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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 981-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE
REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS FROM TRANSPORT
Wednesday 19 April 2006 MR KEVIN AUSTIN, MS ISABEL DEDRING and MR MARK EVERS CLLR TONY PAGE and CLLR SHONA JOHNSTONE Evidence heard in Public Questions 172 - 277
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee on Wednesday 19 April 2006 Members present Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair Ms Celia Barlow Mr Martin Caton Colin Challen Mr David Chaytor Lynne Featherstone David Howarth Mark Pritchard Emily Thornberry Mr Edward Vaizey Joan Walley ________________ Memorandum submitted by the Mayor of London
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Kevin Austin, Head of Transport (Greater London Authority); Ms Isabel Dedring, Director of Policy Unit, and Mr Mark Evers, Analyst, Policy Unit, Transport for London, gave evidence. Q172 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee. I am afraid in this room we are all rather separated from each other but we are delighted that you are here to give us evidence. We have seen the memorandum from the Mayor's office. Perhaps, just to kick things off, you would like to give your overall assessment of the Government's Climate Change Programme Review and in particular how it addresses cutting carbon emissions from transport. Mr Austin: Perhaps I will start. The document does show that achieving reductions in emissions from transport in the short to medium term is going to be extremely difficult. I think it highlights that even with all the proposed measures in place CO2 emissions will still stay about the same in 2010 as they were in 1990. We are pleased that there is a clear commitment to reducing CO2 and it identifies clear areas for attention but I think we would want to see a more aggressive approach to encourage modal shift and to reduce the carbon content of road transport fuels. In terms of the key areas that they put forward, in terms of modal shift we are pleased that the Government highlights investment in public transport as a critical element in strategy. In London bus use has seen a 40 per cent increase in ridership and a four per cent modal shift from cars to buses as a result of that investment. Investment really does need to continue, in particular in national rail which will see a significant increase in passengers over the next 20 years and does need a lot of investment. Mention is also made of the 20 million a year rail freight grants. We are pleased that is in but, again, more funding could be made available to encourage the further shift of lorries off the roads. Mention is also made of investment in travel demand management. Again, it is absolutely crucial in the short-term to encourage a shift towards sustainable transport. We are pleased that DfT have put forward ten million over five years but they certainly need to be ready to commit significant amounts of funding once the demonstration towns have been completed and go out and implement on a much larger scale. The Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation is a positive step forward. Biofuels account for 0.3 per cent a day and the target of five per cent in 2010-11 is a step forward but we would like to see longer term targets to encourage a longer term commitment and potentially more challenging targets over the longer term to ensure that the proportion of biofuels increases steadily into the future. There is also the issue about the use of biofuels for public transport and the potential to have separate targets and we would like to see that because that is an area where Government has a much greater amount of influence compared with the private vehicles. Finally on that, developing technology required to support alternatively fuelled vehicles and the infrastructure required. On the issue of fuel efficiency of vehicles, again it is a step forward that the Government have reformed the company car tax, fuel benefit charge and the vehicle excise duty related to CO2 emissions and also the recent announcement to zero rate the A band cars is positive. However, there is concern that the vehicle excise duty differential is insufficient. For example, £215 for a diesel car at the highest level is not so much different from some of the most fuel efficient cars. We would like to see consideration of additional bands with significantly higher rates of duty and potentially wider differentials in the existing bands. We are also pleased that they are looking at sustainable distribution because the area of freight driving has the potential to reduce the amount of fuel used with better training. Certainly the Government needs to help promote the schemes and educate drivers to drive more efficiently. Transport for London is currently developing a freight operator recognition system which will do this and we are happy to share that information with Government. Q173 Chairman: That is helpful. Do you want to put that in a specifically London context and say how the GLA is tackling the question of cutting carbon emissions? Mr Austin: Certainly. In terms of the modal shift, I have mentioned the increased investment in buses which has led to a four per cent modal shift from cars to buses. The additional investment and capacity increases in the Underground will also see the same sort of growth. On the travel demand management scheme that TfL has put forward, originally in 2005-06 they put about £13.9 million towards this and this is going to be doubled this year to £24.5 million and next year to £30 million. That will ramp up school travel plans, workplace travel plans and personalised travel plans where you target individuals to change their travel habits. We have also invested significant amounts of additional money in cycling, both in terms of marketing, advertising and training but also in terms of providing better facilities, such as cycle lanes. We did a study about three or four months ago and found that cycle lanes were the critical thing to encourage non-cyclists to become cyclists. Once they start to become cyclists they will continue and other issues will become more important. Ms Dedring: London as a purchaser has a significant role to play. Certainly we are thinking about how we can catalyse the development of markets by promising to buy X volume of buses as hybrid buses. One of the points you have made is how do we get to the 600 bus target. Just making an announcement to the market that our intention is for the fleet to be hybrid by a certain date, which is not something that we have done but is something that we are considering, would have a significant impact on giving a certain level of assurance to the market. That is the kind of place where I think London can play a significant role simply because of the volume of purchasing that it does. In addition, it can do that in conjunction with other European cities. There you start to get into the potential of getting some of the prices down for something like hydrogen fuel cell technology. One of the counter-arguments that I have heard is that London is different because it is more CO2 efficient, because of the nature of the density of the population and the nature of the activity. I guess one of the things that is worth mentioning is that outer London is very much like a lot of suburban areas in the UK so London's experience in the suburban areas is highly relevant to other parts of the UK, so we do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater when we say "London is not relevant for a Leeds or a Bristol". The Committee suspended from 2.59pm to 3.12pm for a division in the House. Chairman: We will move on to buses, I think. Q174 Colin Challen: Bus use in London has increased greatly in recent years, whilst in the rest of the country it has diminished greatly it is true to say. What do you think are the most important features of London's success in promoting bus use? Mr Austin: I think there are a number. Firstly, there is the investment. Significant investment has gone in to increase the bus services in London. There has been a 26 per cent increase in services so people know that buses will come along very soon, they will not have to wait so long. Allied to that there have also been significant improvements in bus reliability, partly as a result of things like the Congestion Charge, which has freed up traffic on central London's roads to enable buses to be more reliable, and partly to do with operating practices, recruitment of drivers, et cetera. There has also been a significant improvement in the quality of buses over the last five years. I think the average age of buses is about half what it was in 2000 and all the buses have CCTV and are wheelchair accessible. The other issue is fares. At the moment average fares on buses is the same as it was five years ago. Allied to that there have been policies to encourage specific groups to travel free, for example free travel for under-16s on buses from last September. A recent survey showed that about 56 per cent of those 11-15 year olds questioned were travelling less by car as a result of that policy. There has also been advertising, "You are better off by bus", so that has put the message that travel by bus is far better than it was and it is an acceptable way to travel around London. I know many people who five years ago would never use a bus who are now using it regularly and finding it a fantastic way to get around. Q175 Colin Challen: Can I just follow up on the issue of free travel. This April we have seen the introduction of free travel for pensioners and I assume that operates in London in a similar way as it would in the rest of the country. Does offering these free travel policies increase capacity or does it simply mean that bus companies reap a greater reward in filling up existing capacity? Mr Austin: It will do two things. One, bus companies will reap greater rewards as more people travel on buses and they are able to obtain income from that. Secondly, it is a question of whether it will encourage some people who previously would use their car for certain trips who now find it just as easy and cheaper to use the bus. Londoners have had free fares for disabled and elderly people for a number of years, so the recent trend is difficult to establish in London. Q176 Colin Challen: How do the bus providers measure the benefits of this? Do you have to register each journey or is it simply a subsidy to the providers? Mr Austin: In London it is based on the journeys. For example, all will have Oyster Cards so every time they go on and click their Oyster Card you know that a trip has been made so you are able to identify the number of trips. Outside London I assume the bus driver will press a button to say that is a concessionary fare and at the end of the month or whatever they will be able to total up the number of concessionary fares and presumably that will be checked by surveys to ensure they are not pressing the button hundreds of times. Q177 Emily Thornberry: Can I ask a question about the younger generation. Another thing that London does which is really innovatory is that we have got free bus travel for youngsters, so the idea is children get used to always travelling on the buses and it is cheaper for the parents to go out on a day trip on the bus because they do not have to pay anything for the children. You still have to pay for the Tube but kids can travel free on the bus. That is right, is it not? Mr Austin: Under-11s can travel free now on the Tube. Ms Dedring: The argument is the incremental cost effectively is zero because these are groups that tend to travel in the off-peak and because of that we would not be carrying very many people at that time anyway so there is a lot of spare capacity on the bus network, just as with the electricity industry, so you may as well get people on the bus and there is a perceived benefit to them but not a great cost to us since the load factors on the buses at that time are quite low. Q178 Emily Thornberry: Except you can travel free to school and that is obviously at peak times but that is clearly an advantage in itself to stop people travelling in cars. Ms Dedring: Exactly. It is the lesser of two evils. Q179 Colin Challen: In the design of routes, are you able to use the free travel issue as a lever with bus providers to get routes laid on where previously they would not have looked at them as a commercial prospect? Mr Austin: In London we regularly monitor the routes anyway and if there are requirements to increase capacity as a result of additional children going on the buses, for example, then additional buses are laid on. The types of trips for