Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR TIM
LARNER, MR
NICK VAUGHAN,
MR NEIL
SCALES, MR
TREVOR ERRINGTON
AND MR
TOM MAGRATH
17 MAY 2006
Chairman: Do any Members have an interest
to declare?
Mr Martlew: I am a member of the Transport
and General and the Municipal Workers' Union.
Mr Clelland: I am a member of Amicus.
Graham Stringer: I am a member of Amicus
and I chair the House of Commons PTEG, the Passenger Transport
Executive Group.
Mr Clelland: I am also a member of that
group.
Q1 Chairman: Gwyneth Dunwoody, ASLEF.
I have apologies from Mr Wilshire and I think Mr Goodwill is hoping
to join us as soon as he can. Good afternoon to you gentlemen.
We are very delighted to see you at the first of our sessions
on local transport planning and funding which we regard as being
one of the most important subjects. I would be very grateful if
you could identify yourselves for the record.
Mr Magrath: I am Tom Magrath.
Although I am a director of West Midlands PTE, I am here on behalf
of the Chief Engineers' and Planning Officers' Group of the West
Midlands of which I am the immediate past chair.
Mr Errington: Good afternoon.
I am Trevor Errington. I lead a team that works on behalf of the
West Midlands Chief Engineers' and Planning Officers' Group in
preparing the joint LTP for the whole of the metropolitan area.
Mr Scales: I am Neil Scales, the
chief executive and director general of Merseytravel.
Mr Vaughan: I am Nick Vaughan.
I am head of project development at the Greater Manchester Passenger
Transport Executive.
Mr Larner: I am Tim Larner. I
am director of PTEG's support unit which represents the interests
of the six English Passenger Transport Executives.
Q2 Chairman: Am I to take it that
none of your groups has anything you want to say before we begin?
Mr Scales: Yes.
Q3 Chairman: Was the first round
of Local Transport Plans successful in meeting its objectives?
Mr Errington, you are smiling.
Mr Errington: In the West Midlands
we believe the first round set a really good framework for engaging
investment and programmes with the wider objectives of local authorities.
In terms of that high level objective of moving from the old fashioned
transport policy programmes which were very narrowly transport
focused to making it part of the wider activity of the metropolitan
authorities, everything embraced a wider agenda in terms of regeneration,
social inclusion and so on. We think it has set a very good framework
for it.
Q4 Chairman: Did it deliver what
the public expected in terms of transport improvements?
Mr Errington: I do not think it
has because clearly public expectations are always greater than
we are able to deliver. One of the difficult issues in talking
to the public is trying to explain the difference between an LTP
and its inherent capital focus and often what is most important
in the day to day operations, the need for revenue funded support
for operational issues. That has always been a very difficult
distinction to draw when you are talking to the public and trying
to explain the niceties of public sector finance.
Q5 Chairman: Five years into the
framework there are only 60% of authorities who are on track to
meet half of the core targets and only 5% of councils are on track
to meet 80% of the targets. Does anybody want to have a crack
at why that is?
Mr Larner: This was a real shift
in the way that local authorities had to tackle transport planning.
A lot of the targets that were set back in 2000 were quite suspect
in many ways. They were based on aspiration and indeed the DFT
encouraged local authorities to be aspirational in the way they
set targets. Often, there was an inadequate baseline for those
targets and not sufficient data collection for them to realise
where they were starting from. There was implicit pressure almost
to follow government targets and say, "If the government
has set those targets, we have to move in line with those targets."
Often the relationship between the amount of money you spent and
the extent to which you achieved targets was not terribly well
established in terms of the methodologies that were used. In other
things, the different impacts of achieving targets are very often
in the hands of other people rather than in the hands of local
authorities and PTEs. The obvious one that comes to mind is bus
patronage where there was a desire to see a 10% increase but most
of the levers are not in the hands of the local authority as to
whether that target gets delivered.
Q6 Chairman: Does anybody want to
add to that?
Mr Scales: One of the problems
that we have on Merseyside is that the bus does not own the track
on which it operates and part of our original plan was to introduce
90 kilometres of bus lanes. We probably have only 50% of that.
On average our bus lane delivery has been three years late and
the reason for that is that the Passenger Transport Authority
and Executives do not own the highways, we are not the Highways
Authority.
Q7 Chairman: Was that money or planning?
What was the real problem with that?
Mr Scales: It was just getting
it through the various processes at a district level.
Q8 Chairman: No one was seeking to
deliberately hang you up? It was the technicalities of the office?
Mr Scales: Yes. You have to go
through a lot of consultation at a local level. One of our corridors
goes from the city centre to Southport and it has taken five years
to put the bus lanes in that particular corridor.
Q9 Chairman: How many years?
Mr Scales: Five years.
Q10 Chairman: You were putting gold
along the edges?
Mr Scales: And diamonds in the
centre of the road as well, but it still did not work. It was
still late. It would help us a lot if the PTEs and the PTAs had
control of the strategic bus highway network in the same way as
our colleagues here in Transport for London have.
