Examination of Witnesses (20 - 39)
20. Mr Elvin: Yes. They are available
both in paper form and electronic form on Crossrail's website
which I will come to in a moment. The Non-technical sunnary was
part of the main Envrionmental Statement which was published at
the time of Bill deposit last February.
21. As the Committee will know, this is the
first hybrid Bill in a decade, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link having
received Royal Assent 10 years ago in 1996. As the Committee will
be aware, a hybrid Bill is an unusual composite of features of
public and private Bills, and I do not think I need to say much
more about it given that you summarised its principal characteristic
in your opening address, namely the principle of the Bill in a
hybrid Bill is fixed by the House on Second Reading. I do not,
I anticipate, need to touch on the instructions at this stage
but if any issue arises in due course then obviously I will address
the Committee.
22. There are some short procedural matters
that it would be useful to address at the end of the Committee
hearing today or first thing in the morning if that is more convenient.
23. Also, I ought to say that although we are
not operating under the full IT system which the Committee had
demonstrated to it last Thursday in Committee Room 5, we do have
two screens available upon which a number of images are proposed
to be projected during the course of these submissions just to
illustrate some of the points. In respect of detailed plans and
the like, can I apologise that it is much more difficult to see
the maps on these screens than it will be on the screens which
you were shown last week in Committee Room 5 where you will each
have an individual screen and the screen for the public will be
that much easier to see. Where necessary, I will refer to plans
in the Environmental Statement Non-technical summary as it saves
eyestrain, because I for one certainly cannot make out all the
detail from this distance and I think you are further away from
the screen at the back, sir, than I am from the one at the front.
24. Crossrail is a major new cross-London rail
link. It is a project which serves not only London but the South
East of England and, in many respects, the nation as a whole.
It will support and maintain the status of London as a World City
by providing a much needed world class transport system. You have
there, and it is in the Quick Guide and the Non-technical summary
right at the front, the main route of that, which I imagine you
will be at least passingly familiar with already at this stage.
It is page two of the Non-technical summary.[1]
25. The introduction of lines for heavy rail
running from one suburb to another by a tunnel under the city
centre with underground stations would be new to London but it
is not to other cities. The RER system in Paris is perhaps the
best known of this type of system. That system now has five lines.
26. The Crossrail project, therefore, represents
a fundamental change to the past development of rail services
which has resulted today in a cordon of termini of mainline rail
stations that force the large proportion of people today who want
to get from the rail termini to the centre of the city to transfer
to underground or buses in order to get to their destination.
Crossrail will enable those people to get much more directly to
their final destination. It will increase the passenger capacity
available for such journeys and will relieve the congestion at
the termini and on London Underground, which of course has wider
benefits, about which I shall say more in a moment.
27. The project includes the construction of
a twin-bore tunnel on a west-east alignment under central London
beginning at Royal Oak just west of Paddington and the upgrading
of existing National Rail lines to the east and west of central
London. Crossrail includes the construction of seven central area
stations providing interchanges with London Underground, the National
Rail system and bus services, and the upgrading or renewal of
existing stations outside central London. It will also allow an
integrated upgrading together with Transport for London of Tottenham
Court Road tube station to provide a joint interchange.
28. Crossrail will provide fast, efficient and
convenient rail access to the West End and the City by linking
existing routes from Shenfield in the east and Abbey Wood in the
south-east with Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west.
29. Crossrail will be a significant and essential
addition to London's transport infrastructure and the South East.
It will deliver improved services for rail users through the relief
of overcrowding, faster journeys and a range of new journey opportunities,
which both the line and the interchanges will provide. It will
have wider social and economic benefits, not only for London but,
as I have already mentioned, for the South East as a whole, and
in particular for the regeneration of areas such as Docklands
and Thames Gateway and, as such, will also have national benefits.
30. The three key objectives of Crossrail are:
firstly, to support the development of London as a World City
and its role as the financial centre of Europe and the United
Kingdom; secondly, to support the economic growth of London and
its regeneration areas by tackling congestion and the lack of
capacity on the existing rail network; and, thirdly, to improve
rail access into and within London.
31. It will achieve these objectives by addressing
problems of inadequate capacity on the National Rail and Tube
networks by improving accessibility to regeneration areas, and
by providing transport capacity for the growth expected for London.
This is not at the expense of regional services, such as to the
South West and to Wales. Crossrail services will use only the
slow lines during normal operation, not the fast lines into Paddington
and Liverpool Street that the regional services use.
The scheme has been in the planning for many
years, the need is a longstanding one and therefore has been subject
to extensive consideration. Cross London Rail Links Limited, CLRL,
was set up in 2001 to undertake the necessary feasibility, design
and assessment work to support an eventual application for powers
to authorise the project. CLRL was established as a joint venture
company initially owned by TfL and the former Strategic Rail Authority.
Following the Rail Review, the role previously taken by the SRA
was assumed by the Secretary of State for Transport who, together
with TfL, is the joint shareholder of CLRL. The Bill proposes
that the Government shall nominate one or more organisations,
known in the Bill as the nominated undertaker, to take the project
forward once Royal Assent has been given, but until any such nomination
is made the Secretary of State will himself have the powers of
the nominated undertaker under the Bill. The Bill will, however,
allow the devolution of the project, if that is thought appropriate,
to either the Greater London Authority or to Transport for London,
which will include the power to appoint the nominated undertaker.
32. Can I now turn to the question of consultation,
which as the Committee may recognise is a very important factor
in a project of this scale and this importance to London and the
South East. There has been very wide consultation over many years.
