Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
260. British Land strongly supports the Petition
of the Corporation, as I have already said, and has of course
lodged its own Petition. British Land will be calling three witnesses:
Adrian Penfold, Head of Planning and Environment at British Land;
Mr Tim Spencer of SDG and Mr Tim Chapman of Ove Arup. Mr Penfold
will be giving planning policy evidence to supplement that of
Mr Rees. Mr Chapman will be telling you about a viable alternative
solution for the capacity at Liverpool Street Station, but it
is Mr Spencer of SDG who will be taking the case on capacity even
further than I have done at the moment. He will be expanding on
the point that even on the Promoter's own figures the solution
proposed by him fails very badly. He will wish to go further;
he will seek to persuade you, sir, that the total figures have
been quite seriously underestimated.
261. I will take us to the example of the number
of 14,500 Crossrail passengers in the morning peak alighting deep
underground at Livergate. Mr Spencer will challenge the correctness
of that figure and suggest that the number will be far greater,
and the split will not be in the proportion 5,300 to Liverpool
Street and 9,200 to Moorgate. Therefore, Mr Spencer will be taking
on the evidence to be given by Mr Weiss. If you accept Mr Spencer's
evidence, putting it crudely, there will be about (these are very
rough figures) 20,000 Crossrail passengers alighting at Livergate
of whom roughly two-thirds will head for ticket hall B and one-third
for Moorgate. Instead of 5,300 Crossrail passengers passing point
M into ticket hall B there will be, if Mr Spencer is right, 13,000
odd passengers doing so. Most of those Crossrail passengers will
be heading straight for the underground ticket hall B gates. Apart
from the huge increase in congestion in the ticket hall, more
gates will be required to accommodate them than can, on any possible
basis, be squeezed into the existing space.
262. Sir, that is still not the end of the story.
Shall I just add one thing that is not in the text, please? If
Mr Spencer is right, the pressure on the gates will not just be
from Crossrail passengers; if CLRL have underestimated Crossrail
passenger numbers it stands to reason that the numbers of passengers
alighting from the Central Line and subsurface lines will have
been underestimated too. What is more, if the Livergate split
between Moorgate and Liverpool Street Station has been misjudged
for Crossrail, it is not clear to me, at any rate, why it would
not also have been misjudged for the Metropolitan Line, for there
the alighting passenger has a choice just as the Livergate alighting
passenger has.
263. For this, sir, if you would look at your
tables, it is Table 11 again on page 5, what you see is, under
the heading "Arrival mode", there are identified, amongst
others, the subsurface lines and Crossrail. The subsurface lines
have in common with Crossrail that they serve both Liverpool Street
and Moorgate; the Central Line serves only Liverpool Street, the
Northern Line serves only Moorgate, but the subsurface lines and
Crossrail serve both Liverpool Street and Moorgate.
264. So if you look at line 3, the subsurface
line figures, you see a projected split there on Crossrail's figures,
of 12,600 for Liverpool Street and 8,000 for Moorgate. For reasons
that I do not understand, at Crossrail it is suggested the split
will be the other way round: 5,300 for Crossrail, 9,200 for Moorgate.
My point here is a different point. It is a simple point, really,
that if at line 5 the figures for Crossrail should be more passengers
alighting—
265. Kelvin Hopkins: I am sorry to interrupt
your flow, at this point. Is there not a possibility that, if
Liverpool Street becomes an impossible scrum, passengers to the
Liverpool Street catchment area might actually travel to Moorgate
and walk back? The split might be a little more shifted towards
Moorgate for that reason. Not a good reason, and I accept there
might be more numbers, but there will be people who will be deterred
from using Liverpool Street and therefore go on to Moorgate and
even walk from Crossrail through the tunnel to the Moorgate end
rather than the Liverpool Street end.
266. Mr Laurence: Of course, if you effectively
force people—if I have understood your question rightly—to
choose another means of exiting the station because the one they
want to use is not conveniently available without having to suffer
unacceptable congestion, then they do, in that sense, have a choice.
You will be hearing from our witnesses why they say that is not
the kind of choice that ought to be foisted on passengers.