Q11 Graham Stringer: If you read
the Department for Transport's submission, it is almost Panglossian,
the best of all possible worlds; everything is perfect; whereas
when I read the submissions from yourselves and other practitioners
there were all sorts of problems. Can you elucidate whether or
not there are any contradictions between the national priorities
and targets the Department for Transport has set and your own
local targets?
Mr Scales: Translating them down
to a local level on the congestion targets, it is particularly
difficult for me because in Merseyside, for example, and in Liverpool
itself we have a city that is built for a million people with
a population of 440,000. Therefore the congestion problems we
face are not the same as your colleagues in Greater Manchester
or my colleagues in the West Midlands or elsewhere. The congestion
targets will be difficult for us to achieve going forward, as
an example. Another problem we have that Mr Larner alluded to,
is that some of the targets are on bus quality and we have no
control whatsoever over the 37 bus companies that operate in Merseyside.
We have had a bit of argument with our colleagues in the Department
for Transport over the number of bus passenger journeys per year
we think we are achieving in Merseyside and what they think we
are achieving. That flows through into the formula and therefore
flows through into the funding so there has been some quite hard
bargaining as to where they think the target is and where we think
the target is.
Mr Magrath: We think the target
setting is a very prescriptive process. However, it is also challenging.
What we have found useful is how it focuses a metropolitan area,
which is some metropolitan and local authorities and a PTE, into
a common purpose. The LTP process has helped us do that. The fact
that some of these targets are really challenging, the fact that
in many areas we do not have control, helps focus the mind. One
of the things we have been doing in the West Midlands is looking
particularly at the delivery of schemes. We have member working
groups to help us do that more effectively so it has focused minds
very much in that respect.
Mr Larner: The national priorities
which the DFT have set are very much transport and DfT priorities.
We miss out on the wider priorities of what cities are trying
to do. Therefore, for much of the work that we do, we are trying
to assist social and economic regeneration and create jobs in
the local area. These are not reflected in DFT targets. They are
reflected in other departments. The Department for Communities
and Local Government has a target of reducing disparity within
GDP per head across the regions, but that is not something which
explicitly is reflected in the Shared Priorities. Similarly, Defra
will have a target about global warming and reducing CO2 emissions
and clearly as PTEs it is very important that we have a role to
play in sustainable transport; but again it is not explicitly
reflected in targets. It is that holistic view which takes place
at a local level that does not necessarily get translated into
the DFT—Local Transport Authority relationship.
Mr Vaughan: These shared priorities
are quite transport focused and our priorities can be much wider,
as Mr Larner has made reference to.
Q12 Graham Stringer: Are there any
specific examples where, if you had not had the national targets
and objectives set by the Department for Transport, different
decisions would have been made in the West Midlands, Merseyside
or Greater Manchester whereby you would have abandoned a particular
scheme or a target that you would have like because there had
been one centrally imposed?
Mr Errington: Within the West
Midlands we have not abandoned anything. What concerns us is that,
whilst our objectives were never to a large extent national ones,
we had some extras, of which the most important one was economic
regeneration, which was the bedrock on which our whole LTP and
other corporate policy documents were based. It was not that the
national priorities contradicted anything; it was that they were
too narrowly focused and we did not give local authorities the
discretion to focus and say, "Which of the four were more
important to us and was there something which was more important
locally than that nationally shared priority?" It did cause
some concern but no contradictions.
Mr Vaughan: It is fair to say
that there would be a slightly different emphasis in some of the
areas of activity. We have been successful in securing quality
bus corridor major scheme funding. I think that is a reflection
of a submission that targeted onto the department's objectives.
If we had picked up on some of our wider economic regeneration
ones, we would have focused more on quality transport corridors
and we would have probably focused more on bus, cycling and pedestrian
measures and maintaining the economic vitality of district centres
on those corridors.
Q13 Chairman: You are not saying
that you, in a sense, bypassed some of those, are you? Because
they were not part of the narrowly drawn terms of reference you
tended to drop them from your schemes? Is that what you are telling
us?
Mr Vaughan: We have not placed
as much emphasis on them as we might have done had the targets
from the national level been wider.
Q14 Graham Stringer: I think what
you are saying is that it is distorting change in your local priorities.
Can any of the witnesses tell us what the cost is to them of the
interaction with the centre because reading the submissions it
seems very expensive. There are schemes delayed. There is a lot
of officer to official interaction. There is the cost of capital.
Have you any estimates on how much this system costs you?
Mr Scales: On Merseytram line
1, if you take the fact that to get a major scheme up and running
at over five million pounds, you have to have heavy interaction
with the Department for Transport. You also have to get the Transport
and Works Act Order powers. Although it is under review, the maximum
at the moment you can recover from central government is £850,000.