children and others will also be considered as part of the overall planning process. For example, if it is shown that a large number of people want to travel from A to C and they have got to go via B or whatever then that can be considered and adjusted accordingly if there is a case for it. Q180 David Howarth: I think you have already mentioned the low carbon buses target. The Department for Transport's target was 600 per year to be sold by 2012 but apparently the number sold last year was 19. The number the year before that was five, so I suppose there has been some improvement. Could you elaborate on why you think progress in that area is so slow? You talked about how London could use its purchasing power to meet its particular target but nationwide this is not going to get anywhere near the target if present trends continue. Mr Evers: I think part of the reason has been the emergence simultaneously of the various competing types of technologies, so at the same time you have diesel hybrid buses emerging, flexi-fuel buses that use a very high blend of biofuels along with a lot of talk about the emergence of hydrogen fuel cell buses as well. That has created a certain amount of confusion as to what is the likely dominant technology in the future for public transport operators. That has also created a degree of confusion amongst manufacturers as to how much they should commit to a certain technology to scale up their manufacturing facilities so that they can provide buses at a cost-effective price. In the wake of several trials that have taken place both within London for hydrogen fuel cell buses and abroad for both biofuelled and diesel hybrid buses there is far more certainty around the robustness of various technologies and the likely timeframe over which they are going to emerge. For instance, hydrogen fuel cell buses are more likely to become more cost-effective and viable in the ten to 15 year timeframe whereas diesel hybrid buses are far more attractive over the shorter term. As a result of that I think you will see a more rapid acceleration of the number of alternatively fuelled vehicles over the course of the next two, three, four, five years and that number of around 600 buses per annum is perhaps not overly optimistic by the time you get to 2010. Mr Austin: There comes a point where the manufacturers then start saying, "Yes, we will do it". I think last week, or the week before, Right Bus in Northern Ireland announced that they were going to gear up to produce their hybrid buses on a larger scale. Obviously they feel there must be a commercial rationale for them to do that and once companies such as they start doing it that will gradually increase production, et cetera, and customers will come. I think 600 is possible. Q181 David Howarth: You do not see any need for regulatory change or any other change of policy, it is just a matter of the market sorting out the standard, a bit like Betamax against VHS? Ms Dedring: For sure some kind of stronger stick type of mechanism to incentivise the take-up would be a good thing and not a bad thing. Because of the rising fuel prices bus operators may have a greater incentive to look to hybrid buses more than they have in the past because they are still about 50 per cent more expensive than regular buses. If you were looking at it from a pure cost standpoint it depends on the fuel price whether or not that breaks even from a purely market driven perspective. Certainly I think it would be worth considering whether it is something to be done. In London we are definitely thinking about what we can do to ramp that up. As Mark was saying, the discussion about hydrogen fuel cells has somewhat compromised that discussion because you think if that is coming along is it worth converting the bus fleet to hybrid in the interim? It depends how long you think the interim period is going to be and how long it is going to take for a lower emission technology to come along: "If it is 50 years we had better do something now, but if it is ten years maybe we should wait for the alternative technology". That has been another area of confusion. Q182 David Howarth: What about the Bus Service Operators Grant? Would not a technology neutral way of approaching this be to reform that to incentivise investment in low carbon buses in general? Have you discussed this with the Department for Transport? If so, what have they said? Ms Dedring: As I understand it, what we have discussed with them has been based not on an environmental perspective or a CO2 perspective but from a pure operational standpoint. We have sent a submission to the DfT but on that basis only where the discussion was around whether it should be based on passenger kilometres or not which has a knock-on impact on CO2 as load factors increase. Certainly that would have an impact and you could imagine various ways of restructuring that to have an impact on take-up. Again, the rebate only dilutes the impact that fuel prices are already having, the rebate. Q183 David Howarth: What was the response of the Department to your suggestions? Ms Dedring: I do not think there has been one as far as I am aware. Mr Austin: It is part of the consultation. Q184 Mr Caton: Continuing with something you have already raised, and that is the subject of hybrid buses, I understand you have recently started running a number on your route 360. What is your evaluation so far in terms of reliability, carbon emissions, costs, including running costs, passenger satisfaction or, indeed, any other yardstick you might be using? Mr Evers: To be honest, I do not think that has been consolidated as yet. It is a very recently commenced trial and I am not aware of the details of that at this particular point in time. There has been no adverse impact at all but I would not like to comment specifically on any of those at this stage. Q185 Mr Caton: Are you assessing it? Mr Evers: Yes. It is being assessed on an ongoing basis but I am not in possession of those figures at the moment. Ms Dedring: Certainly once we formed the view that the lags in terms of a larger scale adoption would be signalling to the manufacturers that there was a certain volume to be purchased, and also flowing that through the contract structure we have in London, you would be talking about a three or four year lag time in terms of getting those significant volumes of hybrids out on to the street. It is worth mentioning that New York has just purchased 300 or more hybrid buses following a trial they have done and the upshot was the maintenance and running costs were slightly higher but that is what you might expect with a new technology and those were expected to bed down and be similar to the existing bus fleet. They have had a very positive experience. Q186 Mr Caton: Is there anything more that the Department for Transport could be doing to encourage the take-up of hybrid buses both in London but also across the rest of the country? Ms Dedring: Yes is probably the short answer. We have not really thought carefully about what would be the best mechanism in order to do that. One could stipulate a certain percentage of the fleet to be hybrid. Certainly hybrid technology is highly appropriate for a bus fleet type of environment because hybrid technology declines in its CO2 effectiveness if you are talking about longer haul travel. Buses which travel in an inner city environment that idle at red lights is where hybrid technology particularly shines. Certainly for bus and taxi fleets there is a very strong argument for pushing for those to be converted to hybrid in their entirety really and it is a nearly proven technology unlike some other fuel types and other technology types where the kinks are still being ironed out. It does deliver a significant reduction in CO2 emissions without compromising performance substantially compared to if you look at the fuel cell buses which are still very expensive and there are a lot of complexities associated with getting hydrogen fuel cell into the depots. It is much more complex and much more expensive orders of magnitude. Q187 Emily Thornberry: Is not one of the other advantages that are seen not just the reduction in CO2 emissions but also the fact that they are quiet and particularly on some busy roads they could make all the difference? My question is if you are going to introduce them elsewhere will you be thinking of introducing them on main roads? The A1, for example, through Islington would be one that I would recommend particularly strongly. Mr Austin: There would be an argument for them on the minor roads so they do not wake people up. The only other issue is that London is a slightly differently contractual regime for buses in the sense that Transport for London can say, "These are the buses we want" whereas outside London it is effectively the operator who can decide what is best for them from a financial perspective. Whatever the DfT will need to do they will need to take that issue into consideration. Ms Dedring: There is an interesting knock-on effect if we purchase a significant percentage of our fleet as hybrids. Because of the desire to keep the fleet in London quite new and modern looking to preserve that quality impression that Kevin was alluding to earlier, those are resold on to other parts of the UK in many cases so you would have a spill-over effect more broadly into the UK if they were adopted into the London fleet. Q188 Mr Vaizey: I think you were mentioning hydrogen fuel cell technology at the end of one of your answers just now. You have got three hydrogen fuel cell technology buses. Could you tell the Committee a bit about what your experience has been using those? Mr Evers: Those buses have been trialled over the last two years. Over that time their operational characteristics have been monitored quite closely and it would be fair to say that over that time period we have seen an improvement in the performance of those vehicles as we have got used to how they operate. There are still some minor operational issues around the range of some of the buses, the amount of power that they have on certain routes, so they would be more applicable to some routes in London than others. Certainly our experiences to date would suggest that when the technology becomes cost-effective hydrogen fuel cells would be a viable technology to use for buses in London and other urban environments. Q189 Mr Vaizey: That has been a similar experience in other European cities that have been trying these? Mr Evers: That is correct. Q190 Mr Vaizey: We are not going to see hydrogen fuel cell buses imminently being used. Is the barrier to that growth Government support into research into hydrogen fuel? Mr Evers: I do not think that would be the barrier. The barrier is the technology itself has not been developed sufficiently. It is not so much throw more money at it, but technologies take time to bed down to discover the problems that need to be solved and we are on a long road to bedding down the technology and making it more effective. For instance, some of the hydrogen fuel cells are still very, very large to provide the sorts of ranges that you need in certain areas so that means it is not particularly suitable for certain bus configurations, double-decker buses et cetera. We are slowly moving towards that. As manufacturers start to see more and more moves towards the use of hydrogen fuel cells both within transport and also in other applications the cost-effectiveness will become more attractive and we will start to see that kicking in. Q191 Mr Vaizey: The reason I mention Government funding is because I think in your memo you expressed concern about how we research funding for hydrogen fuel cell technology and how the different programmes can work together. Is there a problem in terms of joined-up research? Ms Dedring: I think it is a component. The problem is that a lot of these technological issues are really quite significant so more than 50 per cent of the problem is not the grant issue. Mark was telling me this morning that withdrawal of government grants from certain types of technologies has created confusion in the market. That kind of thing is highly unhelpful when you are trying to develop new technologies. It is clearly a component but from an operational standpoint and just looking at the market, how long it will take to become viable technologically and from a cost standpoint, the estimates vary widely but I have not seen anything that sounds feasible that is less than ten to 15 years away and possibly very much more than that, 20 or 30 years away, which is why my personal view is that looking at some kind of alternative for the medium term is really critical. Q192 Mr Vaizey: Would one of those be biofuels? Could you talk a bit about how you