267. Sir, you raise your question just at the
point that I was saying that my point for present purposes was
not to question the split as such at line 3 on the subsurface
lines between 12,600 and 8,000 but just to point out that if,
in due course, you hear and, subsequently, accept evidence that
the overall numbers will be greater than those identified for
Crossrail in line 5, then the same reasoning could, on the face
of it, appear for the other place where passengers have a choice
of where they get off, that is to say passengers on the Metropolitan
Line or the Circle Line, the so-called subsurface lines, whose
numbers are given at line 3 in Table 11.
268. I am now able to bring the threads together
before Mr Cameron calls our first witness, and I do so in this
way: we suggest that there are, in the face of all this, two critical
questions for the Committee. The first of them can be framed like
this: can this Committee allow the Crossrail project to be taken
forward to detailed design and construction on the basis of the
Promoter's predictions of passenger demand, bearing in mind that
even if these are wholly correct the ticket hall is placed under
unacceptable strain from the outset? To that question we invite
you to give an unequivocal negative answer.
269. The second question is this: what is it
that this Committee should direct the Promoter to do if it accepts
our evidence on passenger demand at Liverpool Street Station?
This is difficult because the Promoter has failed to complete
essential preliminary work in order to identify the best option
for providing a proper eastern ticket hall at Liverpool Street
Station. The Corporation and British Land, who support them, consider
that there are realistically only two options which are feasible.
One of these has already been identified by Ove Arup on behalf
of British Land, and I would like to ask you to look briefly at
your little clip of diagrams to see what that alternative option
involves.
270. Skip the first three documents which you
have already seen, skip Figure 1 and Figure 2 and go to Figure
3. This is an Ove Arup document under the heading: "Crossrail
at Liverpool Street Station: suggested alternative layout".
Over the page, at Figure 4, you see the same scheme with a section
along Eldon Street with Crossrail Scheme dashed. Mr Tim Chapman
will obviously be able to explain all this to you in greater detail
in due course. What this scheme shows, sir, in very broad outline,
is an additional method of exiting Livergate, showing passengers
emerging into the corner of Blomfield Street and Eldon Street
just near the number 102, Figure 3. You have still got a connecting
passageway between the exit from the second of the two escalators
but the escalators and the tunnels which I mentioned earlier are
differently aligned because, under this scheme, it becomes necessary
to reach shallow level sooner than it is necessary to do under
the Promoter's scheme.
271. For present purposes, all I need invite
you to do is to note that there is an alternative that Ove Arup
has been working hard on for the last three or four months, I
think. Let us call that option the British Land Company option
(or the BLC option, for short). CLRL themselves have been looking
at it in detail and have even made suggestions for its improvement.
That is the option Mr Tim Chapman of Ove Arup believes, on the
present evidence, stands the best chance of solving the capacity
problem at Liverpool Street Station. You will hear from him, however,
that he remains entirely open-minded about the possibility of
identifying a better option.
272. There is, in theory, a number of other
possible options but, in practice, Ove Arup believe, only one.
That other option would have to involve a very substantial enlargement
of ticket hall B. There may well prove to be practical constraints
which rule it out. Let us call that massively enlarged ticket
hall option the METH option. CLRL told us in late December that
by early January they hoped to have carried out "an assessment
of other options for providing additional ticket hall provision".
(I am quoting from a letter from Mr Ben Wilson of CLRL to Mr Chapman,
dated 22 December 2005, under cover of which he provided, in draft
form, a detailed critique of the Ove Arup option.)
273. Somewhat to our surprise, we recently learned
that work on the assessment of such other options has been halted.
Of the alternative options up to now discussed, Mr Chapman believes
that only the METH option is a runner. However, as he will tell
you, he also thinks it will take a few more months from now for
CLRL to reach the point where as much work has been done on the
METH option as has been done on the BLC option to enable them
to be realistically compared. So it is not a question of getting
to the detailed design stage, obviously, on either of these options,
but it is a question of doing enough work on the options to be
able to compare them realistically. At that stage, when the extra
work has been done, a few months from now, your Committee ought
to be in a position to make a judgment which option to choose,
if necessary after hearing further evidence in the absence of
agreement between Petitioner and Promoter, as to which is best.
