Select Committee on Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 6660 - 6679)

  6660. In addition to the river route can we now turn to see if there are any other feasible alternatives shown on the line through central London?
  (Mr Schabas) Sure. In 2004 I was again in a position where I could take an interest in this and I was one of the people who formed the group called Superlink with John Prideaux, who had been Chairman of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link project, Chris Stokes, who is Deputy Director of Network South East. He was the British Rail person in charge of Crossrail back in the 1988 scheme. The three of us got together as well as some other people and said, "We want to see Crossrail built. How can we help?", whether it was to help them to help themselves, but there must be an easier way through London, a better way through London and something that has a better business case. And with respect to central London we could see that there were clear advantages to the river route in terms of reducing environmental impacts and property impacts and petitioners, but that there was also maybe another route that had not been looked at sensibly, because again they had taken something that had been done in 1988 in six weeks and just stuck with it. In particular, if you go to slide 17, from my experience of planning several railways this is a list of some of the main things you take into account when you are taking a route for a railway.[11] It should be something you can build. Preferably you do not have to go through deep pile foundations, but if you had to go through one or two you would be willing to pay that price as the rest of the route was very good. You wanted, in this case, the West End, the City and Docklands to interchange with other underground and national and international rail lines. Remember, the Channel Tunnel was not open in 1988, and then it went to Waterloo for a while but now it is going to King's Cross. You want to design stations in locations where you do not make surface congestion, not just cars and buses but also pedestrians, and minimise the constructions impacts, and you have a lot of trade-offs to make between these, and you have £150 million, among other things, to do the kind of analysis to evaluate these alternatives, and the word "evaluation" is important because it implies—I did not study Latin but it implies some numbers, some modelling. We have quite sophisticated computer modelling in this country which allows us to analyse whether that route or this route is going to generate more people and save more time. If you go to the next slide, there is the river route and there is the safeguarded route through the centre of that.[12] The red line is another route that we came up with. We do not have any engineering on this. Superlink does not have the budget of the kind they have, but we said, "Now that the Post Office tube is closed there is probably no reason you could not stay on the north side of Oxford Street running roughly under Wimpole Street. You could then have the station at Cavendish Square". Cavendish Square has an underground car park and it is a terrible underground car park because it was built when people had Austin Morrises. The spaces are very small, but it is a great site to build a station from. It is twice the size of Hanover Square. There are no mature trees because they were all taken out when they built the car park, and it has few historic buildings. It is also on the north side of Oxford Street and that much closer up the Euston Road so you can get trucks up on to the trunk road system with less disruption and without them running past the American Embassy. You can also, at Cavendish Square, probably connect both to Bond Street and to Oxford Circus stations. As you know, at Oxford Circus station the Bakerloo and Victoria line platforms have their entrances mostly at the south end, not at the north end, and that is why Crossrail could not connect into the Victoria line in the current alignment, but if they had stayed on the north side of Oxford Street they could. The second thing we said was what we would really like to do is to connect with the national rail network because this is massively important. There is a billion pounds a year of passenger rail revenue that comes into the King's Cross, Euston and St Pancras areas, and I am sure many people use those trains regularly. Not only is there a billion pounds' worth of revenue a year but if Crossrail connected those terminals with Heathrow, with Stansted, with Canary Wharf and with Reading, national rail would benefit, probably with an increase of about £100 million a year in passenger revenue. That is a very big amount of money in the railway industry.



  6661. Of course, I had never thought of it before, John Prideaux thought of this, and he used to run Intercity, he was the one who brought it up to be without subsidy in 1990, you may recall. If Crossrail is truly to cross the capital and connect the UK—which I think Mr Gambrill uses in his slogan, and it is a great slogan but it is not true in this current scheme—it has to go via King's Cross, Euston and St Pancras. We do not know the engineering from Cavendish Square up to King's Cross, you can do anything for a price, it might require moving some deep pile foundation. We do know there is a station location safeguarded right in front of King's Cross for Crossrail Line 2, Chelsea-Hackney it used to be called. There is a place for a station. We also know one of the main reasons they want to build Chelsea-Hackney in Crossrail Line 2 is because there is massive congestion, some of the worst congestion on the tube, from King's Cross and Euston down to the West End.