are using biofuels? Mr Evers: Yes. Biofuels can be used in either low blended proportions or high blended proportions. In blends of up to five to ten per cent you do not need to make any modifications, or very minor modifications, to the vehicles that are operating using that. Obviously you see a proportionately lower CO2 benefit as a result of that. Stockholm has indicated their shift towards moving their bus fleet to 100 per cent E85 fuelled vehicles - these are buses operating on biofuels which comprise 85 per cent biofuel and 15 per cent fossil fuel derived petroleum - by 2020. There are countries that have significant experience in this area already and they have demonstrated that biofuels are an alternative that need to be considered so long as the source of the feedstock for those biofuels and the manufacturing process in order to produce them has CO2 benefits. Q193 Mr Vaizey: Is this part of your strategy as well? Mr Evers: It is one of the areas which we are looking at to see whether or not it offers something for London, yes. Ms Dedring: The best thing about biofuel is that it is not an alternative, you can use it in conjunction with hybrid technology and in conjunction in low blends with the existing buses. It is not an either/or decision. Mr Evers: You can take the example of Scania, the vehicle partner of Stockholm Transport, who are in the process of developing a biofuel hybrid bus at the moment which again demonstrates these technologies can be used in parallel. Q194 Mark Pritchard: If you are looking for feedstock there are plenty of Shropshire farmers who would be very happy to put their supply of sugar beet for biofuel production. My small, but hopefully not insignificant, question is this: can you recycle spent fuel cells, the actual piece of kit? Are they recyclable themselves? Mr Evers: To be honest, I am not 100 per cent sure. I am sure the components of it could be recycled but I do not know whether or not 100 per cent of the fuel cell itself could be recycled. Q195 Mark Pritchard: What is the average life not of the actual cell which we fuel or we charge but the hardware that it fits in and the overall framework, as it were, that it sits in? What is the lifespan of that? Where have the ones that have already been spent gone? Can they be recycled? If not, can you drop the Committee a note? Mr Evers: I think it would be better if we could come back to you with the facts. Q196 Mark Pritchard: It would be quite an interesting and perhaps fascinating paradox to have fuel cells that were recyclable trying to reduce carbon emissions. Ms Dedring: It is a similar issue to the question about where do you get the energy that is producing the fuel cells because if they are highly CO2 intensive then you do not want to do that either. It is a common misconception that hydrogen fuel cell is zero emission but it is not if you take the well to wheel type of approach with fuel cells, if you take the whole lifecycle. It can be a bit of a misleading type of technology where people think, "Ah, problem solved, no more CO2". Mark Pritchard: A bit like windmills without wind being powered by electricity. Thank you, Chairman. Q197 Mr Vaizey: I want to ask about taxis. You have made it pretty clear that taxis should be moving to hybrid technology. Could you talk a bit about the contribution of taxis to carbon emissions in London and what moves you are making to try to move taxi drivers into low carbon vehicles? I have noticed there is one minicab company that is now touting the fact that it is using the Toyota Prius. Do they get any additional grant, subsidy, let-off because of what they are doing? Mr Evers: The contribution of taxis and private hire vehicles to London's CO2 emissions is around about four per cent of the total transport related CO2 emissions. That comes to something of the order of 400,000 tonnes of CO2 annually split around 50/50 between the Black Cab fleet and private hire vehicles. It is a reasonably significant contributor to transport CO2 in London. Q198 Mr Vaizey: In terms of the minicab operator and whether or not they are receiving any additional incentives? Mr Austin: That was a minicab operator in Hammersmith, I think, and Toyota have given them five initially and they are looking to increase up to 50. As far as I know they are not receiving any incentives but we could find out. The fact they are using new vehicles, the Prius, is quite a good selling point for them and that could encourage people to use them, so it is a good commercial decision. Q199 Mr Vaizey: My main point is whether there is any programme to try to move taxis in general to low carbon technology? Ms Dedring: Not at the moment. Because the Mayor has expressed a strong desire to do something more aggressive on the whole climate change agenda we are looking at a whole range of things that we should be doing differently potentially and that is internally in progress. In principle that is the kind of thing we can do. The advantage is because of the licensing regime we have some tools to do that. It has been used to get the taxis to adopt the new standards of euro engines in terms of air quality. There are definitely tools at our disposal, unlike with private vehicles where there is not very much we can do short of using the Congestion Charge or parking fees. Mr Austin: That is probably what we will be concentrating on in the next two years, to improve the PM10 emissions from taxis which in central London is about a quarter of all those emissions. Q200 Emily Thornberry: It is 25 per cent, not four per cent? Mr Austin: I think it is about 24 per cent. This is PM10 from taxis. Q201 Emily Thornberry: What is PM10? Mr Austin: It is particulates, dust that comes out of the back of the exhaust. Q202 Emily Thornberry: The sort of stuff that gives you asthma? Mr Austin: That is it. Q203 Mark Pritchard: Do you think the reception you would get from taxi drivers would be a positive one? Perhaps part of the answer to that question might suggest why, if you will forgive me, Transport for London, whilst being strategic and forward thinking in many areas that you set out in our evidence today, when it comes to taxis are being slightly shy, because you are fearful of the reception you might get. Am I being unkind? Mr Austin: I think the power is with the PM10 emissions that they have got 20p extra on their "flag for" which goes towards the cost, so every time they have a ride they get an extra 20p which will go towards the cost of them purchasing equipment that can reduce the emissions or, if they have already got a new cab, that is additional money for them. There has to be a financial incentive for them to change. Q204 Mark Pritchard: Do Transport for London agree with me that if I step out as a hopefully environmentally discerning consumer, if I have ten Black Cabs going past me I would like to have an indication of which one I can choose that is using alternative fuels, not just having a catalytic converter put on the exhaust to try to mitigate certain people within the Black Cab lobby who will not be too happy if the Mayor is more serious about the environmental agenda? Ms Dedring: That might be a way to pursue that policy, to do it on a voluntary basis at first and see whether those cabs have better take-up or are particularly used by people. That could be a way to approach it. We have not thought about it yet but it is only because we are at the beginning of the discussions internally. You are quite right, it is an issue. Emily Thornberry: The Black Cab lobby is already going. All the London MPs have been contacted by the Black Cab lobby already about this; I am just telling you. Q205 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask about light rail because in London there are two light rail schemes, the Docklands Light Railway and the Croydon tram. What assessment have you made of the economic value of light rail and the effectiveness in bringing about modal shift in reducing emissions? Is there any consideration of a third light rail scheme at any point in the conurbation? Mr Austin: You mentioned the two schemes, those being DLR and Tramlink. Certainly with the Docklands Light Railway, that scheme has been quite effective in terms of modal shift. If you take between 1991 and 1998, in 1991 about half drove to the Isle of Dogs by car, and that went down to a third by 1998. Conversely, about a third used DLR in 1991 and that went up to a half. That shows the impact of DLR and switching people out of cars. In the same way with the Croydon Tramlink, a detailed impact study was undertaken following its implementation and that found about 19 per cent of people switched from car to tram. It does show a properly designed, thought-out and implemented scheme can have a very good effect in terms of taking car journeys off the roads. In terms of future schemes, the scheme that is being progressed furthest at the moment is the West London tram scheme which will go from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush along the Uxbridge Road and will follow, I think, the busiest bus corridor in London which is the 207 bus corridor. We are hoping by the end of the year to put the Transport and Works Act in. Q206 Mr Chaytor: Sorry, by the end of the year? Mr Austin: By the end of the year to put the Transport and Works Act in, and then it will all go through the obvious processes. Other schemes that we are looking at are to extend the Croydon Tramlink scheme to Crystal Palace and to deliver a tram through central London from Peckham to Camden, which is a cross-river tram. They are the critical ones. There are others that have got feasibility and we are looking at but they are the three that have been taken forward furthest. Q207 Mr Chaytor: On those three, you are confident that they are cost-effective economically? Mr Austin: Yes. Certainly the West London tram and Croydon Tramlink are being developed further to a further stage, and they provide a very good benefit-cost ratio. There is also the extension to the Docklands Light Railway. They are starting to bore through from London City Airport through to Woolwich, and there will be a number of extensions in the next two or three years to cater for the Olympics, for example to Stratford. DLR is working; its passenger numbers are increasing from a very low base several years ago to 55 million people now and probably up to 80 million within five or ten years. Q208 Mr Chaytor: What do you think about the Department for Transport's views of light rail because there has been some criticism that they are cooling down an earlier enthusiasm in favour of supporting light rail? Is that your experience? Mr Austin: Regardless if it is light rail or buses, any scheme can be effective and shown that that is the best alternative, then I would hope the Department for Transport would support that. They have not given me any indication of a lack of support for West London tram or schemes in London. Q209 Mr Chaytor: The Climate Change Programme Review does not make any reference to light rail at all, as far as I recall. Is that an oversight or do you think we should be considering this more seriously? Mr Austin: We should be considering the best type of public transport for the conditions; in some cases it will be bus, in other cases the improvements could be light rail, in others it will be heavy rail. It is really horses for courses. The Review does say that investment in public transport is essential and needs to be continued. You just need to look at the right types of transport for the right places. Q210 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the Uxbridge corridor, the 207 corridor, why is it that you came down in favour of light rail there? Mr Austin: Firstly, it is effectively the busiest bus corridor in London. Secondly, looking at the projected future growth in passengers along that corridor, buses would not be able to cope; they would be affecting the junction, et cetera. The only way you can cater for increased demand over the next 20 years is for light rail. Q211 Mr Chaytor: You cannot make any generalised judgments about the equivalent cost of light rail as against quality of bus corridors? It depends entirely on the usage of the route, does it? Mr Austin: Exactly. At low passenger levels, buses are the most efficient way of transporting people. As passenger levels go up, it becomes the case that it costs more to operate the bus than light rail, so when you move to a certain point, you have to say that light rail might be more economically viable at this point. Q212 Mr Chaytor: Is there any evidence that light rail is intrinsically more attractive to people in terms of modal shift? Are people more easily persuaded out their cars because of a tram as against a bus? Mr