Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)

DFT, ATOC, NETWORK RAIL, ORR AND SRA

12 OCTOBER 2005

  Q140 Mr Khan: You raise a good point in answering the previous question. Southwest Trains, in fact, want a holistic approach to Earlsfield station, which leads me on to Mr Armitt. There is a half a hectare site available for sale owned by Network Rail adjoining Earlsfield station. One would have thought—especially reading your "hot off the press" press release, talking about joined-up work in private finance partnership—that when you sell this piece of land, you would want to make sure that the planning gain is used to improve the quality of services at Earlsfield station, but also for a development which benefits local residents in the sort of way that the German stations usually benefit German residents. I have been told that the company selling the property on your behalf want the highest bid available and approaches made by local developers to try a holistic approach, in partnership with Southwest Trains, has been discharged and they have been told that frankly we want the highest bid because we want to cut and run and use the money for proceeds elsewhere which could be stations in constituencies around this table, which is all wonderful for them, but I want an improved station in Earlsfield. What do you say to that?

  Mr Armitt: I am surprised. Anyway, whatever the local developer may wish to do, of course, he is going to have to get planning consent for it and it would be absolutely normal and to be expected in a situation like this, that he will not get permission to do things without taking account of some of the benefits which the station requires because the local authorities will use all the powers they have to make sure the development does take account of this issue.

  Q141  Mr Khan: The site is owned by Network Rail. You are going to sell it to the highest bidder, who I am sure will put up luxury flats, that is what everyone does, to make huge profits, and that site is now lost. Southwest Trains are desperate to get hold of that site and work in partnership with you, but you want the highest price.

  Mr Armitt: I do not know the details of this particular bid, but normally we would be looking for a balanced bid which we will get. We want both. We will want the very best bid that we can get and we will want to make the best improvements we can to the station.

  Q142  Mr Khan: In that case, will you agree to delay the closing date for bids, which is 21 October, for you to investigate whether or not Network Rail is acting in the best interest of local residents in Tooting and Earlsfield by going for the highest bid possible?

  Mr Armitt: If the closing date is 21 October, we will have a very long way to run if the bids can come in on 21 October and then in appraising the bids we can see what opportunities can be delivered through those bids to benefit the station.

  Q143  Mr Khan: Sorry to press you, but somebody who once had a holistic approach has been discouraged from putting that bid in but has been asked to put in a bid which could compete with those who are putting in bids for, for example, luxury flats.

  Mr Armitt: I am quite happy to receive bids on both cases and then judge on the value for money at the end of the day which is the best. It could be that the very best bid will give me a lot more money than the balanced bid, in which case it might be better to take that extra money and then spend it as Network Rail on stations elsewhere.

  Q144  Mr Khan: Excellent. You are going to reinvest the money for the better of Earlsfield and Tooting residents, is that what you are saying?

  Mr Armitt: No, I am saying that we would take the money and spend it. As always, we have to prioritise our spending and there could be other stations, it might even be the next station down the line, where it would be more sensible to spend the money than at Earlsfield. I cannot make a judgement or a commitment on Earlsfield sitting here.[11]


  Q145 Mr Khan: You are willing to look into this and get back to me.

  Mr Armitt: I will.

  Q146  Mr Khan: I have got one other final question to ask and it is probably for Dr Mitchell. I see that rail passengers have increased by 22% since 1997, obviously from the fantastic vibrant economy since then. Someone also mentioned the fact that each year, year-on-year the increase in passenger growth is about 5%-8%. In light of that, is it in your interest to have more for the benefit of passengers? Why should you care and do you care about having better facilities for your passengers when you have full capacity and they will use your trains anyway because they have no alternative?

  Dr Mitchell: I believe the railways in the UK are becoming quite a success story. We are growing in passenger numbers every year. We are growing faster than any other European railway, but we have got a lot to do. We have got a lot to do with punctuality; 85% is not enough, we need to do better than that. We need to do more on stations—and this is part of the rationale of the Leipzig statement—we need to look hard at how we deal with capacity. That is the biggest problem we have and will have over the next few years that all of that has to be taken into account. I am certainly not in favour of a situation as you described.

  Q147  Mr Khan: In the Report it was reported most frequently about small low level problems, that great perception of users at stations which is low level stuff. What sort of approach are you taking to low level type things which really would improve the quality of life of users at the stations? You talked about graffiti, and there is violence at my station, lifts are another thing as well.