  6662. If you swung Crossrail up there and back down again you might not have this problem—you would not have this problem. Given the difficulties in funding Crossrail Line 1 it might be a good idea to solve some of the problems of Crossrail Line 2 while you are at it. The line could then swing back down and rejoin the safeguarded route through Liverpool Street. It is a bit of detour but I am not sure it is no more of a detour than they are doing to go to Whitechapel and back into Canary Wharf. Why they are going to Whitechapel is a bit of a mystery for some people. The business case for going to Shenfield has evaporated. Chris Stokes, part of the Superlink team, was involved in the original selection of Shenfield. We have taken apart Cross London Rail Link's business case for it. We have done quantitative analysis with numbers we got from Freedom of Information and the business case does not stack up so they should just dropt the Shenfield branch and then you do not need to go to Whitechapel. The money you would save from that would—This might not be any more expensive than the safeguarded route and would certainly generate masses of extra revenue on the Intercity network.

  6663. The Cross London Rail Link is a London-led project and their models do not take account of the Intercity revenues, I think that is correct. They take account of commuter rail revenues but they take no account of generation on the national rail system and to me that is a major flaw in the methodology. As I said, as far as I know they have never bothered to model pedestrian passenger circulation. The statement that the stations in front of Charing Cross, Blackfriars and London Bridge are not convenient without any analysis to back it up is a worthless statement to me.

  6664. Mr Pugh-Smith: Mr Schabas, if we have on the screen to assist you, the three identified alternatives—the northern route, the river route and safeguarded route—could you explain to the Committee the way in which you understand these alternatives being treated?[13]

  (Mr Schabas) We presented, as Superlink, our proposals to the Department for Transport in July 2004 with a lot of proposals from Superlink but also saying there seemed to be three routes through the centre that needed to be evaluated and that had not been done. Initially we had quite a cordial, even friendly, reception from the Department for Transport but clearly there was a political will to move forward regardless of the process and about two weeks later the so-called Montague Report was published.

  6665. I should just back up. The thing about the alternatives analysis is it is not rocket science. Mr Gambrill was involved in the Channel Tunnel Rail Link project with me and John Prideaux and we looked at hundreds of alternatives between Folkestone and London, including many different alternative locations. It took two years and it probably did cost £50 million but we ended up with a scheme that although it did not sail through, it got a pretty smooth ride through Parliament and it has now been funded and built. I could not understand why they had skipped this process and I could not understand when, indeed, the civil servants, some of the ones involved in Crossrail were involved in the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. It was a surprise to me when they decided to release the Montague Report with a statement that the Montague Report endorsed the scheme and they were now going to put a Hybrid Bill in before the end of the current parliamentary session.

  6666. That seemed to be a very hasty way to move, also because the Montague Report did not exactly give a resounding endorsement of the project. If we go to the next slide Montague, in his report, said: "... while there are no pivotal problems, the aggregation of the concerns noted . . . creates significant uncertainty.[14] Some of these concerns reflect the still preliminary development of the scheme, and could be expected to be resolved in time, but others are and will remain more enduring objections . . . . Accordingly, as matters stand, the Review cannot confirm the deliverability of the CLRL Business Case." This was very surprising because this was released at the same time that they announced, "That's great, let's go on and build it", because clearly he is not saying that you can do that, he is saying, "There's lots to figure out still, guys".


  6667. Superlink wrote to Mike Fuhr at the Department for Transport who was the person in charge of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Bill as well, as Bernard knows him well, and we said there were a lot of questions in the Montague Report, and I have only touched on them here but there were many questions that his report raised about the business case, about the feasibility, the engineering, even down to how many trains an hour you could run through the middle of it. We got no response. We sent the letter 20 October and we got no response. We did get a response from Adrian Montague very quickly. He had been appointed as Chairman of CLRL by this point and he came back and said: "My mandate is very much to press ahead with this scheme . . . I really have no locus to consider alternatives."[15] I think that is probably correct, that was probably what he was told to do. It does not seem to me to be the correct instrument for him in a statutory process affecting individuals and the future of London.


  6668. We then decided to publish the Superlink proposals. We were accused of being too late, which was something we did not want to respond to directly but clearly the proposals had been fed to an uninterested Cross London Rail Link over the previous years. We were not too late, they were just refusing to listen. Finally we decided to publish them in public.

  6669. In February the Government introduced the Crossrail Bill and published the Environmental Statement and Mr Derek Twigg stated, and it says in the Environmental Statement in response to a question in Parliament that CLRL had evaluated and rejected the Superlink proposals, and he used the word "evaluated". He probably thought they had evaluated it but we had not seen any evidence of anything that could be called evaluation.