Austin: Certainly that was the case with the Croydon Tramlink. That was a good incentive for people to switch; you do not want to get a bus where the journey takes longer, and you have got comfort et cetera on light rail. Q213 Lynne Featherstone: You state that the Congestion Charge has been very successful in reducing carbon emissions, around a 20 per cent reduction. What lessons have you learned from running the scheme that you would advise the Department for Transport or local authorities on? What should they or should they not take into account in bringing forward other road-user charging schemes? Ms Dedring: If you look at transport emissions in London, as you probably know, 50 per cent, by far the bulk of the emissions, comes from private vehicles and motorcycles. Obviously if you want to reduce emissions and you are looking for the biggest bang for your buck, you would want to focus on private vehicles. There are two sides to that: one is offering a viable alternative on the public transport side and the other one is providing the incentive for people to get out of their cars. The London example demonstrates that pricing is the most effective way to do that. If you are looking for a significant reduction in transport CO2 emissions, then it would seem to me that a pricing tool in the private vehicle arena would be one obvious place - just purely from a numerical standpoint - that you would be looking at, if not the primary policy that you would be looking at. Q214 Lynne Featherstone: It is just that in terms of being an attractive proposition for other places or other local authorities, there was one scheme that did not come to be in Edinburgh, I think. Should the Department for Transport be given a stronger lead or more support to local authorities in setting up other road charging schemes? When I say "What lessons have you learned?", I know that the pricing mechanism is a good idea in terms of what we see but were there pitfalls? What could you do to sell it to other places to make it more attractive than it apparently is so far? Mr Austin: I think in terms of allowing other towns and cities to take up that option, it does need strong local leadership, that is for sure. The money that the DfT is putting forward as part of the transport and innovation fund - I think it is £200 million a year for five years or so - is a good way. They can provide the funding to get things up and running so it does not rely on local taxpayers et cetera paying for the set‑up charge, but obviously in many places it is going to be controversial. It has to be sold; there are significant benefits. Many centres in the UK have significantly high levels of congestion, possibly not as bad as central London but not far off, and they also have very good public transport. There are good alternatives to the car; there are options. Selling the benefits to the actual quality of life, the town, et cetera, is one way to do that, but it is never going to be easy. Ms Dedring: Just to add on the £200 million that appears to be flagged within the TIF funding, the set‑up costs for the Congestion Charging scheme in London will be roughly £200 million. If you are looking at that on a national scale, then your question about "Is the DfT providing a sufficient lead from a financial standpoint?", no would be the answer, I would say, purely because of the cost, of course other conurbations will be smaller but that is not going to cover a significant volume of these kinds of schemes nationally. Q215 Emily Thornberry: Can I ask a question about the Congestion Charge, because low-emission cars can go into central London without paying the Charge. Has it had a significant effect on the take‑up of low-emission cars in London, do you think? Ms Dedring: It is difficult to know because there are market forces and green desires among consumers anyway and it is difficult to disentangle those. I guess on balance our view would be yes, it has had an effect. Certainly, on sales of electric vehicles, I know, for example, that the manufacturers are saying the Congestion Charge had a significant effect on that. Q216 Emily Thornberry: Do you know what proportion of low-emission vehicles are being used in central London? Ms Dedring: That is a good question, I do not. Mr Austin: I do not. Part of the thing is that the number of vehicles in central London is relatively small, but I think the help that the Congestion Charge has given to say, "Low-emission vehicles are great. You can go into the Congestion Charging zone free" is a very good marketing tool for them. Q217 Emily Thornberry: You can count them, can you not, so you will know presumably? Can you get back to us on that? Mr Austin: Yes. Q218 Mark Pritchard: We are currently consulting on proposals to establish a low-emission zone, I just wonder whether you have got any comments on how that might impact on London's tourism given that part of the objectives is targeted at buses and coaches and that very large parties of people come into London on coaches. What impact might it have on the capital's tourism? Mr Austin: That is something that we are going to be looking at as part of the monitoring exercise. Q219 Mark Pritchard: Sorry, can I just interject, when you say "monitoring", monitoring suggests post? Mr Austin: Before and after. I think the first thing to say is the majority of coaches, particularly international-type coaches et cetera, coming into London will meet the criteria by 2008 anyway. In terms of the work that we are doing on monitoring, I am happy to come back to you and highlight what we are doing. Q220 Mark Pritchard: Under your proposals, you expect the effects of the Low Emissions Zone to be carbon neutral, that is it would improve air quality but not reduce carbon emissions. Why is this, given that it is only achieving half of the objective? Mr Austin: The main objective of the Low Emissions Zone was to reduce the most polluting, the HGVs, buses and coaches, so that is particularly particulates and NOx. The prime aim was not to reduce carbon. For example, if someone has an old, poorly-maintained vehicle and they decide to upgrade it to a brand new vehicle, then there will be fuel efficiency savings which will go through to carbon savings but, alternatively, people could put particulate traps on and therefore there will not be the carbon dioxide saving. Q221 Mark Pritchard: Your colleague Isabel mentioned sticks. Do you think this is another stick and the Department for Transport ought to be offering more carrots before sticks are applied as far as coaches, buses, vans and HGVs coming into London are concerned? People have to go about their business. Mr Austin: Looking at the figures, I think the majority of vehicles will meet the standard; some of them will not. The critical factor is that a thousand people a year are dying as a result of poor air quality in London. We need to do something otherwise there will be problems and therefore to wait, I do not think is really the answer. Q222 Mark Pritchard: I understand that point. I think we would all agree that we have to do something, but hopefully we might all agree that it needs to be in co‑ordination with government policy, and there needs to be joined-up thinking and linkage between policies in the capital of our country and what the Government is planning strategically for the rest of the nation otherwise we might find ourselves in difficulty in achieving the objectives in the medium and long term. Mr Austin: We are discussing those issues with the Government and also, more importantly, discussing it with key stakeholders, such as IT, motor manufacturers, the Confederation of Passenger Transport et cetera, who have an important interest in that to work out what their views are and how we can best address their problems and needs. Q223 Mark Pritchard: I presume the Rail Freight Association and so on and so forth? Mr Austin: The FTA and the RHA. Q224 Mark Pritchard: Coming to Heathrow, some people claim that Heathrow is in breach of EU levels on air quality; it is arguable. I wonder what your thoughts are, Transport for London, vis-à-vis airport expansion in the South East and what impact that may or may not have on carbon emissions and your strategy on reducing those? Ms Dedring: I guess, first of all, as you probably know, because a lot of the standards of what is counted and is not counted are set through Kyoto, when we look at aviation in London, we are only counting on-ground activity basically and take-offs and landings. It does not take into account the flights that Londoners take and the freight that is brought in by air which, if you did include that, would be equivalent to twice the size of London's total transport emissions, so it is vast and dwarfs the transport emissions from London itself. However, that is not an area that we have been looking at. We have primarily looked at the impact of airport expansion on ground transport in terms of getting people to and from the airport, but obviously if one was to consider the truly attributable percentage of that air travel to London, then we would have to really re-think where our focus lay, but at the moment that is not pertinent. Q225 Mark Pritchard: Finally, Chairman, - not a suggestion, just a question - do you think that might involve some sort of linkage to the Heathrow Express which currently does not run, am I right, from terminal four because you have to change and get on at one, two or three? Is that something that you might be having discussions with BAA on? Mr Austin: Certainly as part of the terminal five expansion there. The Heathrow Express will go to terminal five, as far as I can recall, and that will be the terminal British Airways will be flying out of, and I think they are fairly happy with that. I think the issue with airport expansion again is that it is unlikely Heathrow will meet the targets for NOx and PM10 by 2010, so there are obviously concerns there. The Government, I think, is doing some work on looking at environmental implications on Heathrow and the work will be out at the end of the year. When that work is published, it is a question of having a look through that and seeing what implications that will have for airport expansion. Q226 Mark Pritchard: Coming back to terminal four, I fly from Heathrow quite a lot so I should know, but I keep thinking that the Heathrow Express does not run to terminal four, is that right? Ms Dedring: You mean terminal five, the new terminal? Mr Austin: It runs to terminal four. Q227 Mark Pritchard: It does, so it runs to every terminal? Mr Austin: Yes. Mr Evers: And it will run to terminal five which will be the main terminal. Mark Pritchard: Thank you. Q228 Lynne Featherstone: This is about travel demand. You say you are increasing the budget to £30 million. I have to say, I have always thought that the money that is spent on reducing demand on travel plans is miniscule compared with the major infrastructure projects. I just wondered if you had done any comparators, bang for buck effectively, on what you get your best out of in terms of both carbon emissions reduction and also modal shift for the money you spend on these kinds of measures as opposed to money you spend on some of the large infrastructure projects? Ms Dedring: They are not really comparable because they tend to be in different areas for different purposes. A large-scale rail scheme is primarily for radial commuting versus demand management, but roughly per space created on the network, if you want to think about it that way, it is one-fifteenth or one-twentieth of the cost. If you think about raw capacity on the network and you try and equate a seat on the Tube with space for somebody to drive with a seat on the bus, it is roughly a twentieth. Q229 Lynne Featherstone: There is this theory, is there not, that there will be a limit to how much public transport you can have and therefore, ultimately, you are going to need to change behaviour, which all this travel planning, travel reduction and reducing the need to travel, will attack whereas provision of more public transport will have a finite point. Ms Dedring: The additional provision of transport creates induced demand, as you know, and that historically has all operated on the basis of new transport technologies coming out which can then support that additional demand, but it is not clear what that new technology is. In the 1950s and 1960s it was the car, before that it was rail and before that it was canals. What is the new thing that is going to enable people to move faster over longer distances which would enable the infinite spread of London, for example? Q230 Lynne Featherstone: Apart from twitching your nose and hoping you can transport yourself like in Bewitched? Ms Dedring: Quite. I think the challenge