of public transport costs going up while road and
air costs are going down. So in that context I think it is very
difficult for people to make responsible travel choices and I
think it is incredibly dangerous for us to put all of our eggs
in one basket and look to the ETS solving all of our problems
really. It is an industry which is increasing rapidly, is subsidised
up to, some say, £9 billion a year through tax breaks and
already accounts internationally for about 3% of carbon emissions.
Q66 Mr Hurd: Do you have a view on
what other eggs might change behaviour?
Mr Joseph: Yes. There is a number
of other measures. For example, the aviation industry, unlike
in other European countries, is zero rated for VAT. I do not mean
that the tickets are zero rated, I mean the industry is zero rated,
which means they can claim back all the tax of VAT from everything
down to the printing of leaflets and tickets. That is a potentially
rather large effective subsidy to the industry. So there is a
number of other fiscal things which can be done in relation to
creating a slightly more level playing field with slightly more
real pricing of aviation.
Q67 Mr Hurd: Do you think it would
make a difference? If you can fly to Malaga for £19 today
and the impact of all you are talking about means that the cost
goes up to £60, do you think that actually people will stop
flying to Malaga?
Mr Joseph: Let us start with the
Aviation White Paper and the forecast underlying that of a tripling
of air passengers by 2030. Friends of the Earth and the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change, which is one of the recognised experts
in this area, use the Department for Transport's own model to
run some alternative assumptions and that showed that just a 15%
increase in average air fares stabilised growth. It actually did
stabilise growth, so you do not need a very large increase in
air fares in general to choke off some of that growth. We also
think that there is an issue about looking for alternatives, because
actually we recognise (as indeed the Prime Minister said the other
day) that beating people over the head and saying, "You can't
fly anywhere," is not a terribly politically attractive proposition.
There are two possible answers to that. One is to frame it in
the way that the French have started to do, which is that you
are contributing to international development; in other words,
"We are taxing you but we are putting the money into something
which a lot of people would consider to be a good idea,"
and people can see that. The second thing is to look at alternatives.
You had some discussion earlier about high-speed rail. We are
interested—and we do not know the answer yet—in whether
high-speed rail could actually reduce the need for expansion in
short haul aviation, particularly in the South East airports.
We think anyway that there will be a case for high-speed rail
just on the basis of rail capacity grounds and also for better
rail links to airports. It is quite clear that Heathrow will not
be able to expand anyway, even if it does not get good rail links
in. So we would want to look at what you could use those rail
links to do. One of the problems with the entire transport debate,
particularly some of the transport forecasting that goes on, is
that it seems to take place in a world in which the internet and
other kinds of communications technology have not been invented,
or at least have no impact on travel. Anecdotally one hears evidence
from businesses that they have started to look and that the finance
departments have started to look at the costs they are paying
out in terms of flying people around the world for meetings and
that actually in a world where video conferencing technology is
now much better than it was even two or three years ago there
are cases where it might actually be worth reducing those things.
In other words, having people flying all over the place is now
no longer going to be as critical for the competitiveness of the
country as it might have once seemed to be.
Q68 Chairman: Just going back to
fiscal incentives for a moment, we touched on those earlier on
and I know you make the point that it is only one of nine answers
to the question, but I rather sympathise with each of the four
tax changes you do mention. I think they are all attractive and
to the point. Realistically, the Treasury looks less and less
interested in using tax policy for environmental ends. It is increasingly
reluctant to do that. Do you think there is much chance that they
are going to do any of these things, say in the Budget?
Mr Joseph: We have made the argument,
for example, on Vehicle Excise Duty that there should be a top
band for that, but we noted very interestingly that so have the
RAC foundation and it may be that that will make it slightly more
acceptable for the Government to move in this area. I think it
is interesting that the RAC foundation were able to say, "Look,
there is a case for a top band, balanced by reductions at the
other end." So it may be that a rather larger coalition,
though not a formal coalition, saying this would be helpful in
that respect. We certainly think that the possibilities around
a graduated purchase tax scheme would be worth considering and
it would also be possible, we think, to look at a kind of trading
scheme which involved manufacturers of vehicles over 140 grammes
per kilometre having to buy permits from those making vehicles
under 140 grammes per kilometre. We also think there is a case
for looking at other incentives, things like, for example, mileage
allowances for business use of private cars, which at the moment
give you 40 pence per mile flat rate up to 10,000 miles. I have
heard people even within the car leasing industry saying that
environmentally this does not make any sense at all and that you
could graduate that either in terms of more pence for the first
few hundred miles and then tailing off at the other end, or through
carbon emissions, or something. So we think there are lots of
things they could do and we note that the Chancellor has said
that climate change is one of his five challenges for the comprehensive
Spending Review, which implies that they are doing rather more
work in this area and showing more interest, so we live in hope.