That consultation programme has continued during the whole of
the development of the Crossrail proposals; it has sought to involve
major stakeholders, including local authorities, key environmental
bodies and the general public, of course, at all stages beginning
with the route selection process in the Spring of 2002. The consultation
programme fed into the project and the environmental assessment
at four different levels: firstly, consultation on the scope and
methodology for the assessment of environment effects; secondly,
consultation with key environmental bodies and other stakeholders
to ensure that appropriate data was used in the assessment and
that appropriate recommendations were incorporated into the emerging
design of the proposals. For instance, CLRL consulted English
Nature to determine the approach to assessing the impact on matters
of ecological importance, protected species, English Heritage
with respect to the build heritage and archaeological matters
and local highways authorities with respect to transport and traffic
issues.
33. Thirdly, CLRL organised local authorities
and key stakeholders into a series of fora that covered issues
such as the consent process, planning, the environmental assessment
and the project programme. These various bodies are still operating
and still a primary means of consultation, and they are the high
level forum, which is, as it says, the forum placed at the highest
level in the consultation process. It is chaired by the Minister,
Mr Twigg, and it was established to act as the top tier for stakeholder
consultation during the development and implementation of the
project and comprises local authority leaders, consent granting
bodies, environmental bodies, representatives of the business
community, other government departments and railway industry bodies.
34. Secondly, there is the planning forum, consisting
of local authorities along the proposed project route, and is
the focus for planning and environmental matters. There are various
subgroups dealing with matters such as environmental health, highways
and heritage and design which report to the planning group.
35. Thirdly, there is the statutory agency forum,
which consists of various agencies established under statute,
exercising statutory powers, which include local authorities and
provides the basis for discussions as to environmental matters
under the Bill with those various statutory organisations. Those
are the three fora which are the focus point for major consultations.
In addition to that there has been extensive public consultation
since 2003, and since the deposit of the Bill in February of last
year, of course, there has also been consultation in the consideration
of the Environmental Statement which was published at the same
time as the Bill. Indeed, not only has there been the initial
Environmental Statement, of which the Committee has the non-technical
summary, but that has been followed by further information in
the form of an addendum, a first supplementary Environment Statement
and a second supplementary Environmental Statement which is about
to be published this week. It has been available electronically
for a month but is about to be published in paper form. Finally,
there will be the Environmental Statement that deals with the
additional provisions which were the subject of the promotion
last week in the House of Commons. So public consultation also
exists in that location.
36. So, as I say, public consultation began
in 2003 with a public awareness campaign along the route to introduce
and explain the proposals and its various benefits to the consultees,
seek initial comments from interested persons and announce the
forthcoming public information round. There you see one of the
mobile information centres that were taken to a variety of locations
so that local people would have easy access to the information
and be able to ask questions and get information. In the first
round of those public information centres the route proposals
were introduced, preliminary project designs were displayed and
comments were sought. A variety of material was provided to help
assist, and you see some of it illustrated there. Information
was available in 11 community languages, Braille, large print
and audio cassette versions. Consultation responses which were
received were evaluated by CLRL and they were considered then
in the next stage of the design of the scheme and any mitigation
measures that were considered necessary to support it.
37. In 2004 there was a second public awareness
campaign followed by a second round of public information centres,
exhibiting the second stage of design and development, with the
supporting materials to inform the public of where matters had
then proceeded to, following the designs and the changes which
had followed the first. Indeed, the results and the response to
the first consultation round were published at that time and you
see a copy of it up there. Overall, there were 103 days of information
centres at 55 locations across the route of Crossrail, attracting
over 15,000 visitors. Invitations were distributed to residential
and business properties near the route, properties above the tunnels
and at the relevant railway stations, accompanied by widespread
advertising. Directly affected property and land owners were contacted
separately and supported by a property call centre. Again, the
consultation responses received after this second consultation
round were evaluated and were considered in the design of the
project and the mitigation measures. So there were two major public
consultation rounds which were rounded off with an information
round, rather than a consultation round, in February of last year,
which accompanied the deposit of the Bill, to inform the public
as to what had happened to the proposals which had been consulted
upon and which were now the subject of the Bill. That included
matters such as a general document such as that, and a whole series
of detailed documents. You will see the noise and vibration document
put up, but there were a whole series of them (and the quick guide,
of course), giving information to those wishing to see the difference
between the state of the project at the time of the initial consultation
rounds and the version put before Parliament.
38. In addition to those structured phases of
consultation and information with the public, consultation meetings
have also been carried out by CLRL with the local community, and
they were set up together with a 24-hour, 7-day a week helpdesk
with deals with enquiries. The helpdesk apparently has dealt with
nearly 11,500 enquiries in the last three years, and the website
has also played an integral part in the consultation process.
I certainly cannot see it in detail at this distance (perhaps
Mr Bennett can zoom in a little) but you will see that there are
various links to the left on the website, with a vast amount of
information, various document, the consultation responses, the
details of the scheme, the Montague report—all the major
documents associated with the development of Crossrail are available
and can be downloaded by members of the public. That site has
received in the order of three-quarters of a million visits since
it was set up in 2001.
39. In addition to that level of public information
there are two other major sources of information to the public
in the electronic form: there is the Bill supporting documents
website, also run by CLRL, and which is linked from the Crossrail
main website.[2]
All the environmental information, Environmental Statements, the
supporting documents, the information papers, all of the major
material which is available and has been prepared in order to
assess the effects and explain the major policies which lie behind
the taking of the Bill forward, are set out in electronic form
there. They are all, of course, available in paper form. They
are also given to those who may be less proficient in terms of
downloading or use of electronic documents, with a whole series
of addresses, local libraries and the sorts of locations where
they can go and see paper copies if they wish to.
1 Crossrail Non-Technical Summary, Route Map, billdocuments.crossrail.co.uk
(LINEWD-EXH02-001). Back
2
www.crossrail.co.uk Back
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