274. Sir, there is a terribly important rider
to all this. The BLC option, the one Mr Chapman currently thinks
will best serve the needs of commuters, will be precluded if the
existing Crossrail scheme is implemented. That is because the
position and angle of the tunnels and escalators of the existing
Crossrail scheme and of the BLC option are different. There are
tunnels and escalators for both schemes but they are aligned differently.
So if the arguments of the Corporation and British Land on capacity
are accepted, it is not an option for the Promoter to say that
provision for extra capacity at Liverpool Street can be bolted
on to the existing scheme by way of a subsequent scheme. The decision
which is the best option must be taken as soon as possible, we
would suggest by the end of April at the latest, in conjunction
with the Corporation and British Land, and that the Promoter must
then be required to set in train the necessary procedures for
amending the Bill, providing a supplementary Environmental Statement,
etc, if necessary after the Committee has ruled which is the best
option.
275. Sir, I do not want to suggest that we anticipate
that there will necessarily be disagreement between the parties
on the subject, because if we succeed in persuading you that our
capacity case is right there is absolutely no reason to think
that the Promoter will not voluntarily get under way again with
the assessment of alternative solutions to the problem, which
we were told, on his behalf, on 22 December, was then under way
and which it was hoped would be completed by early January. If
this Committee hears our case on capacity and decides that it
is sound and that something has got to be done, we apprehend that
Mr Elvin, on behalf of the Promoter, will be saying: "Of
course we will carry on looking at alternative options, the massively
enlarged ticket hall option in particular, perhaps, but it will
take us so long to do it and what we would then hope, in conjunction
with the Corporation and British Land, is to reach agreement as
to which of the two options is the best option to take forward,
if necessary by amending the Bill and producing an Environmental
Statement, and so on and so forth".
276. There are, potentially, lots of issues
that will have to be resolved in relation to the choice of the
two options. If the massively enlarged ticket hall option, for
example, is the one that the Promoter, in the end, thinks is the
best there is the position of National Rail and London Underground
to consider because, as far as I am aware, they have not been
brought into this debate very much at all up to now, and issues
of that sort will no doubt have to be looked at. That is why I
foreshadow, as a possibility, that if we are successful on the
first part of our case it may be that we will end up disagreeing
with the Promoter as to which of the two options is the best option.
It is not purely a matter of engineering; it is cost and all the
rest of it that will have to be considered. If that happens, we
may have to ask you, sir, to adjudicate on that, but you certainly
cannot adjudicate on it now.
277. My last two paragraphs, sir. Mr Darling,
on 13 December 2005 made another £100 million available for
further development of Crossrail. In his statement on that day
he indicated that the additional money would allow CLRL, working
with the Department and Transport for London, to do the necessary
research and planning before Crossrail can enter the next phase
of development. I do not mean to be too flippant here; there will
be money to pay my learned friends and something left over to
identify the best option for "additional ticket hall provision",
in the words of Mr Ben Wilson. But that option ought to have been
identified long ago. Your Petitioners, of course, appreciate the
efforts that have belatedly been made to identify options for
a suitable Liverpool Street eastern ticket hall, but urge your
Committee on no account to allow that latter issue to be kicked
into the long, or any, grass. We respectfully argue that provision
for a properly designed Liverpool Street eastern ticket hall must
form part of the Bill, and the Bill must be suitably amended to
achieve this unless the Promoter, of course, can satisfy us that
the best option is to enlarge the ticket hall and that that can
be done without amending the Bill, which will obviously be delightful
but we remain to be persuaded.
278. I should add this by way of further emphasis
as to why these Petitions have been lodged: your Petitioners want
the best possible Crossrail Bill in order to achieve the project's
stated objectives. It makes no sense whatever for the main entrance
and exit from the Crossrail station which serves the heart of
the world's leading international finance and business centre
to be created by funnelling passengers into an existing crowded
ticket hall. Now is the time to do something about it.
279. I note that it is 12.45 or thereabouts.
I am in your hands. We could get started with Mr Rees; Mr Cameron
is here to call him and I know Mr Rees is in the room. Is that
what you would like to do?
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