Q69 Ms Barlow: In your memo you have
attempted to assess your nine groups of steps in terms of their
possible carbon savings. Could you quickly run through them and
tell us which you think would be the biggest help in dealing with
the carbon challenge?
Mr Joseph: I think the big one
we have highlighted is number two, the incentives for changing
travel patterns, simply because there is now good evidence not
just on congestion but on the Department's own website there is
a decent piece of research which says that this range of measures
in relation to influencing particularly business and commuter
travel, and also personalised journey planning, could have a really
large impact. It means it is 16% of a contribution to the PSA
target and an equal 31% to the emissions currently expected from
a combination of all the 10 year plan policies and the EU emissions.
The key point about that is that you could start it now and you
could expect to get something by 2010 and roll it out. The benefit/cost
ratio is good, and so on. So I think we would put that in as one
of the core ones. We think that freight is important simply because
the carbon dioxide emissions for freight have been rising. I noted
the comments made to the previous witnesses about speed management.
There is just one thing which we did not put in the evidence and
perhaps should have done. One estimate we have seen is that if
you enforce the motorway speed limit of 70 mph at 79 mph (in other
words you are not enforcing it at 70 but at near 80) and enforce
it rigidly, you would reduce CO2 emissions by 4% from
transport, which is big. Similarly, reductions of speed limits
on single carriageway roads from 60 to 50 mph would have some
significant benefits. I do not think we have got to hand the quantification
on that. There were some press stories about speed limits, which
the Department for Transport firmly put back in the box, but we
think there are some benefits from those. The motorway limits,
I accept from the previous discussion, are potentially politically
quite difficult, but the 60 mph to 50 mph on single carriageways
has good road safety benefits as well as carbon emission benefits
and would not, I think, be regarded as a big problem politically
for a lot of people. So I think we would pick out speed and freight,
and longer term things like road-user charging. The evidence from
London is clear on this and, as the previous witnesses said, that
is planning. In relation to public transport, walking and cycling,
we do think these are important and we think the Department needs
to think about this in terms of networks of public transport and
cycling, and so on, rather than individual schemes and that is
what does not happen at the moment.
Q70 Ms Barlow: Just to go back to
the VIBAT study, you have talked about a change of perception
and a change of attitude in terms of transport, in terms of road
users in particular. Cutting out how far it goes, do you think
that an improvement in cleaner vehicles and cleaner fuels would
in time go far towards the 60% target?
Mr Joseph: We do not know more
than VIBAT says. I think VIBAT has done some of the work on this.
The work which we are getting done will, I think, go into this
in some more detail and we will be interested to see that.
Mr Torrance: I think there is
one additional point. Involving people in making a conscious choice
over their carbon use, purchasing low carbon vehicles and using
alternative fuels I think can only be a really good thing and
encourage people to look at other ways in which they can reduce
their carbon. So I think there is a wider behavioural change aspect
really, which should not be ignored.
Q71 David Howarth: Perhaps I should
mention before I start that I am a member of Transport 2000, so
I should declare that as a sort of interest. At least, I think
I am a member. I feel my subscription might be overdue!
Mr Torrance: We will check on
that!
Q72 David Howarth: Can I come back
to the point you were making about the contributions of the nine
policies. You mentioned public transport last and you and I have
been campaigning for public transport for a very long time. If
you look at the VIBAT study, you will see that they are talking
about road pricing, slower speeds (as you mentioned) and alternative
fuels rather than public transport. I was wondering whether you
would like to respond to the view which some people might put
forward that public transport is now lower down the list of priorities
as a way of dealing with carbon emissions from transport and these
other matters are higher up? Do we have to change our tune, or
can we carry on with campaigning for pubic transport?
Mr Joseph: I think we should certainly
carry on campaigning for public transport. We have had a bit of
work done by the Professor of Transport Strategy at the Open University.