of the demand management is helping people to understand that we are not asking them to reduce their volume of activity and what they want to do, it is just the way they are doing it and when they are doing it. Q231 Lynne Featherstone: Perhaps you would like to describe what the £30 million is going on? Ms Dedring: If I just look at the schools and the workplace, there are school travel plans and workplace travel plans, where we are basically targeting organisations rather than individuals because it is much more cost-effective and work and school are the primary trip purposes during the peak. In terms of the workplace, we are quite reactive, we were targeting employers who came to speak to us, usually looking for infrastructure changes on the road network asking, "Can you put in some helpful traffic lights here?" "Well, no, would you like a workplace travel plan instead?" Now we are trying to totally invert that and focus on the largest employers because if you can get the top 300 employers in London, you have got ten per cent of all employees or the top ten per cent of employers, you could get roughly 70 per cent of all of London's employees that way. There is a huge bulk of employees employed by the largest employers. That is where we really need to be focusing our activities, but in order to do that you need to have a really high-skilled team of people to go in and talk to them, you cannot send somebody who does not know how to speak to senior business decision makers into that kind of environment. It used to be that we would bring along 200 or 300-page documents saying, "Here is how to incentivise people to cycle to work"; nobody is going to read that and so we are trying to be much more intelligent about the quality of materials and people that we are sending in, and both of those things cost more money. Schools are a similar thing; we are trying to focus on schools that are in areas of highest congestion where the parents will tend to have an incentive to want to not drive because they are experiencing very high levels of congestion in driving their children to school, so starting with the schools that are in the most congested areas where the school run is contributing very significantly to the congestion, we have basically mapped congestion on the network against where schools are located. Q232 Lynne Featherstone: Do you have targets for carbon emissions for the money that you put in for funding? Ms Dedring: Not at the moment. If I understand the question then, no, not really where we would assign CO2 reductions to all of our policies on a more consistent basis, but we do have a sense of what we would expect travel demand management, as a whole, to deliver from a CO2 standpoint. Q233 Lynne Featherstone: Lastly, what are you doing to assist car clubs and do you think the Department for Transport is doing enough to assist them nationwide? Ms Dedring: It is quite a difficult area because they are private companies, so TfL is trying to assist them. Simply granting money to an organisation that may be struggling from a commercial standpoint anyway we do not see as being necessarily a sustainable way to contribute to car clubs. Rather helping them in terms of getting parking spaces on the road and getting around some of the local planning problems with getting parking spaces freed up is where we are trying to focus our activities. It is quite a difficult area and it is very fragmented at the moment. There is quite a number of providers and a low level of consumer understanding of what is being offered and the offer is still relatively expensive, so there are a lot of problems on a number of different dimensions. Q234 Emily Thornberry: Nowhere in Britain has been more successful in encouraging cycling than London, so what is the secret of your success? Mr Austin: I think it is a number of things. Firstly, it is investment. We have quadrupled the investment over the last five years. That is not only by putting hard measures in, cycle lanes, parking et cetera, but also funding soft measures, better information, more cycle training, and linking this to other elements. For example, the travel demand management has certain elements of cycling associated with it. When you are talking to a person, you work out they could and would want to cycle, then you can give them a range of measures to do that, for example if they need training to encourage them to cycle or whatever, that is one thing. Certainly, the issue to do with cycle lanes and I think about half the budget, £12.5 million, is going to develop cycle lanes not only on the road but also through parks and along green areas. This is a big incentive; people feel safer on the cycle lanes, safer travelling through parks and along canals rather than on the roads. I think once you have got that and there is a critical mass, more and more people will cycle. Cycling use has doubled over the last four or five years. We are getting to the stage now where people see cyclists, they are much more visible in London and as you see more cyclists, you start thinking to yourself, "That might be something for me" and that encourages more. Q235 Emily Thornberry: You have had terrible trouble though, have you not, getting cycling integrated with rail travel and some difficulties with stations around London? Do you know about this, and, if you do, could you tell us a little bit about it? Mr Austin: There is certainly the issue of providing sufficient parking at rail stations. We are working with the train operating companies to provide not only cycle racks but also cycle lockers, which are a far more secure way of putting cycles away. I think we are putting about £700,000 a year into that. As part of TfL's commitment, they are looking on new infrastructure they are putting in, such as DLR stations, to provide enough parking for 25 cycles so that integrates into TfL's planning process. Q236 Emily Thornberry: I was thinking particularly about St Pancras, which is going to be the biggest European rail hub, and yet provision for parking bicycles has just not been considered at all, and it has been TfL that is having to pay for it, is it not? Mr Austin: That does not surprise me. We are paying for it throughout the network, but in order to get people to cycle to a station rather than maybe driving or whatever throughout London to improve the integration modes, it is essential to do that. Q237 Colin Challen: You have a very prominent advertising campaign promoting bus use and cycling and so on. How much are you spending on that, are you aware? Ms Dedring: I do not know the answer off the cuff. I can get that for you. Mr Austin: No. Q238 Colin Challen: Do you measure its effectiveness, and have people been asking how effective it has been, particularly the DfT itself? Mr Austin: I am not sure about the DfT. We will measure the effectiveness of campaigns by doing market research, product recall et cetera to identify whether people have seen the campaigns and whether they have changed the way they think about things. I do not have any results in my head at the moment, but I am sure we could provide those. Q239 Colin Challen: How long has it been running now? Mr Austin: The bus campaign has been running for a number of years. The large cycling campaign has just been launched, I think, a few weeks ago. Chairman: Thank you very much. We have covered quite a wide range of issues. We are very grateful to you for coming in and if we could have the extra bits of information we have discussed, that would be very helpful.
Witnesses: Cllr Tony Page, Transport Spokesperson, LGA Environment Board, and Cllr Shona Johnstone, Transport Spokesperson, LGA Environment Board, Local Government Association, gave evidence. Q240 Chairman: You are very welcome to the Committee. Perhaps we could start off on a slightly general point. The LGA made a submission to the Climate Change Programme Review last year and made a submission to the Energy Review. Can you summarise your general approach in relation to those two reviews? Cllr Johnstone: Yes, what the LGA was talking about with the Energy Review is that transport policy needs to be geared around emission reductions rather more explicitly than it is at present because any rises in this sector might offset any reductions elsewhere. We would want to see policies that are encouraging more public transport services. We accept that in rural areas that is always going to be economically more difficult, so possibly the solution for rural areas might be better, more efficient, low-carbon, alternative fuel vehicles. I think possibly I would also like to see more in terms of demand-responsive transport rather than the traditional double-decker bus running around full of air. Also we would like to see greater links between air quality and climate change issues in relation to transport as well as in planning and development. Cllr Page: As a long-standing member of my own local authority's planning committee I find it increasingly frustrating that we are unable to see step change improvements in energy efficiency - use of solar panels, greater use of grey water as a matter of course - required of developers. It is still lamentable that we as local authorities have to beg and encourage developers. Occasionally they will offer something as good practice which should be required nationally. There should be a national playing field that requires much higher standards across the board and we as local authorities should not have to be in a position of having to beg, and that really is, I think, something that we have been pressing very strongly on ministers in recent months. Q241 Chairman: I think we are sympathetic to that sort of frustration ourselves. We have seen it in other inquiries. Now you have seen the Climate Change Programme Review do you have a view about what it said about transport? Cllr Page: In terms of the benefits from greater use of public transport, clearly what has been achieved in London is something that is impressive and the linkage between increased public transport and improved air quality - and you heard earlier from TfL the 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions - is something that we regard as extremely laudable. The key point that we would want to make to you, particularly those of you who are members of non-London constituencies who will perhaps appreciate this more, is that the deregulated framework for providing public transport out of London is a major obstacle to achieving these sorts of improvements. What has been achieved in London by the Mayor is not achievable anywhere else in this country because there is no other authority or individual elsewhere in Britain who has the comparable powers to those vested in the Mayor of London. That is why I believe and why the LGA believes, and has been advocating to ministers, the need for enhanced powers to local authorities outside of London, in order to be able to deliver those sorts of improvements. If you introduced a congestion charge anywhere else outside of London, you as that local authority would be hard-pressed to be able to deliver the prior improvements in public transport and also to reap the benefits of extra bums on seats on the buses because the money would go off to the privately-owned bus companies and you as a local authority have no power through the current regime to be able to take any of those benefits that would accrue from congestion charging. Until the Government rises to the challenge that the Transport Select Committee has been constantly making about the need for more regulation, not necessarily the London system, not necessarily a pre-1985 system but a greater measure of deregulation, I fear that we will not be able to deliver those sorts of improvements outside of London. Q242 Joan Walley: That is exactly the point I wanted to pick up with you. You say those greater powers are needed but if you look at the increase that there has been in London in terms of bus use - something like 32 per cent - despite what you have just said, there are some towns or areas around the country where there has been perhaps not as big as London but nonetheless a particularly big increase in bus usage. What is it that those local authorities are doing to get that increased bus usage even within the constraints under which they are operating, including that of deregulation, which I think we will come on to in a moment? Cllr Page: These are essentially isolated examples and the percentage increases are pretty minimal when you set them in the context of the lengthy decline over the last 20 years. Until recently I was the chairman of a municipal bus company in Reading, which is historically good bus territory, as are most of the other places that are cited by ministers. These are