Examination of Witnesses (Questions 6120
- 6139)
6120. Mr Berryman, forgive me, I have not asked
a question yet. The question I wanted to ask was that, as you
are illustrating what you are saying, Ms Lieven informed us yesterday
that what we have—I think the phrase was—is a personal
appraisal of £500 million arising from the sort of considerations
you have mentioned to the Committee now.
(Mr Berryman) Yes, I think 500 would be on
the low side.
6121. The point is that there is no proper estimate,
there is no quantified estimate, there is nothing on paper—as
my learned friend Mr Stoker put it, nothing in the public domain—other
than the one paragraph in document A7 which you now say is wrong,
to set out the basis of the cost of a terminus at Stratford. That
is right, is it not?
(Mr Berryman) That is right, but there are
other issues which would arise with such a terminus, and that
the quality of interchange for passengers changing from one train
service to another would inevitably be poor. Stratford Station,
as you will be aware, is already a two-level station and this
would require going down to a third level. There are many, many
underground difficulties on this site; the Channel Tunnel Rail
Link is immediately adjacent to the site, there is a river underneath
the station called the Channelsea River and there is what we can
only describe as very, very bad ground in the area.
6122. Mr Berryman, forgive me. It is difficult
that we are addressing each other in the strange way that we are,
but I am conscious of the time and the Chairman's desire to see
the session through by the time the division is likely. If we
can constrain ourselves, please, to the question. There is no
proper estimate of Stratford, there is no estimate—it is
right, is it not—of the individual stations, the cost of
them, along the route were there to be a stop at other places
along the route where it would be practical?
(Mr Berryman) Yes, that is correct. There is
no formal estimate.
6123. There is no demonstration. You refer in
paragraph 5.2 of A7 to the physical constraints at Stratford on
the surface level, that is to say the Stratford City Development,
the Transport for London upgrade including, I know, plans to cater
for the Olympics which, I think I am right in saying, were only
agreed relatively recently, and then the DLR's plans to take over
the North London Line.[46]
You mention those as physical constraints in the way of surface
development at Stratford. That is right, is it not?
(Mr Berryman) Yes, that is correct.
They are all physical constraints. Of course, irrespective of
whether the Olympic decision had been to award the Games to London
or not, the Stratford City Development is immediately adjacent
to the site as well.
6124. The point I am attempting to put and getting
towards is that there is no detailed demonstration of why those
schemes are in place. The case has been made to demonstrate the
physical difficulties that you claim to exist at a surface level
in Stratford thereby constraining you to consider going underground.
That is right—there is no such demonstration.
(Mr Berryman) A cursory glance at an aerial
photograph would probably suffice for that.
6125. Yes, but we are talking about schemes
that are in place alongside the Crossrail proposal that is already
there. I am merely positing, from the residents' point of view,
that if it is the case, as you argue, that there is simply no
possibility, that could easily be demonstrated. If it is the case
that there are arguments that could be had about what is desirable
at Stratford that, too, would be worthy of demonstration and discussion
in the public domain.
(Mr Berryman) I think there are tests of impossibility,
are there not? Saying a scheme is impossible, of course, is never
really true because all things are possible if you chuck enough
money at them, but we are getting, with a Stratford terminus station,
either on the surface or underground, towards the extreme end
of what is possible, never mind what is feasible.
6126. Moving on to the practical question of
finance, the major reason for opting for Shenfield is the practicality
of it in those terms. Yet for the reasons we have just been discussing
there are no firm figures to demonstrate what the case for Shenfield
is in those terms, are there?
(Mr Berryman) Indeed there are. The feasibility
studies that we have done, the business case for the project and
so on, set that out quite clearly.
6127. Mr Berryman, if you cannot quantify the
cost of Stratford, which would be the most likely alternative,
and you cannot quantify the cost of Romford or Gidea Park or any
other potential terminus against Shenfield, then you cannot make
a case in financial terms for Shenfield, in terms of the figures.
Can you?
(Mr Berryman) The process of design—and
what we are talking about here is the design of a railway system—involves
high level decisions to see which options are worth pursuing.
It is completely impractical to look at every scheme, however
unfeasible it may be.
6128. Mr Berryman, I have not asked you to compare
the schemes or suggested that you should but—
(Mr Berryman) There are a number of other options
for the Crossrail project which are more practical than those
you are suggesting, which we have not looked at because we simply
know they are not going to work.
6129. This particular proposal at Shenfield
is controversial, I am sure that is recognised. Whatever the high
level, as you put it, view is taken on an engineering basis, surely
it is right both from Parliament's point of view (which is why
we are here) and from the point of view of the residents of Shenfield
(which is why these particular Petitions have been brought) for
the case to be demonstrated and set out so that people can be
satisfied it has been examined and know what it is.
(Mr Berryman) The case is set out in the Environmental
Statement.
6130. The financial case for Shenfield as being
the place to go is not set out in the way that can be tested against
any criteria or can be questioned simply because it is not there,
other than in a couple of paragraphs. To reinforce my learned
friend Mr Stoker's point, there is therefore no cost-benefit analysis.
Because there are no figures you cannot set against the figures,
can you, Mr Berryman, an analysis of the benefits balanced against
the cost.