He did a presentation for us the other day, which we can let the
Committee have, which is about rail investment and the links with
sustainability. His conclusion was that better rail services are
good and that actually for certain types of journeys they are
very good indeed. He said that for an electric commuter rail journey
to work you get really significant savings, which work out at
0.65 megajoules per passenger kilometres going by train, compared
with 3.04 for a medium sized car. When pressed, he pointed out
that if you took a top of the range Land Rover with one person
in it you are talking about a factor of seven times that. His
argument was that it very much depends. Load factors are critical,
so full but not over-full trains are good, and the point which
the VIBAT people made, compared with cars, where load factors
have actually been falling. That is important, but also what else
you do. If people commute by train but do the other 80% of their
journeys exclusively by car, then you have not really gained an
enormous amount. So it is about rail as part of a wider package.
If you take Cambridge, for example, and the way Cambridge develops.
If it develops so that people do the commute out of Cambridge
by train, or indeed even by guided bus, but then the patterns
of settlement are designed in such a way that basically you cannot
do anything other than drive to places in order to get there then
you will not have gained very much. So I think, in typical academic
fashion, his point was that it depends, but I think his point
was also that if you build rail into it as part of a broader package
then it is very sustainable and does contribute.
Q73 David Howarth: But then the other
question becomes prising people out of their cars and onto other
transport, and the costs of doing that. Would you still stick
to your previous position, which would have been mine, that it
is certainly worth spending the money on doing that and that you
can do that at reasonable cost to get the improvement in carbon
emissions from the use of rail?
Mr Joseph: I am sorry, you go
with road charging as well as public transport?
Q74 David Howarth: The question is
the cost of getting modal shift and whether it is worth spending
the money on getting that modal shift as opposed to spending the
money on setting up road pricing schemes, enforcing speed limits
and subsidising alternative fuels?
Mr Joseph: Firstly, I think that
you need to do a mix and certainly I do not believe in practice
that any road charging scheme would come in on its own; it would
need to be part of a package which would include better public
transport, as it had done in London and other cities which have
been doing it. Secondly, one of the frustrations about campaigning
on public transport is that there are lots of very small but effective
things which can be done, including in some cases marketing it
and telling people that it exists, which can have a hugely beneficial
effect in terms of increasing load factors and also actually doing
a mode shift. The point about the personalised journey planning
which I mentioned earlier is that the evidence was that even in
a city like Perth in western Australia, which is very low density,
just doing a very strong programme of giving good information
to those who want it (which I think typically was about half of
the households which were asked) about the transport options available
to them produced a significant reduction in car travel and a significant
mode shift, but that meant that the public transport had to be
there to start with, if you see what I mean. There is no point
in telling people that they could use buses if there were no buses
there. The point we make is that there are things in terms of
small pieces of infrastructure which make better use of the network
we have got which would be very effective and very cost-effective
in terms of actually getting people out of cars.
Q75 David Howarth: The other option
which you mentioned briefly is reducing the need to travel, which
raises the question of the planning system, and so on. Could you
just say a few words on how you see the potential of that compared
with the other possible options?
Mr Joseph: Again, it is not an
alternative, it is something which needs to happen over the longer
term. It also needs to be something which is built into transport
policy generally. I think the contrast here is between the Netherlands,
where I have seen articles in the technical press about Rotterdam
having empty trams running around, and they proclaim this because
they have a policy which is that before a single person occupies
a new housing development the tram is there. By contrast—and
this is a fact which I gather is true and this is going back a
bit but I think it is still an example—the decision to designate
Milton Keynes as a new town in the 1960s was taken at the same
time as the decision to shut the Oxford/Cambridge railway line,
the same week, announced by different departments, you see. So
it can be done right and there are some examples in this country
where it is being done right. There is in Kent a fast-track scheme,
which is a guided bus scheme being built around some housing development.
The housing development will have relatively low levels of car
parking, but every house will also have a screen by the front
door which will tell them in real time when the next bus is coming.
That seems to us to be an example of getting it right and of doing
the integration. Sadly, that seems to have been an entirely local
initiative with no kind of national policy or guidance behind
it, but it is an example of what you can do if you try. There
have been some very interesting plans produced for Harlow which
are about extending Harlow and doing that in a way which actually
makes what I think the current Minister for Communities and Local
Government has called "having local facilities within pram-pushing
distance of new development." The problem is that if you
just, for example, took a congestion-based road-user charging
scheme the danger is that you would price up city travel and price
everybody out to developments outside the cities. Therefore, you
need to have a kind of land use dimension to what you do if you
are going to approach sustainable development properly.