We probably spent 10 times more than that just getting the powers
and getting everything in place before we started moving the statutory
undertakers, the gas, water and electrics out of the way of the
path of the tram. There is a tremendous transaction cost involved
in getting these things up and running and interaction with the
department, as well as all the stakeholders that you have to keep
on board back in the county to try and make sure that it is all
pointing in the right direction. If it would help the Committee,
I can give you a note specifically on the tram because that is
something dear to my heart and we are already going through that
exercise for another reason. I can give Mr Stringer that as a
case study.
Q15 Chairman: The Committee, I think,
Mr Scales. Mr Stringer can have a copy. Mr Magrath, do you want
to add to that?
Mr Magrath: There are a number
of risks in developing major schemes which in the first stages
of development quite clearly fall with local authorities. What
is quite important from our point of view is clarity about where
that risk is transferred. Because of decisions on major schemes,
certainly from our experience, being rather slower than we would
have expected, that means that we are bearing these costs for
longer. With major schemes, Metro schemes in particular, it is
really important that there is a milestone approach to it, which
the DFT and government are developing but I think it needs further
development. In terms of additional costs, we can send a further
note to you. By way of example, Trevor Errington, as part of the
core support team for CEPOG, is paid for by a joint budget of
about £600,000 which is to bring that coordination and back-up
together.
Mr Vaughan: As a further example,
the Leeds/Salford/Manchester busway scheme secured provisional
approval in December 2000 but we still have no conditional funding
approval. We still have not moved forward in terms of getting
approvals from the department. It has so far cost the PTE £4.3
million to take it through various stages of design and through
the powers. That is for a scheme that has a capital value of about
£45 million, so we are talking about 10% that has already
been expended with still no certainty that we can move forward.
Chairman: We would be very grateful for
a short note about that from every department.
Q16 Graham Stringer: The other new
part of the funding scheme is the involvement of the regions in
allocating funds. I would be interested in how that works. Is
it successful? Is it effective or does it put uncertainty into
the scheme?
Mr Errington: We met a very challenging
timetable in the West Midlands to deliver our priorities for regional
funding. We found it an extremely demanding process in a very
short timescale but a very worthwhile one because it really did
focus some minds as to what the regions' key priorities were and
how the metropolitan fitted into the region. Through some robust
political debate, we agreed a consensus and a solution. We also
identified how the mainstream LTP funding that will come through
that process, which for the West Midlands is about 90 million
a year, will go absolutely nowhere to meeting the needs of the
area. It was very helpful in clarifying what our priorities were,
in clarifying for our members what the scale of resources we were
talking about was. Unfortunately, of course we are still waiting
for a response to that submission in May. Our hopes are that that
will be a very helpful process to us going forward.
Q17 Graham Stringer: These are submissions
for which financial year?
Mr Errington: You had to do it
for the next 15 years with certain timescales. We are looking
forward five or 10 years. We made the submission before Christmas.
Originally, we were told we would be given a response by March.
We are still waiting. Our hope is this could be a very valuable
tool for focusing minds on what is important in the region, what
is important in the metropolitan area and what else we need to
do to meet our transport aspirations.
Q18 Chairman: Does anybody disagree
with that?
Mr Larner: I think it has been
helpful in refining the prioritisation process but we have to
recognise that there is no decision making going on at a regional
level. It merely puts projects in an order whereby they have to
go through the Department for Transport's very strict appraisal
process, cost benefit analysis and all the rest. It will be interesting
to see whether the way in which schemes get full approval does
accord with those regional priorities because our suspicion is
that, whilst it will guide it, it certainly will not determine
the speed with which these things emerge from the sausage machine
and get some funding to be approved.
Q19 Mr Scott: To what extent are
Local Transport Plans limited in their chances of success by the
lack of control over local heavy rail services? How could this
be approached? Have you discussed this with the department and,
if so, what was the response?
Mr Scales: We are fortunate that
we have control of Mersey Rail Electrics directly and therefore
it is controlled by the Passenger Transport Authority and the
Executive, so we have managed to do that. It injects a great deal
of certainty into what we are trying to do locally. Where we have
been less successful is on the city line which goes out towards
Manchester and beyond because you have relatively short term franchises.
We have a 25 year concession and franchises tend to be seven or
eight years. Our experience is that that is too short. For example,
if you take the Dutch who are operating our franchise at the moment,
they move at light speed for normal transport people and even
they have taken three years to put a wheel lathe onto our system.
If that was on a seven or eight year franchise, they just would
not do it because there is no chance to recoup the cost. Things
where you have a much longer lead-in and a much longer arrangement
are that much better.
Mr Magrath: It is interesting
that the regional prioritisation process did include rail schemes,
along with a more inclusive approach to transport generally, so
the Highways Agency was involved in that as well. In terms of
the Local Transport Plan, it is something which we think is absolutely
essential. I am not aware of the outcome of any discussions in
the West Midlands but we will drop a note to you about that.
Chairman: Does anybody have a different
experience? No? It is about the same.
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