areas where traditionally buses have been well embedded in the local community and they have survived in spite of the deregulated system; they have not been delivering their achievements because of it. The picture that we need to look at is the wider picture of decline outside of London. Cllr Johnstone: If I could just add to that, coming from an area that has seen quite a staggering increase in bus growth, I think there are a number of key factors that I would say are special. One of those is very strong partnership with bus companies, where you can build up a strong partnership, where the bus companies can see the potential win/win in terms of increased dividends for their shareholders, if you like, combined with some high-quality systems and an emphasis on quality, an emphasis on information, and an emphasis on providing a service rather than just running a bus. There are many bus companies which are very good at running buses but they do not know an awful lot about providing a service and they are very different. So attractive forms of public transport, park and ride systems for example, substantial bus priority on radial routes, and also some hard measures within city centres to stop the private car coming into the city centre, where you have got all those in place there you can see some real improvements. To quote what TfL was saying that people who would never have dreamt of getting a bus now do it as a matter of routine because they know it reliable, they know it is frequent, and they know it provides good value for money. When you have those elements in place then you will see a difference. Q243 Joan Walley: From the LGA's perspective, can some of the areas that have seen an increase in bus usage be put down to the existence of PTAs? Cllr Page: I stand to be corrected, Chairman, but I think the sharpest decline in bus patronage has been in the PTA areas over the last 20 years, so I do not think the PTAs would ascribe to themselves as having sufficient powers, and indeed Councillor Mark Dowd, the chair of Merseytravel is forever lamenting the fact that he has to deal with over 60 bus operators. Whilst I agree with the point Shona has just made that partnership working is easier to achieve where there is a monopoly or only a couple of bus operators, it is impossible to achieve when you are dealing with dozens of them, many of them operating only over a relatively small area. I think the PTAs would certainly support the LGA's call for additional powers to be given to them to secure greater stability in the network. The one thing of course that the Mayor is able to deliver through TfL is stability because he commissions and determines through TfL the network, the frequencies and the services, all of which are outwith the control of local authorities outside of London, other than on the 15 per cent of the network which are tendered services. The 85 per cent commercially operated services are precisely that; they are commercially operated, and we as local authorities have no control over those. Q244 Joan Walley: In respect of what Government could do, you are saying extra powers rather than using the powers that are there at the moment? Cllr Page: We fully support what the Transport Select Committee has said on umpteen occasions and that is the need for additional powers to be given to local authorities, particularly in terms of things like Quality Partnerships where currently things like services, fares, frequencies and networks are outwith Quality Partnerships. We believe they should be brought in to Quality Partnerships as an essential part of delivering stability across the network. Q245 Mark Pritchard: Even without new powers and perhaps reintroducing monopoly in bus services, would you agree with me that the tens of thousands of local government officers up and down the land taking political leadership from whatever political party might be a good place to start vis-à-vis those workers actually travelling to work by forms of public transport? If you go to many councils throughout the country you will find a lot of the parking bays in the town centre taken up by local government employees. It is quite surprising how many councils do not have a strategic green travel plan of their own, despite the fact that they require one for any major and substantial planning application from the private sector. What about leading from the front, what is your view on that? Cllr Johnstone: I think that many local authorities are already leading from the front in terms of developing green travel plans among their own staff and encouraging alternatives such as tele-working, homeworking, hot-desking and that sort of thing, to reduce the amount of travel. I wonder if I could ask very tongue in cheek whether the House of Commons has its own green travel plan because trying to bring my bike in here this afternoon was more difficult than trying to get it on a train. Q246 Mark Pritchard: Chairman, just for the record I enjoy using the bus every morning. However, we are asking the questions today, I am sorry. Chairman, I have not had an answer to that question and I thought the questions were coming from us to you rather than the other way round, so I would be grateful if you would answer. Cllr Johnstone: I am sorry, I thought I was answering the question when I said my experience is that local authorities are leading from the front, they are implementing green travel plans, and they are doing alternatives like tele-working, hot-desking, and encouraging alternatives. I think local authorities are leading from the front. Perhaps we are not explicit enough about how we are doing it but we certainly are doing it. Cllr Page: I certainly do not recognise the caricature that was just given of local authorities. Inevitably there are some that do not have green travel plans and I would not defend those for a moment. I would suggest that virtually all the larger authorities do have them. As for parking on streets, I would be interested to know what examples there are. Certainly there are key workers for local authorities who sometimes have to use their cars and are required to use their cars, but in the main most local authorities have been driving down the use of the private car amongst their employees, and that is their committed policy. The LGA is a large trade association and we obviously cannot answer for every single authority, but if you have got any examples of recalcitrant local authorities in this field I would be more than happy to parade them on your behalf. Q247 Ms Barlow: I am not describing a recalcitrant local authority but I was interested in what you are saying, particularly in light of Brighton & Hove as one of the examples of places where bus use has expanded greatly. You were you talking about an overall travel plan and the importance of things like park and ride and light transport systems within an overall plan. Do you find that local authorities are stymied to a certain extent by cross-regional bodies, for example, the train companies in our neck of the woods in the south-east of England have stopped people from being able to take bicycles on peak time trains? Can you see any way in which, for example, the Government or you as an association could bring pressure to bear on, say, the rail companies or other transport authorities which would help far-seeing local authorities like Brighton & Hove? Cllr Johnstone: It is certainly very frustrating when you see train operators banning bikes from trains which then immediately pushes more traffic on to the roads. We have seen train companies do that. I think that the key message that the LGA would like to be putting across is the need for better integration of all forms of public transport, to encourage better cycle parking at stations, more secure cycle parking, opportunities for bike hire at stations, better integration between bus and rail so that the bus does not leave five minutes before the train comes in, and for integrated timetables. Yes, we have all seen it. It is about better working together and I think that is what we would like to be seeing from the LGA side. Cllr Page: But none of that of course can be achieved without at the end having some authority responsible for delivering that integration. A deregulated system simply does not deliver that. Somebody has to hold the ring at the end of the day. Can I just add the other problem that stymies local authorities is the often unrealistic boundaries under which we labour. Coming from a densely-populated town with tight boundaries such as Reading, we are unable to deliver our park and ride strategy because the necessary sites happen to be outside the town. That is a problem that Norwich has and many other towns and cities have around the country. Whether that requires an extension of boundaries or some sort of PTA equivalent for those areas is debatable, but one thing is sure, that the current boundaries of local government do not facilitate the development of park and ride schemes. Q248 Colin Challen: The Audit Commission and National Audit Office has exposed the fact that not a single local authority has put in place a Quality Contract. Why is that? Do you think it is right that the Government should rely on Quality Contracts as part of its Climate Change Programme? Cllr Page: I missed the start of that with the bell. Q249 Colin Challen: Not a single local authority has put in place Quality Contracts. Cllr Johnstone: There are a number of areas where there are Quality Partnerships and my understanding is that the Quality Contracts are a last resort. I think where Quality Partnerships work well that is the right approach because I think partnership rather than enforcement, where partnership works, is a better approach. That is where I think it has worked quite well in some cases but in others it does not go far enough. Cllr Page: This is where the political divide may become apparent. Those of us who favour a more regulated system would argue the reason that Quality Contracts have not appeared is because the hurdles are too steep. They are legally an horrendous prospect and the recent joint National Audit Office and Audit Commission Report highlighted that. The LGA is putting forward a number of alternatives to those statutory Quality Contracts that would allow local authorities to be able to apply a range of options to their own localities that would better fit with their local circumstances, but the key element is that we need powers to be able to bring together services and frequencies and to be able to integrate with other forms of public transport, and those we do not currently have. Chairman: We will have to suspend for a few minutes. We will resume as soon as we have got a quorum. The Committee suspended from 4.26pm to 4.36 pm for a division in the House. Chairman: Right, I think we have a quorum. We were in the middle of dealing with Quality Contracts and you had just finished giving an answer. Ed, do you want to crack on? Q250 Mr Vaizey: Can I say how much I am enjoying this evidence session and I quite agree with you about the gloomy things going on with cycling. I do not want to name and shame my council but there were some quite good photographs in Oxfordshire of cycle lanes going round lamp posts or having lamp posts in the middle of them, which is even more unhelpful. I want to talk about money. First of all, we obviously have one of the least subsidised if not the least subsidised bus services in Europe. Should we increase the subsidies? If the answer is yes, do you have any kind of ball-park figure in mind or percentage or anything like that? Cllr Page: These would be personal views. I do not think the LGA has a collective position on this. Clearly this is relating to outside of London because of course there is a substantial subsidy going in in London. I think the point that I made earlier is a key one, that at the moment we do not have the legal framework for actually being able to inject those subsidies in a structured way that could actually deliver the outcome that you have in London. So even if there were a limitless kitty you would be hard-pushed within the current regime to be able to deliver the sort of substantial improvements that I think you and I would want to see. I would therefore say that there is a choice between expanding existing services and looking at developing new services. The Government has had a commendable record in terms of kick-start and rural initiatives for developing and trialling buses, and I think that is continuing to go ahead. So I would say the priority has to be to look to channelling money into improving existing services as a precursor towards a more substantial modal shift. Whether that then takes the form of congestion charging or some other initiative, that