  6670. Cross London Rail Link followed up in May with a report called the Super-Crossrail and Superlink update report, which was their attempt to justify their thinking—a bit late—that they put forward in the Environmental Statement. The update report has nothing in it that could be described as analysis, it is 25 pages of unsupported assertions. There are no numbers in it, no comparison with the Crossrail scheme, they just say, for instance, that it will have problems building it, as if Crossrail has no problems. They note that it will be difficult to have worksites on the river. There is no analysis in there to say whether it is easier to have a worksite at Hanover Square or Bethnal Green or Spitalfields than in the river, it is stating basically they did not like it, they had their scheme, they did not need another scheme and it would complicate life to look at another scheme. We presented a detailed word by word rebuttal, paragraph by paragraph, and you have that in your exhibits if you are looking for something to read. It would have been good to read it over the holidays. Basically paragraph by paragraph rebuttal of unsupported statements by them, every one of them.

  6671. Mr Pugh-Smith: Mr Schabas, what are the main points that you would like the Committee Members to dwell upon?
  (Mr Schabas) We think they have been in a great hurry and they need to slow down. This scheme has already cost £150 million and they are no closer to funding it, nobody has any idea how they are going to come up with £10 billion. They are causing a disruption to people's lives, to their homes, to businesses. They have blighted many people. They have not addressed the issues we have raised. London has changed enormously since 1988 and the London East-West study is frankly a joke. They need to go back and comply with the law and with good planning practice, quite frankly. They need to go and study alternatives with taking constructive advice and input from people like Superlink and the Mayfair Residents. It is déja" vu, it is frankly a tragedy because if they had done this from 2000 for the last six years and been open-minded instead of saying, "We do not have time to look at alternatives, we are going to start building in two years", they might now have a scheme that was funded, that was better value for money, that had public support, that did indeed cross the capital and connect the UK and maybe did not mess up Mayfair. It may well be the safeguarded route is the best route through Central London, I do not know, but they do not know either. This work will take a few months, it will require a few million pounds, but it is money that needs to be spent. A proper analysis consistent with law and good practice is required before we spend this kind of money. We need to know for sure. Thank you.[16]


  6672. Mr Pugh-Smith: Thank you very much, Mr Schabas.

  6673. Chairman: Ms Lieven?

  6674. Ms Lieven: Sir, as I indicated last time we met, I have no questions for this witness. It is our view that these matters go to the principle of the Bill and we dealt in the information papers I referred to in opening and I will refer to in closing as to why we have chosen this alignment. I am not going to waste the Committee's time by an extended cross-examination about the merits of our alignment.

  Examined by the Committee

  6675. Mr Binley: I understand, Chairman, why counsel for the Promoters would say what they have just said, however the taxpayer has to be fully aware that the decisions arrived at are right and proper, that politics has to be seen to be done as well as be done, quite frankly. This raises some particular questions from me. The 18 billion, Mr Schabas, were there any figures at all that you were given which suggested the evaluation of your scheme should be twice as much as the evaluation of the route being proposed?
  (Mr Schabas) Not at the time. They refused to give us any more numbers. He said three times and in the follow-up letter he said maybe only two times. We did get a break down in 2005 under Freedom of Information as to how they got 18 billion. The 18 billion we got last year. I think you have that in your exhibits. It is exhibit 10.[17] It is one page and a spreadsheet. I should explain the 18 billion was for the entire Superlink scheme which includes branches at Stansted, through Terminal 5 and so on. We have also said that Superlink as a whole was 25per cent more than Crossrail, we never said it was cheaper, but we always said that Paddington to Canary Wharf should be similar in price, and this, which they gave to us only in 2005 under Freedom of Information, confirmed that. If you go down to EE Central Area, GB Rail Alignment—


  6676. Mr Binley: I am getting a little lost.
  (Mr Schabas) It would be nice if the pages were numbered.

  6677. Mr Pugh-Smith: We are looking at exhibit 10 in the big bundle.

  6678. Mr Binley: Does it have a page number?

  6679. Mr Pugh-Smith: No. If you look at exhibit ten.


11   Committee Ref: A80, Route Selection Criteria (WESTCC-32605-050). Back

12   Committee Ref: A80, Northern Alternative (WESTCC-32605-051). Back

13   Committee Ref: A80, Three identified alternative routes (WESTCC-32605-053). Back

14   Committee Ref: A80, Montague Conclusions, July 2004 (WESTCC-32605-055). Back

15   Committee Ref: A80, Correspondence from Chairman of CLRL to Chairman of Superlink Ltd, 27 October 2004 (WESTCC-32605-056). Back

16   Committee Ref: A80, Mr Schabas' Conclusions (WESTCC-32605-057). Back

17   Committee Ref: A80, Corrspondence from Crossrail to GB Railways Group plc, 30 September 2002 (WESTCC-32605-047). Back


 
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