(Mr Berryman) The first thing to say is that
we do have a cost-benefit analysis for the Shenfield scheme. We
do have some transport benefit work which is being done, again
at a very strategic level, for terminating at Stratford. We do
have some very strategic cost work that has been done for Stratford.
These are enough of a test to allow us to make a decision as to
whether we proceed with a feasibility study. If something looks
as if it is never going to work, if we are a mile out on things
like the benefit-cost ratio, there is no point in pursuing it.
We only pursue things which look halfway viable, otherwise we
would be here for a hundred years.
6131. Mr Berryman, the argument that you are
now making is that it is right to make a high-level decision and
then to assess what is subjected to a feasibility study after
that, but the difficulty is that we are now in the public domain
and we are in a democratic domain, and Parliament is seeking to
make decisions and residents are seeking to understand those decisions,
and what we have here is a situation where it is not possible
to balance, to see clearly what the costs and benefits are against
each other because, if I may say so, the clearest indication or
claim for benefits to Shenfield were the cross-examination notes
that Ms Lieven put on the screen an hour or two ago. That is the
clearest statement we have yet, weak though it is, with the greatest
of respect, of the actual benefits that will come to Shenfield,
and in no sense, I am sure you would accept, is that something
that can be balanced against costs simply because of its brevity.
(Mr Berryman) Yes, but on the other hand, the
line must end somewhere. As we have already established, and I
think it is common ground between everybody, there is a fast service
from Shenfield, therefore the benefits of Crossrail are not as
great as they would be from a station where there was no fast
service, but that does not detract from the point that Shenfield
is the obvious terminating point because it is the end of the
four-track section, it is the point at which we can make a reasonable
disposition of services between the fast lines and the Crossrail
lines and it is an appropriate location for stabling and the other
things which need to go with the terminating point of this particular
railway.
6132. Mr Berryman, would you accept that there
is also no consideration following from what I have been saying
of the wider effect on the social, economic or environmental impact,
good or bad, on Shenfield?
(Mr Berryman) Not at all. I would not accept
that at all. The environmental impact statement sets out what
the impacts are for all sections of the route.
6133. Yes, it sets them out in terms of individual
effects but in terms of the character of an area, the community
of Shenfield, the impact on the community of Shenfield is not
part of the consideration that has been put forward, is it?
(Mr Berryman) There is a community impact assessment
done as part of that document. Mr Anderson will be a better person
to give evidence on that if it is required, but certainly that
is covered in the environmental assessment. I think it is worth
mentioning, by the way, that the kind of works we are talking
about here are works which are routinely done on the railways.
They are not out of scale with what Network Rail do as part of
their normal track reconstruction and rebuilding from time to
time.
6134. Do Network Rail expect compulsorily to
acquire or take over the use of car parks as part of that, for
example?
(Mr Berryman) They certainly would of Hunter
car park, because they own it, of course, but you are right, they
would not expect to do that.
6135. They would not expect to disrupt the community
in the way that is sought here. Mr Berryman, the difficulty is,
from the point of view of the residents, that even the conclusion
that it cannot be done elsewhere, which is the way colloquially
it was being described in yesterday's hearing, cannot properly
be demonstrated in a way that can be tested. You have given us
your professional judgments but it is not something that is open
to examination because the case is not set out for and against
or cost and benefit-balanced on paper in the way I have sought
to describe.
(Mr Berryman) No, but, as I say, it is the
opinion of myself, our consulting engineers and all our design
team, when we looked at this in the first instance—and I
am going right back to the beginning now—that none of the
other options were really worth spending any time on.
6136. Mr Berryman, the view of residents is
that the benefits are negligible or not significant. The case
for Shenfield is a matter of assumption; it is not demonstrable
conclusions. Perhaps we should attach some significance, would
you agree, to your statement just now that actually, the aim is
for reliability of the Crossrail system, and the creation of a
segregated system is perhaps underlying some of the arguments
that we have been having?
(Mr Berryman) Yes, that is certainly one of
the strongest arguments for this proposal.
6137. From the point of view of residents and
people in Brentwood, that argument and that system and that assumption
are not in the public domain, not demonstrated and argued through
in the public domain in a way that enables them to assess the
benefits and the costs.
(Mr Berryman) That was certainly covered in
the London East-West Study. I think it has been covered subsequently,
although where you would actually go in the documents to find
it, I could not tell you off the top of my head, but certainly
it is in the public domain. The reliability issue is very much
an important and significant factor.
6138. From the point of view of residents in
Shenfield it is not something that has been put to them, it is
not something that obviously affects the way that the system would
work for their benefit, and the difficulty with all of this is
that the Crossrail proposal in this respect has been put forward
without adequate consideration for human impact and community
impact, apart from in relation to individuals as far as Shenfield
is concerned.
(Mr Berryman) As I just said a moment ago,
the community impacts were considered as part of the environmental
impact statement.
6139. Yes, but in relation to individual houses
and the effect on individual people seeking insulation or having
to move out.
(Mr Berryman) Individual people's cases were
considered under the various headings of noise, dust and the like,
but then there is an overall impact on the community which was
considered.
46 Crossrail Information Paper A7, Para 5.2, Great
Eastern Electric Lines Options (LINEWD-IPA7-004; SCN20060329-002). Back
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