has to be taken together, and we therefore need the framework to be able to deliver that outside of London. Cllr Johnstone: Again speaking personally, there are a number of different scenarios. Rural bus services could be a bottomless pit of subsidy if you chose to go down that route. I do not think I could support that sort of level of subsidy. There are a number of urban areas where clearly you do not need subsidies because they are self-sufficient. I think that there is a grey area in between where the Government might want to consider more in terms of pump-priming services, services which at the moment are not commercially viable but certainly with the right level of initial support have the potential to be commercial in future. I can quote a local example where we did that between Haverhill and Cambridge where a service that was running hourly we ran half hourly, which within six months was not only running half hourly but every 20 minutes in the peak and had gone from single to double-decker and is now a very, very successful commercial service. That had some pump-priming. If you could do that along a number of radial routes that could make a big difference in terms of the modal shift from private car to public transport. I think that would be the area I would be looking to government to invest in more rather than the bottomless pit, as I say, of rural bus services which you will never ever be able to run commercially. Q251 Mr Vaizey: That is quite interesting because I was going to ask you about Government funding for local authorities. The Climate Change Programme Review states that the Government has increased spending on bus lanes and Rural Bus Grants and the Urban Bus Challenge. Again personally speaking, in Oxfordshire I do not think we find much of that money filters through. I just wondered whether you felt that the Government as it has stated its case there is being accurate? Is there a lot of extra money around for these sorts of initiatives? Cllr Johnstone: I think there has been quite a lot of extra money and again speaking personally I have seen the benefits of that. My concern has been that a lot of these have been short term with no certainty of continuing. For example, the initial rural bus grant was only for three years and we are faced with a prospect of possibly having to end all these bus services that we were putting on with the rural bus grant if they were not commercial viable, which is why we invested in pump-priming rather than rural services that would never ever become commercially viable. I think what I would like to see is more certainty in long-term funding for some of these sorts of services. Cllr Page: We have been well endowed with capital monies over the last few years. It is capital rich and revenue poor and that has been the cry from all local authorities, particularly those responsible for transport. That is still the case. However, it is interesting on things like congestion charging that you do not actually need government grants to roll out congestion charging because the set-up costs could be covered out of the new prudential borrowing regime that local authorities have. The capital costs could easily be set against future revenue income streams from congestion charging, so that is not the issue for local authorities. Funding the set-up of congestion charging could be done in that way. It is delivering that wider package of improvements that eludes us and it is that absence of the framework of powers that you have in London that we need to see applied, to a greater or lesser extent, elsewhere in England. Q252 Mr Vaizey: What about the Bus Service Operators Grant which other people have criticised because it does not, they feel, incentivise bus companies to move over to low carbon systems? Cllr Page: The Commission for Integrated Transport did a very detailed investigation into the future of the BSOG a few years ago. I sat on that on behalf of the LGA and the general consensus was that departing from the current regime would inevitably produce winners and losers, and the Government's fear, quite genuinely, was that whilst they accepted that there were arguments for changing and incentivising, that would inevitably cause losers. One thing the DfT is very, very wary about is destabilising the system in an unpredictable way. That produces a great argument for inertia. I think the sentiments are very laudable but when you look at the practicalities it is very difficult, particularly if you have got a cash-limited sum. If you are willing to incentivise the system and literally let the system take the money off your hands then I am sure you could devise a system but the Chancellor, I think, would have other views on that. Q253 Chairman: We have seen bus fares going up and the cost of motoring going down. The Department seems to be relying on this new Transport Innovation Fund to address that gap. Do you think that is a sensible way to do it? Cllr Page: No is the short answer. Cllr Johnstone: Again, I think it is one of these funds where there is no guarantee of stability of long-term funding. Again, it is about the split between capital and revenue. I think there are some real issues that need to be addressed with the Transport Innovation Fund. Cllr Page: It is essentially back-loaded and I think it skirts round some of the fundamental shortfalls and failings to which we have alluded. I think if the Government is serious about addressing problems in the PTA areas they have to look at powers as well. Powers and structures go hand-in-hand in this debate. The debate about city regions is an interesting one because that at least recognises that the existing boundaries are not suitable for planning the future growth and development, particularly in a sustainable fashion, of many of our towns and cities. Whether the Government is going to have the courage to be able to move forward and give us the appropriate powers, I do not know. I think TIF without a change in powers and structures is not going to deliver. Q254 Chairman: The Department said that the two main objectives of the fund would be tackling congestion and improving productivity. Do you think it would be helpful if they added reducing carbon emissions alongside those two? Cllr Page: Absolutely. Q255 Mr Chaytor: Just pursuing the point about the difference between the cost of private motoring and the cost of public transport. Some years ago the Government abandoned the fuel duty escalator with the pledge that any future above-inflation increase in fuel duty would be hypothecated towards investment in public transport. Since that pledge there has been no above-inflation rise in fuel duty. Would this be a suitable means of dealing with the problem you described of being capital rich but revenue poor if the Government were to once again, either for a definite period of time or as a one-off, introduce a fuel duty rise above inflation and ring fence it to local government for public transport investment? Cllr Johnstone: When you are using carrots along with the sticks, it is much more acceptable from a public point of view than simply the stick of the escalator, so I would support linking the two together and that might well help if it were injected into revenue funding. Q256 Mr Chaytor: So the stick of the escalator translated into the carrot of more revenue support for your authorities? Cllr Johnstone: Yes. Certainly the experience that I have is that where we have introduced the stick of stopping private motorists coming into the city centre but accompanying it with the carrot of better public transport, of a new park and ride or whatever, that has been much more acceptable than simply the stick, and whilst the public may not particularly like it they can understand the reasons for it and they can see that there are benefits on the other side. Q257 Mr Chaytor: But has the LGA made any representations to the Treasury about the fuel duty escalator? Cllr Page: We made it on a broader front. We did a specific inquiry into the whole issue of road pricing and have made a lengthy submission to the Government about this. The key issue relating to road pricing and to the point you are making is the need for transparency because the public are rightly sceptical about national governments saying, "We are increasing your taxes from X", and then it disappearing into a black hole. One of the successes that the Mayor has had in London is being able to link clearly the congestion charge into a recycling towards public transport. Insufficient has been generated from the congestion charge but what has been raised goes into public transport and that is clearly demonstrable. It is this key issue of being able to put in place improvements, levying a charge through whatever means - it could be through fuel duty or congestion charge - and then displaying that that money is going back into supporting improvements and delivering further improvements. That is the key virtuous circle that you have to display to the public. I am not sure that central government can necessarily do that and therefore the mechanism has to be done at a local level. I support a national congestion charging scheme, as does the LGA, but it is predicated on that need for revenue neutrality and transparency. If you can deliver that and show it then I think you can carry the public a long way down this road. Q258 Mr Chaytor: Could I change tack away from fuel duty and talk about trams a little bit. Six years ago in the 10-Year Transport Plan the Government envisaged 25 new tram schemes by the end of the decade. How many of those do you think will be in place by 2010? Cllr Johnstone: Very few, for various reasons mostly down to, I think, cost. Q259 Mr Chaytor: When you say cost do you mean changing costs or poor estimates of cost? Cllr Johnstone: Rising costs, yes. Q260 Mr Chaytor: What is the source of the problem? Is it inadequate estimation by the PTAs or local authorities submitting the schemes or is there some excessive cost inflation in tram schemes that does not apply to any other sector? Cllr Page: We have to tread carefully; these are our members. Q261 Mr Chaytor: But I am looking for an honest answer. Cllr Johnstone: I do not think it would be fair to comment on specific schemes without knowing the full details, but it is certainly the case that inflation within transport industry capital is running ahead of standard inflation; we know that. Cllr Page: I think there is a real issue of value for money. Speaking as a recent chairman of a bus company, I would argue that pound for pound investment in improved bus services and guided busways could probably deliver more in terms of improving public transport. Q262 Mr Chaytor: That is not what the Transport Select Committee has said. The Transport Select Committee has said pound for pound that light rail is as cost effective as bus routes. Cllr Page: Then you have the problem, though, of the timescale for delivery and of course there is, by definition, nothing like the flexibility in light rail that there is in bus services. I think central government has rightly subjected these proposals to a great deal of scrutiny. I am not too sure that all the schemes have necessarily been presented as well as they could have been. Q263 Mr Chaytor: Reading does not have a tram scheme in the pipeline, I take it? Cllr Page: We do have them planned but they are to be funded by private developers on the back of section 106 agreements. The developments near the M4 are predicated on them providing light rail into town, but those will be funded by developers, so there is no call on the public purse. I think the view the LGA has is that clearly this is a local decision that has to be argued in the context of a package of measures. Simply to say, "This is a light rail scheme; give us the money" is perhaps a bit naïve, and some of the schemes seem to have been presented more on that basis. I think the context of the benefits to a wider area needs perhaps to be displayed. Q264 Mr Chaytor: So you are not really representing your members' frustrations on this or the members who have submitted light rail schemes? You are distancing the LGA from the individual authorities with particular problems on this point? Cllr Page: In the submissions that we have made we have supported the principle of light rail where it can be demonstrated that it provides good value. I think that is the test that has to be applied. Clearly for the Secretary of State that has not been the case in some of the recent schemes. Q265 Mr Chaytor: Just coming back to our earlier point about transparency and hypothecation in terms of tax increases and the investment in public transport, do you think one way forward in the light rail log-jam could be that congestion charging