Q76 David Howarth: What you are saying
is that that land use plan has to be combined with an expenditure
plan, that the two things have to go together and preferably in
the right order?
Mr Joseph: Yes, that is exactly
right, and I think the Government is busy finding this out or
slowly learning this lesson in relation to the sustainable communities
plan, possibly not quite fast enough.
Q77 Mr Caton: You have mentioned
this afternoon the importance you put on freight and in your submission
you say that transfer from road and air to rail and water all
need to be part of any serious climate change strategy and then
call on the Government to promote investment in rail and inland
coastal water freight infrastructure. Passenger rail seems to
be at or near capacity, at least in many parts of the country,
and it is hoped to further increase passenger numbers in the future,
so is there really room, even with investment, for a significant
shift from road to rail, and if there is that room what sort of
scale of investment are we going to need to put in?
Mr Joseph: I can answer this because
the Rail Freight Group has just done some forecasting in this
area, which I think is available now. Firstly, there is room on
the network, partly because peaks for rail freight are not the
same as peaks for passengers. Secondly, if you look at where the
freight growth is going, the flows which you want to particularly
deal with, particularly the growth in deep sea container traffic
(which I gather is one of the big growth areas with the China,
et cetera, factors in there), the priority is link supports and
there are some well worked-up schemes which involve increasing
the gauge and enhancing the capacity for things from, say, Southampton
and Felixstowe to the Midlands and the North. That suggests that
you would be able to improve the capacity for freight. For example,
the Felixstowe story is that at the moment freight from Felixstowe
goes via London and gets mixed up with the congested London commuter
traffic and that a cross-country route is there and the work is
being done on upgrading it and it awaits funding in the way we
discussed earlier. That has the double benefit of providing a
good freight route across the country which can mix in with the
local passenger trains which are there, taking a lot of that through
freight out of London, where there is not capacity, so that the
two can co-exist. The other point is that in a lot of cases there
are routes which can be used. Some of it is about putting in loops
which freight trains can go into to allow passenger trains to
pass and putting in that freight capacity. A lot of it is small-scale,
it is not great big pieces of infrastructure. There are options
which do involve big projects, such as the Central Railway Project
and similar ones which involve whole new freight routes, but that
is not necessarily where the action is, so to speak. It is these
kinds of initiatives which are about raising bridges and tunnels
to take larger freight trains, perhaps longer trains, and creating
freight by-pass routes. That seems to be the factor and that allows
freight to grow. The point we make here is about grants. Actually
what is happening at the moment, perhaps another case where the
Department for Transport is going in the wrong direction, is that
grants for rail freight are actually being cut at the moment,
or have been cut and I think the plan is to cut them further.
These are small-scale items and we are talking tens of millions
rather than hundreds of millions here, and they have been very
effective in terms of promoting mode shift to rail for some freight
traffic. I think rail freight is something which can grow and
it can grow without very large amounts of public spending.
Q78 Mr Chaytor: Just another question
on freight. A point made by Professor Banister in the earlier
part of the session was that the shift of manufacturing to Eastern
Europe and the Far East had resulted in changes to the nature
of freight in the UK and lorries were carrying smaller, lighter
packages, and so on. Is that the case, because on the assumption
that people are still buying cars and washing machines and radios,
I cannot understand why there would be less freight containing
those products simply because they are manufactured abroad? They
have still go to be delivered from Dover to Scunthorpe, have they
not?
Mr Joseph: They have. What it
means is that the patterns change. I understand that actually
the Rail Freight Group has the same kinds of things in it, that
traffic tends to be lighter goods, more consumer goods, less heavy
manufacturing and travelling further distances. But what it also
means is that traffic from the ports becomes very critical and
that is travelling inland, hence the discussion about Felixstowe
and Southampton, and indeed Immingham as well. The fact that it
is moving longer distances ought to favour rail actually in principle.
It means that it is moving in boxes rather than big wagons and
you are moving away from the situation where things like coal
and aggregates are partly moving heavy freight around between
manufacturing sites and more to finished products of one sort
or another.
Q79 Mr Chaytor: I can understand
how we are moving less coal within the United Kingdom, but I cannot
understand how we are moving fewer cars within the United Kingdom,
because surely it is just a change in the nature of the journeys?
Mr Joseph: We are moving finished
products from the ports to manufacturing distribution points rather
than moving bits of steel and aluminium.
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