  Dr Mitchell: I think there are some things which can be done following some of the successful things in the UK, but also environmental factors, you can remove some of the hiding places for people: parks, bushes, small buildings on platforms and things like that. You can improve lighting, you can improve signage and you can install close-circuit television and that kind of thing. I totally agree that the perception of safety is extremely important to people, almost more important than the actual risks which exist. Some of these things do not cost a lot of money. There is a £50 million a year pot available for Network Rail to spend on minor enhancements which could include things like that.

  Q148  Kitty Ussher: I would like to start by thanking the NAO for quite a useful Report and the team who have obviously put a large amount of effort into this. I think it is a Report the public will be extremely interested in, not least because this is an issue which members of the public are rightly very concerned about. Often it is quite difficult to find out where they need to go to make improvements. I think the fact that we have a large number of organisations in front of us today, basically between them answering the same questions, rather proves that point. We now have a spotlight shining on this, so hopefully we can make some progress. Chairman, I hope you will forgive me if I too am rather parochial in my questions in that I want to take an example from my constituency, pretty much because it is the situation I know best. I think it rather illustrates the point. I am going to start with Dr Mitchell, if I may, in asking this question. If I could describe the situation: I represent Burnley in Lancashire, which is a town in a valley and has one main train line running through it, which is the Trans-Pennine route. It crosses the Pennines running to York, Leeds, Burnley Lancashire Road station through to Blackburn and on to Preston and Blackpool. I believe—correct me if I am wrong—the franchise has recently changed and it is now Northern Trains. I think it was called Trans-Pennine as well as being geographically the Trans-Pennine route. It is the only way to commute to a major city: Leeds, Preston or York, since although Manchester is nearby there is no direct train to there. It has no train indicator, therefore you have no idea when the train is coming. There are no waiting rooms at all, so it gets rather cosy under one very small shelter when it is raining, of course it never rains in Burnley, but there are many times when that rule is broken and it does get rather tight. There are no staff there whatsoever. I once saw a five year old child who seemed to have no parent anywhere, obviously he was wandering around the town, playing on the train line, with no staff there at all and it meant that one of the few members of the public who happened to be there had to get him off the train line, and I do not think that is acceptable. There is no ticket machine, no way of picking up tickets, no office whatsoever, which means it is quite difficult sometimes to take advantage of pre-payments for tickets on the major routes if you are not confident that they will be sent to you in time, no toilets and rubbish strewn everywhere. However, it does have a ramp, so it does have some facilities. My question—and I think it is from the public point of view—is given the evidence we have received from this Report, where do we start in addressing these problems? In particular, at what point do we come up against an effective value for money question given that effectively it is a monopoly route? There is no other way to get to Leeds, so the passenger numbers, I guess, would not vary hugely, although there is clearly a very large demand for improvements.

  Dr Mitchell: As I said to the previous Member, we have a lot to do. We have a limited amount of money available. The Government is spending £87 million per year on railways, Clearly it has to be prioritised. As several of us have said, in the early years of the century we had to give priority to safety and other things. I do not think anyone would disagree that was the right thing to do. Now we have got to the point where we have the benefit of this Report and we have the benefit of the RPC report and we are working now on a strategy for all stations, as I outlined before. I think we can start addressing some of these issues. Clearly, I could not defend the kind of things which you have outlined, no one would. No one would want to be in that position. It is a question of how do we prioritise, how do we make sure that the right value for money is achieved and then move forward. [12]


  Q149 Kitty Ussher: Can I probe you a little bit more on value for money. What calculation do you do at that point when you are trying to work out value for money?

  Dr Mitchell: It is very similar to the answer Mr Newton gave. Effectively, the value for money calculations which the Department for Transport do are pretty much the same as the ones which the Strategic Rail Authority did when it had responsibility for this. What we are basically looking for is the best return in terms of what we would get back from the money spent because we have limited resources, and I am afraid we have to prioritise.

  Q150  Kitty Ussher: The best return in what sense, passenger numbers?

  Dr Mitchell: It has to be turned into a financial return, but we can turn most of the outputs that we are looking for back into a financial number, so that we can then see how we rank one thing against another. It has to be done that way because that is the lowest common denominator between schemes, if you like.

  Q151  Kitty Ussher: When you have a situation—I am sure my constituency is not the only one—where in a more remote community there is no other way to travel from A to B, how would you start to assess a financial return of raising the standard of the station?