schemes should be an essential part of the package, and that would mean that the local authorities submitting a bid for a tram would have to show their commitment and their courage by introducing a congestion scheme and using the revenue in order to part finance the tram schemes? Cllr Page: It would have to be part of a wider scheme. There is no way you could put forward a congestion charge scheme simply related to the expansion of light rail. Q266 Mr Chaytor: No, a congestion charge scheme for the conurbation in which the new light rail was going to run. Cllr Johnstone: I think you would need to be certain that the benefits of the light rail system were spread across the area in which you had a congestion charging scheme. I think I would have a little bit of nervousness in some respects. For example, in my area we are currently awaiting funding decisions on a guided busway scheme. That is going to go along one corridor. It would be very difficult, I think, to implement a congestion charging scheme along that corridor because what you would do is encourage rat-running on to other corridors. I think the principle is sound. The actual implementation and how it would work in practice is far more complex and would need to be worked through very carefully, but I do not have a problem with the linkages. Q267 Mr Chaytor: You both focus strongly on the question of integration and the difficulties caused by the 1985 legislation, but you say that you do not want to simply turn the clock back pre-1985. What would be the most important specific powers that transport authorities could be granted that would help to improve the integration of all public transport systems? Cllr Page: In terms of the existing operators, if we could have the powers within a statutory Quality Partnership to be able to bring in services and frequencies covering a town or city, that would at a stroke provide us with additional powers that we currently do not have and would put us in a key position that at the moment we have to use voluntary persuasion. Shona said that there have been a number of voluntary partners but they are precisely that. We have no statutory Quality Partnerships operating in England because local authorities do not see them as providing anything of real value to them. If you included services and frequencies, and therefore the ability to be able to co-ordinate, that would certainly give us a much more powerful tool. Ultimately, a franchising regime should also be available to the larger PTAs, and that is something that we include in our toolbox of measures, but what we are saying is that there is no single one-size-fits-all solution to promoting public transport outside of London. Situations vary so enormously we must have the flexibility at local level to choose a number of options, but certainly the recourse to a franchising regime would also deliver that integration and co-ordination. Q268 Joan Walley: One area where your members do have a degree of local flexibility is through the local transport plans for which they have responsibility. Looking at the area and the time between now and 2010-2011, there will be something like £8 billion worth of capital funding. I would be very interested in your views as to why in the LTPs climate change and carbon reductions have not been made one of the shared priorities that are applying to local authorities when submitting those LTPs? Cllr Johnstone: I do not see a problem with it being a shared priority. Q269 Joan Walley: But it is not. Cllr Johnstone: It is not at present. LTPs have become more and more prescriptive over the years as to what should and should not be included, and perhaps in the next round of LTPs, yes, the Government should be discussing with local authorities how carbon reduction can be part of that shared priority. Q270 Joan Walley: In terms of the opportunity to be prescriptive, I am really interested in your views as to whether or not the Government should have been prescriptive about requiring that to be a shared priority because what has been submitted now is going to be paving the way ahead between now and 2010-2011, and if we have lost the opportunity to integrate carbon reduction to that extent into the LTP, the Government has missed a trick, has it not? Cllr Johnstone: It probably has. Cllr Page: It may not feature in the headlines but all local transport plans will include issues of air quality monitoring and the broader issues of pollution, and some authorities are better at this than others. My own authority has monitoring stations for air quality throughout the borough and that is clearly an issue of priority to us. So it not only issues of CO2 and wider climate change, but it is a very important issue for people on the doorstep, and that is the quality of the air that they are breathing locally through something that is monitored and plays an important part in the plan. So I would not want you to think that simply because it is not there in the headline - and I agree with everything Shona has said - it means that local authorities are not focusing on the issues in their own localities. Q271 Joan Walley: I would be interested as to whether or not the LGA has done any research or got any feedback from its members as to whether they feel that by including in the LTP the heading "quality of life issues" that gives them sufficient scope to be as innovative as they really would like to be in terms of using that heading as a main priority for carbon reduction? Cllr Johnstone: I think there are other opportunities as well as the LTP in bringing forward the sorts of things that you are looking for and those are the local area agreements that are coming forward and the local strategic partnerships. There is a danger of concentrating too much on LTP and LTP money. I think we need to look more broadly across some of the new funding streams coming forward and some of the new priorities coming forward in the local area agreements. Q272 Joan Walley: So you would go along with the Government not choosing that to be a priority? Cllr Johnstone: I think what I said was that it probably did miss a trick in the current round of LTPs but rather than saying, "Well, there is nothing going to happen now for another few years," we need to be looking at the other areas where there are shared priorities and local area agreements and perhaps we need to be looking towards a more environmental block in some of those coming forward. Q273 Chairman: In terms of disincentivising car use, Transport 2000 has suggested that both central government and local authorities could be more imaginative in using "sticks as well as carrots". For example, business rates could be reformed so that you could charge carparking more and shop frontages less, or you could have tax credits for businesses that take up workplace travel plans. Do you have any views about that? Cllr Page: I am not too sure that the LGA has expressed a general view. We support the return of the business rate to local authority control. I am not too sure whether within the return of that there would be the sort of flexibility that you have indicated. I am sure we would support the principle of greater flexibility and therefore such proposals, but we do not have an LGA position on that. In terms of the wider incentives, clearly it returns to the question of our ability to be able to put in place and deliver improvements in advance of sticks. I think the key success of London was for the Mayor being able to plan for the improvement of public transport in a way that would be very difficult, in fact nigh on impossible, in the current structure. Admittedly, where there is a single monopoly operator in my own town which is owned by the local authority we have a degree of synergy but of course that does not apply in more than 13 authorities across the country. Elsewhere you have independent bus operators who have their own agenda and their own shareholders to account to, so the scope there is more limited. Q274 Ms Barlow: In its section on transport, the Climate Change Programme Review does not include a single mention of the use of planning regulations in cutting down car dependence in new housing or new commercial developments. How significant is this omission? Cllr Johnstone: It is extremely significant. I think there are a couple of things there. I would want to highlight or flag up the proposed planning gains supplement as a real issue in terms of the limitations that it would be putting on local authorities in negotiating with developers for better public transport. The idea that this is a tax that is going to be collected centrally and divvied out will certainly not be an incentive to local authorities in planning. Although not specifically around car use, I think there is also an opportunity with the Code on Sustainable Homes. What I would really like to see is that made mandatory for all new building and not just new public buildings. So I think there are some opportunities there and I think that I would be looking to see the Government really working on both of those to provide some better incentives for local authorities with new developments. Q275 Ms Barlow: So not only do you feel there are few incentives but actually there are restrictions on forward-thinking local authorities? Cllr Johnstone: I think the planning gain supplement is a potential restriction on local authorities and the freedom that local authorities currently have in negotiating section 106 agreements, some of which can be very flexible in terms of alternatives to car use. I think there are some real potential dangers there. Where the Government really could help and could show its teeth is in the Code on Sustainable Homes and all sectors having to build sustainable buildings. Q276 Ms Barlow: Finally, you have got the three departments, Transport, ODPM and Defra. How effective do you think they are in providing both a unified and a consistent lead to local authorities, to narrow it down a bit, particularly in the area of sustainable planning? Cllr Johnstone: I think that there is sometimes very little evidence of joined-up government between the various departments. I would like to see a lot better integration of government departments in working to provide better public transport, less carbon emissions, and better use and better integration than is currently the case. It is very, very frustrating sometimes as local authorities to see them not working together. If I can give a specific example. We work with DfT in terms of developing travel and integrated transport plans and long-term transport strategies only to see ODPM then come back and insist that we have to take another X thousand houses, which completely throws any transport strategy out of the window because transport strategies are predicated on a certain number of houses in that area. So the two do not work together, and I think that is a very clear example of where government departments are fighting against each other. Cllr Page: I would agree with that entirely. Looking at the comments Stephen Joseph made in one of your earlier sessions when he talked about a "disjunction" between the departments, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. There is often little evidence that the Department for Transport takes on board the wider picture, neither do the other departments. I do not know what goes on in Cabinet committees these days, I have never been a member of a Cabinet committee, Cabinet government as such may be pooh-poohed but I was always told that Cabinet committees were to provide the real co-ordination between the various departments. There does not seem to be much evidence of it, certainly at the sharp end in terms of local government, and I think there is a real need for pressure to be brought on departments to look at the implications of the wider climate change agenda and not just pass it off to Defra and say, "It is the words 'climate change', that is therefore you." If we functioned at a local government level in the compartmentalised way that departments of state seem to, I think we would be rightly castigated. Coming from a unitary authority that is trying to overcome these departmental boundaries I think I can be reasonably critical of what we see from the departments to which Shona has referred. It is pretty dismal. Q277 Chairman: Have any colleagues any further points? I think you will find much to agree with in the report we published last month on sustainable housing. Cllr Page: I have not had a chance to read it yet. Chairman: I commend it to you. Thank you very much. I am sorry once again we were interrupted by the division but it has been a very helpful session from our point of view, so thank you very much.
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