  Dr Mitchell: The sort of things that would be taken into account are obviously the costs of what is proposed; secondly, the number of people that could benefit from it and the other benefits which we might gain from that are, for example, an increased number of passengers, attracting new investment—which I am sure Mr Armitt would look at—and these kind of issues.

  Q152  Kitty Ussher: Just to push you further on value for money, do you think it is possible that calculation might come out as such that you would do the investment even if the passenger numbers do not increase as a result? Could you look purely at the number of existing passengers or would you have to demonstrate that the number of passengers would actually increase?

  Dr Mitchell: It is possible.

  Q153  Kitty Ussher: Chairman, if I may use the remaining time to draw attention particularly to paragraph 2.9. Mr Muir, you said you required Network Rail to provide more information about how it spends the money from the train operating companies which you represent. What type of information do you require?

  Mr Muir: We would like a better understanding of the disposition of the rental money which we pay. We know that some of that rental money is allocated towards remunerating their asset base in stations, which is about £2 billion. Also, some of our rental money is intended to be spent on stations. I know that they spend substantially the right amount of money, but whether it is exactly the same, I do not know. Train operators would like to know more about the overall distribution of their money. I would say that since this Report was written, and since the interviews and work which went into this, I think relations between train operators and Network Rail have got a lot better. It is a developing relationship and our experience on the ground now—which is confirmed by speaking to train operators before coming here—is of an increasing level of comfort and confidence that Network Rail understands our issues and we understand Network Rail's issues. Nonetheless, some more transparency would be useful.

  Q154  Kitty Ussher: Perhaps we could take this opportunity to provide it. Would Mr Armitt care to respond to that? Are you now able to provide that information?

  Mr Armitt: I am not entirely sure what information they would like. Our business plan, which is published every year, sets out our spending plans route by route and to a degree does specify which stations we are going to be spending money on, particularly in terms of improving stations in the next five years. We do provide information as to where we expect to spend money. Train operators are obviously very well aware of what we are spending on their particular stations because they usually work with us in organising the expenditure and they can see how much is being spent on their particular part of the network.

  Q155  Kitty Ussher: Mr Muir, are you now satisfied?

  Mr Muir: We have more to talk about. I want to emphasise that relations and working together is a lot better than it was a year ago, and I am confident that we will work this thing out between us.

  Q156  Kitty Ussher: Mr Bolt, perhaps you can turn to paragraph 2.11 in the Report. There seems to have been some problem with clarifying who is responsible for station repairs and maintenance. Is this something you now feel has been sorted out and why was there a difficulty in the first place?

  Mr Bolt: I think the issue is not so much being clear as to who is responsible for what but having a more rational allocation, so that Network Rail is responsible for the whole of the maintenance and renewal of particular assets and train operators are responsible for the customer facing assets. The Stations Code, which we are hoping will be in place next April, is designed to get that clearer, more rational, division of responsibilities.

  Kitty Ussher: I am sure that will help us all.

  Q157  Stephen Williams: I think this question is probably best directed initially to Mr Muir, but maybe another witness might think differently. First of all, on passenger safety paragraph 3.16 suggests that if passengers were more confident that there were safety improvements being put in place, it could lead to a 15% uplift in people travelling by either train or on the Underground. Elsewhere in this Report it is not clear how many small stations, in particular where you are most likely to feel vulnerable, have CCTV or a panic button or a help point in place. Given that there is a target in paragraph 3.17 of reducing crime against passengers by 7.5%—which is due to be met in two months' time and it will be interesting to see whether that has been met—do you also have a target for having CCTV help points and panic buttons in all small stations?

  Mr Muir: We do not have targets for CCTV at all stations, but what train operators do have, and have quite extensively, is target date measures which are appropriate to improve associate stations. They have been focusing CCTV, for example, at the stations which need it. Some stations will have an extraordinary number, between 20 and 50 CCTV cameras in some stations, so it is being very targeted by the train operators.

  Q158  Stephen Williams: That large number of cameras is presumably at large stations rather than small stations?

  Mr Muir: At some quite small stations I discovered they had 30 CCTV cameras and it stunned me when I saw it.

  Q159  Stephen Williams: Do you have any idea how many small stations would have no personal safety enhancements at all?

  Mr Muir: Of the 2,500 I expect a very large percentage will not have CCTV cameras. Indeed, I would be surprised if more than a quarter had them because train operators are focusing on where it is needed.


11   Note by witness: We are still finalising the initial list of stations to receive investment so it is not possible to give an answer in to relation to Earlsfield at this moment. Back

12   Ev 25-26 Back


 
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